On Dec 8, 2011, at 1:07 AM, Tom Morris wrote:
> If you look at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31061.rdf, all it
> contains is the author, the title, and a statement that the work is
> "public domain" -- no copyright dates, publication dates, etc, so
> there's no automated way to tell that it's this edition
> http://openlibrary.org/books/OL14801590M/A_history_of_mathematics.
> that PG transcribed.  You'd also need to figure out which of the works
> to connect to 
> http://openlibrary.org/search?q=a+history+of+mathematics&author_key=OL316652A

This example is not representative, as there are only few
LaTeX/PDF only books in PG. Most have an HTML version,
unfortunately without meta header. Many however state the
publishing date of the book below the title.

So, I agree this will be difficult for a robot.

> An additional complication is that, rather ironically, Project
> Gutenberg is claiming copyright on the bibliographic data they do have
> and only license it under GPL which isn't compatible with
> OpenLibrary's licensing.  I have a hard time seeing them winning the
> argument that a book's title and author are copyrightable facts, but
> stranger things have happened.

The best summary on compilation copyrights I found was
http://www.bitlaw.com/copyright/database.html

> I think it'd be great to see this happen, but I suspect it'll be a
> non-trivial task.

Which could be made more motivating by placing Gutenberg
links on par with Internet Archive, i.e. automatic creation of
"Read online" buttons etc.

Ralf Stephan
http://www.ark.in-berlin.de
...."C'est les microbes qui auront le dernier mot." -Louis Pasteur

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