Without wanting to bring down any ideas, I hope you will consider my reflections on your proposal.
Summary: - How about focussing on "independent variables" like dates and origins instead of manual labelling? - Research should be recorded - Are there identifiers? I like the idea of being able to tell whether a work (or rather edition, when there are text differences between editions) is in the public domain - and of course we're not alone in that respect, given the public domain calculators [1] and guidelines for determining copyright status. Open Library may be a place for it. For scanned books, there is a copyright notice already on the Internet Archive detail page, albeit without (much?) provenance. But one good reason for the existence of these tools for determining copyright status is of course the diversity of copyright laws across the globe. I'm in a different jurisdiction than you (unless you're in the Netherlands too ;-)), so (as far as I know) different terms apply here even to books published in the US. The most extreme example is countries without copyright laws, for which any of the statuses you propose are, well, meaningless. And as time progresses (and the US definition of public domain can be changed by Congress, apparently), a manually assigned status will most likely change. Even though determining copyright status isn't / may never be easy, it may eventually be automated. Could it be more useful to focus on the inputs of copyright status determination (publication date, publisher, author death date, copyright holding organisation) and make sure these are recorded correctly? Research can already be recorded in a general text field like edition notes (without the specific designation, of course), but it may be useful to record it separately. Let me propose that the words "copyright research" be added to research in notes, to enable retrieving the records later with a text search. By the way: can the research be modelled as (a small set of) simple assertions, like "book has copyright notice and copyright notice says copyright is held by X starting 1925"? I'm thinking this may help letting machines do the work (in the future). Regarding external (renewal) databases: do they have identifiers that could be added? Some general remarks: - these seem serious questions, for which I don't think you would need to apologise :) - I'm afraid there is little activity on developing new features from IA developers... - ... but/and I don't know the current status or future plans - you're welcome to contribute to the code (or at least propose code changes) [2] :) Ben [1] e.g. http://wiki.okfn.org/Public_Domain_Calculators [2] https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary On 1 December 2012 19:59, Adelle Frank <[email protected]> wrote: > On a non-spam-related note, would it be possible to add these 2 intellectual > property fields to the librarian mode on Open Library: Copyright status & > Copyright evidence? > > I don't think the general public would want to see these on the basic edits > page, but they would be extremely useful to those of us gathering copyright > status evidence for certain 1923-63 books published in the US. > > Example options for the Copyright Status field might be: > > not yet researched (a good default for 1923+ published works in the US) > public domain (a good default for pre-1923 published works in the US) > copyright owned by organization > copyright owned by individual > orphan work > > The Copyright Evidence field would probably need to be a textarea field. It > could include help text that gives an example, such as: "Physical copy has > no visible notice of copyright symbol or wording and stated publication > information is 1907 in the USA." or "©House of the Church of the Brethren > (A130150). Catalog of Copyright Entries, 1954 - Page 94. > http://www.archive.org/details/catalogofcopyrig381lib). However, no evidence > of renewal found in Stanford or LC renewal databases." > > Apologies if I am asking for difficult things! I enjoy OpenLibrary very much > and wanted to contribute a few ideas that could lead to even more > crowd-sourcing. > > Appreciative of your excellent work on this open access project, > > ~Adelle Frank > > _______________________________________________ > Ol-tech mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to > [email protected] > _______________________________________________ Ol-tech mailing list [email protected] http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send email to [email protected]
