I did an analysis of copyright variables for U of California, which you can find:
http://www.cdlib.org/groups/rmg/ It was based on the same concerns of Ben's, plus the nervousness of the institution's lawyers. It is essentially extended metadata for copyright evidence, plus information on "who to call" for more information, which would not be appropriate for OL. It also includes a country code since any copyright determination is country-specific. However, the Internet Archive does have copyright declarations AND evidence fields for its digitized materials, so you can view those by following the link to the full text. I don't know if there's a reasonable way to pull those into the OL database. I understand when people are nervous about recording copyright information, but my approach at U of C was that it is a disservice to users to not at least tell them what you *do* know about materials you are making available. If nothing else, if you have already done a lookup in the renewal database and found/not found anything, that should be recorded. If you have looked at the title page and the date is before 1923 and it is a US publication held in the US, that should be recorded. (This is what the Archive does.) If, in the case of U of C, you are the holder of an archive but you truly do not know what the copyright status of an item is, THAT should be recorded so people know that they shouldn't waste their time calling you to ask. More information for users is better. At the same time, with a very few exceptions, actually determining copyright status is a lengthy, expensive process. There is some evidence that HathiTrust will be going through that process, and US libraries are talking about sharing among them their determinations. These will be conceptually in the form of: Harvard U says that this book, published in 1939, was never renewed and therefore is in the public domain. They have looked here, and here (or they have followed procedure XYZ) to determine this. I support making this type of information available as widely as possible. Actual "copyright declarations" is of course what people wish they could get, although those should be done by experts, and even those should be accompanied by evidence, as the Archive is doing (albeit their only determination is public domain/not public domain). kc On 1/29/13 3:56 PM, Ben Companjen wrote: > 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] > -- Karen Coyle [email protected] http://kcoyle.net ph: 1-510-540-7596 m: 1-510-435-8234 skype: kcoylenet _______________________________________________ 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]
