A coalition of archivists, activists, and libraries are working overtime
to make it easier to identify the many books that are secretly in the
public domain, digitize them, and make them freely available online to
everyone. The people behind the effort are now hoping to upload these
books to the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital archives on the internet.
As it currently stands, all books published in the U.S. before 1924 are in the public domain,
meaning they’re publicly owned and can be freely used and copied. Books
published in 1964 and after are still in copyright, and by law will be
for 95 years from their publication date.
But a copyright loophole means that up to 75 percent of books published between 1923 to 1964 are secretly in the public domain,
meaning they are free to read and copy. The problem is determining
which books these are, due to archaic copyright registration systems and
convoluted and shifting copyright law.
As such, a coalition of
libraries, volunteers, and archivists have been working overtime to
identify which titles are in the public domain, digitize them, then
upload them to the internet. At the heart of the effort has been the New
York Public Library, which recently documented why the entire process
is important, but a bit of a pain.
Back in the 1970s, the Library of Congress operated a Catalog of
Copyright Entries (CCE) indicating which books had renewed copyright.
Digital copies of these notices can be found in the Internet Archive and at over at Stanford University.
Historically, it’s been fairly easy to tell whether a book published
between 1923 and 1964 had its copyright renewed, because the renewal
records were already digitized. But proving that a book hadn’t
had its copyright renewed has historically been more difficult, New York
Public Library Senior Product Manager Sean Redmond said.
“Part of the difficulty is that you're proving a negative—that it's
copyright wasn't renewed—so you're looking for the lack of a record,”
Redmond told Motherboard. “There was no way to make lists of public
domain candidates.”
So as part of a massive undertaking, the NYPL recently converted many of these records to XML format,
making it significantly easier to automate the process of determining
which books might be candidates for being added to the public domain,
the first step in ultimately making sure they’re freely available
online.
“It's like a shoe store going from estimating shoe sales
from returns and exchanges only, to having the actual sales receipts,”
Redmond said. “The public domain exists, it's just been hard to see and
this project is about shining a light on it.”
Leonard Richardson, a software developer and science fiction author whose Python matching scripts are helping expedite the process, tells Motherboard that the hard work is only just beginning.... [mehr] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3534j/libraries-and-archivists-are-scanning-and-uploading-books-that-are-secretly-in-the-public-domain
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen