I think this is worth at least a forward to Commons-l as well.
Nemo
-------- Messaggio originale -------- Oggetto: [Communia] OutOfCopyright.eu makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union Data: Tue, 26 Jul 2011 10:14:15 +0200 Mittente: Maarten Zeinstra
OutOfCopyright.eu http://OutOfCopyright.eu/ makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union
Works that have fallen into the public domain after their term of copyright protection has elapsed can be freely used by everybody. In theory that means that these works can be reused by anyone for any purpose which includes commercial exploitation. In theory the public domain status increases access to our shared knowledge and culture and encourages economic activities that do not take place as long as works are protected by copyright. In turn the commercial exploitation of public domain works (for example out of copyright books http://www.voyantes.net/blog/?p=589) has the tendency to increase their accessibility.
In practice however determining if a work has passed into the public domain can prove very difficult. This is especially true when attempting to determine the public domain status of content in multiple jurisdictions. As part of the EuropeanaConnect project http://www.europeanaconnect.eu/ Knowledgeland http://www.knowledgeland.org/ and the Institute for information Law at the University of Amsterdam http://www.ivir.nl/ have developed public domain calculators to answer the question whether a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights (related rights) has fallen into the public domain. These public domain Calculators have been developed for 30 countries (the European Union plus Switzerland, Iceland & Norway) and are available at www.outofcopyright.eu http://www.outofcopyright.eu/
Users can use the calculators (and the underlying research http://outofcopyright.eu/methodology.html published at outofcopyright.eu http://outofcopyright.eu/) to determine the copyright status of works in all these countries. This is the first time that this question has been structurally researched across all European jurisdictions.
The results of this research of national copyright laws shows a complex semi-harmonized field of legislation across Europe that makes it unnecessarily difficult to unlock the cultural, social and economic potential of works in the public domain. Identification of works as being in the public domain needs be made easier and less resource consuming by simplifying and harmonizing rules of copyright duration and territoriality.
Outofcopyright continues to adjust and refine its calculators. It is also researching how to make calculation possible using large datasets like bibliographica http://bibliographica.org/, DBPedia http://dbpedia.org/ and the Europeana http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/web/api datasets on cultural objects in Europe.
We encourage everyone interested in the public domain to try the calculators, comment on them and re-use the published research. All research and other material on Outofcopyright is available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/ and the software http://www.outofcopyright.eu/software_description.html powering the calculators can be reused under the terms of the EUPL license http://www.osor.eu/eupl
Kind regards,
Maarten Zeinstra *
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* Kennisland | Knowledgeland
t +31205756720 | m +31643053919 | s mzeinstra www.kennisland.nl http://www.kennisland.nl/| www.knowledgeland.org http://www.knowledgeland.org/
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