My concern is mainly that I think the benefit of the PD mark comes from it being a confident statement by the institution - if it becomes used for "probably public domain", it loses a lot of its value.
That said, incorporating the flowcharts (plus something like Arrow) would be great, if it's practical! (It depends a lot on cataloguing quality - if you need to check the item, it makes it a lot trickier.)
FWIW, the British Library's study of using Arrow as a copyright-clearance system managed to identify a 151-year case (a work published at 14 by someone who lived to 98; PD last year.). So very conservative is very conservative indeed ;-)
http://pressandpolicy.bl.uk/Press-Releases/Electronic-clearance-of-Orphan-Wo...
- Andrew.
On 9 November 2012 00:02, Jonathan Gray jonathan.gray@okfn.org wrote:
In an ideal world we could have a very conservative cut-off point and explicitly mark all things before this date as PD.
If only we had a complete set of these: http://publicdomain.okfn.org/calculators
Maybe one day!
In any case, if there were willingness from to do this at KB, it would be a shame not to PD mark much of this material because of uncertainty surrounding a few possible edge cases.
J.
On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 11:29 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 1 November 2012 13:46, Jonathan Gray jonathan.gray@okfn.org wrote:
Great - thanks Ole!
So - from the point of view of prospective reusers - does this mean that e-books from DOD can be freely circulated and reused (as per opendefinition.org)? E.g. will scanned e-books or digital editions be made available with a legal waiver (Public Domain Mark / CC0) or equivalent "no rights reserved" legal disclaimers?
Is this a little risky? I'm all for making definitely-PD material available, but I would assume that a good proportion of late-19th century material is potentially still in copyright - the traditional "safe" cutoff date is around 1870.
Unless it checks on a case-by-case basis, the KB would be tagging material that is likely to still be in copyright, and while it's probably safe for them to make it available, I don't know if we should be encouraging using PD marks for possibly unfree material.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
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-- Jonathan Gray
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