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.