While I'm also interested in looking into this, for *images* in particular I think it's quite difficult. They're often used in books and journals by permission of the photographer, so the fact that the book/journal's copyright wasn't renewed doesn't necessarily mean the photographs in the book/journal are now public domain. You'd also have to check that the photographer didn't separately register/renew a copyright on the photo. And, since photos don't typically have convenient names or IDs to use for lookup, it can be pretty hard to check.
-Mark
On 6/24/12 8:22 AM, Eddie Erhart wrote:
Whoa, in 1958/59, only *seven *percent of the books and *eleven *percent of the journals were renewed? This may be obvious, but clarifying the copyright status of these works would be a huge benefit to editors looking for public domain image to illustrate Wikipedia articles... and that's not including the benefits to the Commons and Wikisource.
--Ed
On Sat, Jun 23, 2012 at 8:07 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
There are scans of most of the relevant records, and the records for books are also transcribed by Project Gutenberg and searchable at a stanford uni website. See en.ws template PD-US-no-renewal. The scans need to be transcribed to increase accessibility. On Jun 24, 2012 3:50 AM, "Kim Bruning" kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
According to:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120330/12402418305/why-missing-20th-centu...
a lot of books have an uncertain copyright status, because the Copyright Office records have not been digitized yet.
Is this true? Would offering to help digitize these records fit in our mission (especially wrt WikiSource) ?
sincerely, Kim Bruning
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