On 05/04/2008, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
Lars Aronsson wrote:
On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Yann Forget yann@forget-me.net wrote:
2009, 60 years after Gandhi's death. The translator is Hélène Hart, she never wrote nor translated anything else beside this book, and her date of death is not known, even to the French National Library (BNF). I personaly called the BNF to ask for details. The book was published only once in 1924, and is out of print since then. If even the BNF does not know anything about Hélène Hart, I doubt anybody else knows it.
I understand that Swedish book publishers in cases like these publish the book anyway, and if the copyright holder contacts them later there is a standard compensation paid out, based on the number of sold copies. This means that the copyright holder who comes too late and makes the claim after publication can get compensated but can't negotiate the price and can't veto the publication. For the publisher it's not hard to do the math: Just set aside the small amount of money for every printed copy. This is apparently a workable solution for the book printing business.
I have tried to figure out if and how this could work for online, non-profit projects. Economic compensation is ruled out for two reasons: 1) there is no money that can be set aside or paid, and 2) we most often don't know how many readers we have, so we can't compute the size of the renumeration anyway. The only workable approach seems to be to allow the late-coming copyright holder a veto, i.e. to take down the work upon request. This is similar to what the Internet Archive or Google are doing.
I completely agree with this. I wish that Wikimedia (practically Commons and Wikisource) comes with a similar solution. This is not really difficult if we stop being too fundamentalist on the issue.
Going rate is I understand about £40 per image. A mere 2500 images less than 0.1% of commons total would be about £100,000 or about $200,000. The methods publishers use don't scale.