On Sun,
Mar 30, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Yann Forget <yann(a)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.