On 17/12/2010 12:13, David Gerard wrote:
There's also gutenberg.org.au, for things that are PD under Australian law (all of Orwell, for example).
So what the WP list indicates is deaths before 1955, from the Australian POV, had copyrights lapsing in or before 2005; and otherwise nothing more until 2026 because 1956 deaths come under a 70 year rule? Damn tricky, in that case. Not to know what the current PD position in Australia, but to see what input needs to be placed in PDator to make it authoritative. You have issues of nationality by birth or naturalisation? The map of the world by jurisdictions has changed a great deal over the last 70 years. There is probably tricky stuff about translations and so on.
What is needed is, not exactly an "expert system" on international copyright, but a tool that has the content of such a system encoded in its output. Which makes this quite an enterprise, for which we have a start from Magnus.
Charles