[Foundation-l] Stroop report

[Yann Forget]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Yann Forget <yann at 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.

> In many cases, where the copyright that we thought had expired is 
> still in force, it will soon expire anyway.  For example, if we 
> publish a work by what we thought was an anonymous author, and it 
> turns out that they died 55 years ago, the take-down will just be 
> a temporary removal for 15 years, and then the copyright will 
> really have expired.  Still, such a removal is unfortunate and 
> complicated.  I think we can help this by clearly announcing who 
> insisted on the removal (rather than granting a free license, 
> which was their alternative option), so that the bad will reflects 
> on them.  The non-profit has the advantage of being the good guys.
> 
> Some might argue that you should always walk on the safe side of 
> copyright, always have good margins and never get into trouble.  
> However, there is no safe side.  Even if Mark Twain died (in 1910) 
> more than 70 years ago, and I publish his works in the best of 
> faith, some person might turn up tomorrow and claim that their 
> Dutch grandfather who died only 65 years ago was actually a secret 
> co-author of that work, and that copyright in the Netherlands is 
> still in force.  You can never be completely safe.

Agreed again.

Regards,

Yann
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