[pdb-discuss] Re: Writing a grant proposal for the public domain works db (example of complexities of copyright)

[Timothy Cowlishaw]

Hey Rufus,

Sorry for the late reply, both deadlines at work and international  
sports tournaments seem to have put  me behind schedule on this.  
Revised version is below, all revisions and comments appreciated, as  
always. I think it needs a better conclusion, (or any sort of  
conclusion at all!) but am being careful not to repeat myself.

Cheers,


Tim

(text follows)
------------------------------
Public Domain Burn – Application for funding

The existence of an accessible public domain of cultural works is  
essential to the business of educators, academics, artists and  
critics alike. The importance of prior art  to the future success of  
creativity (and the ‘knowledge economy’) both in the UK and Globally,  
cannot be underestimated.

Originally, in order to benefit from copyright protection for a work,  
authors were required to register the work and deposit a copy at a  
central registry. This ensured that the identity of the work’s author  
could always be known, and that both copyright and public domain  
works could be easily identified.

Today it is no longer necessary to do this. Any work eligible for  
protection is covered from the time of the making or publication of  
the work, without any need to register that work as being protected,  
or to mark it as such. As a result, the process of identifying  
protected or public domain works is no longer trivial, as there is no  
central registry for copyrighted works, determining whether or not a  
work is still covered can rely on guesswork, or substantial (and  
costly) investigation. This is an unsatisfactory situation, as the  
prohibitive cost and time commitment involved in ascertaining whether  
a work is or is not in the public domain stifles creativity that  
could otherwise profit from the existence of public domain ‘prior art’.

In order to combat this problem and ease the difficulties involved in  
ascertaining whether a work is in the public domain, the Public  
Domain Burn project, instigated by Free Culture UK, is seeking  
funding in order to build a prototype database of artistic and  
cultural works that have fallen into the public domain or which are  
about to fall out of copyright, initially focusing on sound  
recordings. This is currently a particularly pertinent field, as  
various interested parties have recently launched a campaign to  
extent the term of copyright for sound recordings from fifty years to  
ninety-five; the confusion resulting from this would make it even  
more difficult to determine the copyright status of a work.

This registry will take the form of a database and associated web  
application storing the above details for as many cultural artefacts  
as possible. With this data stored, it would then be possible to  
determine programmatically or by hand which works are currently in  
the Public Domain.

In order to do this, several facts about each work need to be  
ascertained – The date the work was first published, the name(s) of  
any contributing authors, and the dates of the death of these  
authors, if they are deceased. In addition, it is important,  
particularly in the case of sound recordings, to ascertain the same  
information about copyrights that the work in question may derive  
from. For example, in order to determine the Copyright status of a  
sound recording we would need to know:

The year in which the recording was first made
The name of the composer of the underlying musical work
The date of death of the composer, if he or she is deceased.

For example, in the case of Elvis Presley’s ‘That’s Alright’, we  
would ascertain that as the recording was made in 1955 and the term  
of copyright on sound recordings currently stands at 50 years, that  
the recording passed into the public domain in 2005. However, as the  
song itself was composed by Billy Crudup (who died in 1974), and is  
covered by a standard term of life plus 70 years, it will enter the  
public domain in 2044.

In the case of recordings of songs with multiple composers, or  
recordings incorporating a number of musical works, this calculation  
is complicated further, and the public domain burn database would  
greatly assist in ascertaining the copyright status of these works.  
In addition, the prototype that we intend to build would be reusable  
in other contexts (the identification of ‘orphan works’ being one  
example.)

---------------------------
On 15 Jun 2006, at 13:27, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> Tim Cowlishaw wrote:
> [snip]
>>> > to register a work in order to gain the benefits of  copyright
>>> > protection. Any work eligible for protection is covered  from  
>>> the time
>>> > of the making or publication of the work, without any  need to  
>>> register
>>> > that work as being protected, or to mark it as such.  As a  
>>> result, the
>>> > process of identifying protected or public domain  works is no  
>>> longer
>>> > trivial, as there is no central registry for  copyrighted works,
>>> > determining whether or not a work is still covered  can rely on
>>> > guesswork, or substantial (and costly) investigation.
>>>
>>> At this point I would introduce what we want funding for: public  
>>> domain
>>> registry, i.e. a database of works with information on whether  
>>> they are
>>> in the public domain.
>>>
>>> We can explain the complexities involved (as you do in next para)  
>>> but we
>>> should keep it to one simple, concrete example such as Elvis That's
>>> Alright -- there was a long discussion of this on creative- 
>>> friends but
>>> the list archives seem to have disappeared so I will try to dig  
>>> up the
>>> email from my own archives and send it to the list.
>
> Unfortunately I've just discovered that the creative-archive was  
> deleted in March by the sysadmins at essential.org so all of this  
> stuff is no longer online :( . However I have managed to repost on  
> FC-UK site the most important bits:
>
>   http://www.freeculture.org.uk/copyright/recordings -- full details
>   http://www.freeculture.org.uk/term_extn -- intro
>
> Regards,
>
> Rufus