[pdb-discuss] Re: Writing a grant proposal for the public domain works db v0.4

Sat Jun 24 17:23:03 UTC 2006

To save Tim yet another another round of folding in suggested changes 
I've produced the a merged myself which you can see below. This should 
be pretty close to final. Main changes are:

1. After talking with Tom I've put this as a joint project of Free 
Culture UK and the Open Knowledge Foundation: "Free Culture UK in 
association with the Open Knowledge Foundation plan to build ...".

2. Removed mention of specific license (GNU GPL) as we may not use that 
license (e.g. we might want to use BSD for code and CC by-sa for data)

3. refactored 2nd and 3rd section: Got rid of proposal section and 
created 'Public Domain or Not? A Complex Question'

Hope these are all ok.

Regards,

Rufus

= Public Domain Works Database =

== Introduction ==

The existence of an accessible public domain of cultural works is 
essential to the business of educators, academics, artists and critics 
alike. 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 works.

== Public Domain or Not? A Complex Question ==

In order to determine whether a work is public domain several facts 
about it 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 (the 'underlying musical work') 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.

As the reader can imagine, for recordings of songs with multiple 
composers, or recordings incorporating a number of musical works, this 
calculation is complicated even further.

== A Public Domain Registry for the EU ==

In order to combat this problem and ease the difficulties involved in 
ascertaining whether a work is in the public domain, Free Culture UK in 
association with the Open Knowledge Foundation plan to build a *Public 
Domain Registry* which will list cultural works that have entered the 
public domain or which are about to fall out of copyright.

The project will initially focusing on sound recordings because of the 
current debate in the EU about the extension of the term of copyright 
for works. Such an extension, (particularly when applied retroactively, 
as in this case) would significantly reduce the size of the public 
domain but in the absence of a Registry of the type we are proposing, 
this loss cannot be accurately quantified.

This registry will take the form of a wiki-like 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. A major aim of the project is to harness community and 
volunteer involvement in the process of finding and entering information 
as well as in determination of the copyright status of the work and so 
the system will be designed to allow decentralized collaborative 
contributions in a wiki-like way.

We are seeking funding in order to develop this Public Domain Registry. 
The funding will be used to develop a software system and associated 
database structure for the registry, and will also cover the collection 
and entry of a limited amount of data for testing and demonstration 
purposes. Once there is a functioning web application the further 
acquisition and entry of data will be performed by the community.

Both the software and data produced would be 'open' so that other 
projects, for example those working on orphan works, could easily use 
and build upon our work.

Tim Cowlishaw wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Version 3 of the proposal, you all know the drill by now. Annotate away!
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Tim
> 
[snip]