[pdb-discuss] Draft funding proposal

[Michael Holloway]

Hey

This draft will eventually go the LDA. Comments pls and thanks, in
particular on

1. Should the focus be on sound recordings rather than 'all categories of
copyright subject matter'?
2. I have noted intention to become self-funding after 6 months, but have
not included suggestions for income.
3. Should we specify what data we already have?

PD Works
(Draft funding application for £5k from the LDA to develop PD Works)

Summary

A LDA grant of £5,000 will enable the Open Rights Group and the Open
Knowledge Foundation to develop a scaleable database of authors and works
for the purpose of identifying their copyright status and contact details
for the right holder. This project will encourage creative and profitable
reuse of public domain works, especially sound recordings, and the public
understanding of copyright balance.

Who we are

This proposal is jointly presented by the Open Rights Group (ORG) and the
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN).

The ORG was created in December 2005 with the following goals:
•    to raise awareness in the media of digital rights abuses;
•    to provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts
and activists;
•    to preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the digital
world;
•    to collaborate with other digital rights and related organizations;
•    to nurture a community of campaigning volunteers, from grassroots
activists to technical and legal experts;
•    to nurture a grassroots activist community and raise awareness in the
media of digital rights abuses.

Since December 2005, we have worked hard and created a sustainable
organisation that amounts to something greater than the sum of its parts. We
now have around 600 paying subscribers, a Board and Advisory Council
comprised of a range of law and technology experts, a staff of 2 and a
growing army of skilled, motivated volunteers. We have forged strong
affiliations with other international organisations in our field.

We have mounted two nationally visible campaigns with the help of funding
from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. In 2006 we mounted a nationally
visible campaign to protect the public domain against calls for copyright
extension in sound recordings by the recording industry. In 2007, spurred on
by the recommendations of the Gowers Review of IP, we continue to campaign
around IP issues. In addition, we are also working to raise awareness of the
dangers to democracy presented by Government's continuing trial of e-voting
technologies.

The OKFN exists to address the challenges of the Information Age by
promoting the openness of knowledge in all its forms, in the belief that
freer access to information will have far-reaching social and commercial
benefits. In particular, we

•    Promote the idea of open knowledge, for example by running a series of
forums.
•    Instigate and support projects related to the creation and distribution
of open knowledge.
•    Campaign against restrictions, both legal and non-legal, on open
knowledge.

Anything further on OKFN?

Background

The existence of an accessible public domain of cultural works is essential
to the business of educators, academics, artists and critics alike. These
materials are freely available - without legal restraint – for inspiration
but also reuse in all manner of projects. Historically, authors and their
publishers were required to register works by depositing a copy at a central
registry before they received the benefit of copyright protection for that
work. This ensured the right holder for any given work could be easily
identified, and that the legal status of a work could be easily identified.

These administrative formalities are no longer in force. Qualifying works
are instead protected once fixed in physical form, regardless of
registration or special identification marks. As a result, discerning the
legal status of works and contact information for right holders is an
unnecessarily complicated process, demanding substantial (and costly)
investigation.

This is an unsatisfactory situation. The cost and time of ascertaining a
work's legal status is prohibitive: it stifles creativity that could
otherwise profit from the existence of public domain works.

(Paragraph on remix / reuse creativity, or are we keeping a formal tone?
Perhaps we can do this with a formal tone … )

Proposal

The PD Works registry is a database and associated web application. We will
eventually store data for all categories of subject matter that qualify for
copyright protection, but have chosen to begin with sound recordings
(because of their popularity and the threat presented by proposals for term
extension). With this data it becomes trivial to determine programmatically
the copyright status of creative works. A major aim of the project is to
harness community and volunteer involvement in finding and entering
information, as well as in determining the rights in a work. Accordingly the
system will be designed to allow decentralized collaborative contributions,
in a wiki-esque manner.

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 these authors. In addition, it is important,
particularly in the case of sound recordings, to ascertain the same
information about any embodied or underlying copyrights.

This innovative project requires modest seed-funding to pay for both
back-end development of the database itself and front-end development of the
web application. Although this programming could be done by a volunteer,
professional development guarantees both timelines high standards. Both the
software and data produced would be 'open' (Gnu GPL) so that other projects,
for example those working on orphan works, could easily use and build upon
our work.

Our backend will process information in pre-existing databases (e.g.
Metabrainz), as well as information made available especially for the
project (e.g. BBC? British Library?). Our web interface will include
plain-English literature regarding copyright's regulation of creative
expression, emphasising the notions of  'balance' and the public domain, as
well as extensive links to further materials, for both academics and layman.

We will arrange and promote a press launch once the project is ready for
public beta testing in October 2007, intended to publish our project to all
sectors of the creative community.

Once we have a functioning web application, the 'open' community will
perform further acquisition and entry of. The project will be sustained in
the long term by ORG and OKFN as the basis for PD-Burn, a connected project,
which intends to link the database to a digital archive of public domain
works.

Activities / Timeline - (To be refined following input from pdb-discuss.)

June: major backend development starts

July: major backend development ongoing

August: major backend development ongoing, major frontend development,
marketing begins

September: major backend development finishes, major frontend development,
marketing ongoing

October: minor backend development, minor frontend development, public
launch

November: minor backend development

December: minor backend development

Budget - see Becky's previous email

Project staff

•    Nathan Lewis? – Python coding
•    Tim Cowlishaw? – Web designer
•    Michael Holloway – Admin and marketing

Participant finances

We have a monthly income (from supporter subscriptions) of approximately X,
and monthly outgoings (wages and events) of X. ORG's current account in
April 2007 holds approximately £X.

Should we give figures for OKFN too? If so, Rufus, please insert following
the form above here.

Details of partner institutions?

-- 
Michael H Holloway
+44 (0) 7974 566 823

http://www.openrightsgroup.org
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