[pdb-discuss] Re: Presenting at OK Con

Thu Mar 15 19:42:19 UTC 2007

Michael Holloway wrote:
[snip]
>     - Background:
>     -- Lack of a central copyright register in the UK - Role fulfilled
>     by the stationers office in Statute of Anne, doesn't exist today.
> 
>     -- Problems of working out copyright / PD status of works -
>     complexities of Music copyrights, records of author death dates, etc.
>     -- Summary of the need for PDW-DB

> By needs do you mean the many potential uses for the DB? e.g. licensing 
> (for sampling, for inclusion in media, for compilations), reference 
> purposes, and the PD-Burn project

Sounds good. As Michael says could also make the point that a metadata 
database like this is useful in itself (how big is the public domain? 
Ratings of music etc etc).

>     - Implementation
>     -- Outline of the app's functionality
>     -- Tech details (Maybe Nathan or Rufus can step in at this point?)

I'll be happy to help out here -- Nathan are you coming too? It would be 
great to see you and have a chat quite apart from the presentation.

>     -- Data sources (BBC Archive, British Library catalogoue,
>     kingkong.demon.co.uk <http://kingkong.demon.co.uk>)
>     -- Use cases / Examples
> 
> 
> I expect this will be revised in light of Rufus' update on the project 
> i.e. using musicbrainz as backend
> 
>     - Future Plans
>     - Call for Volunteers

I've just hacked together a bit of code to calculate copyright statuses 
for our composer data and as a first bit of info I calculate that of the 
1083 composers we have listed:

Out of Copyright:  263
In Copyright:      762
Status Unknown:    58

I can provide much more data on each of these categories with a few 
lines of python (other volunteer hackers welcome) and I'll be around on 
irc most of tomorrow (irc.oftc.net #okfn) so just drop in there or email 
if you want to know more.

NB: I've just committed latest files to subversion including script used 
to generate those results:

http://project.knowledgeforge.net/pdw/svn/trunk/bin/out_of_copyright_composers

> Let's try and be precise about the kind of skills we need right now (not 
> that i could give you that detail)

Why not update (as necessary):

http://www.publicdomainworks.net/participate/

~rufus