[pd-discuss] Europeana Hackathon: Using Public Domain Calculation to check PD

Mon Jun 20 12:15:20 UTC 2011

Hi List,

2 weeks ago I participated in the Europeana Hackathon in Barcelona (part of 4 simultaneous hackathons in London, Poznan, and Stockholm). Victor de Boer from the VU Amsterdam and I developed an interesting hack. 

We took the Europeana Public Domain Calculator from outofcopyright.eu (of which I am the architect/developer) and stripped the GUI of the software and made it read a static JSON files. Victor de Boer enriched some data from the Europeana API with DBPedia, although Bibliographica would have been better in hindsight. This added death dates for artists, and identified that it was a natural person. 

We've queried material from the Europeana API that had a date before 1960 and was NOT marked with the mandatory Public Domain Mark.

The hack had the following result: http://www.outofcopyright.eu/hack4europe/

It has some (hacky) overlays when you hover of the title of a work and the PD/C icons. We show which assumption we make to come to our conclusions, which makes it a first attempt at a Public Domain due diligence tool. 

It used Dutch copyright law for the calculation. To make this hack possible for other jurisdictions we need to do 2 things:
1. add metadata to other XML files for other flowcharts. This takes about 3 hours to do/jurisdiction
2. Adjust the python script to JSON arrays in accordance with local jurisdiction (some jurisdiction need more/less information to calculate).

I hope to hear your remarks and ideas.

Cheers,

Maarten Zeinstra

Kennisland | Knowledgeland

t +31205756720 | m +31643053919 | s mzeinstra
www.kennisland.nl | www.knowledgeland.org

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