[pd-discuss] BL and google digitise books

Tue Jun 21 08:47:15 UTC 2011

(Cc'ing pd-discuss)

Mark: yes - this is exactly the kind of thing we want to do! :-)

I.e. metadata + calculators = overview of what is in PD.

Unfortunately even after the calculation is done and material is PD,
it is not clear that digital copies will be open as in
opendefinition.org (and hence free for anyone to use without
restriction).

E.g. I understand the material from BL is unfortunately still rights
encumbered [1], possibly due to contractual obligations (with
Google?).

This is addressed by things like PD Charter [2] from Europeana and PD
Manifesto [3] from Communia.

We want to cover things like this in our PD FAQ [4] - any ideas for
how we could make this clearer? Perhaps we should mention [2] and [3]
somewhere?

Also I think we ultimately want to start linking to *open* copies of
public domain works from PublicDomainWorks.net, so people have (i)
calculation of PD status and (ii) information about digital copies
available, including whether or not they are fully open.

Apologies for the rather verbose response! ;-)

J.

[1] http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/pd-discuss/2011-June/000653.html
[2] http://version1.europeana.eu/web/europeana-project/publications
[3] http://publicdomainmanifesto.org/
[4] http://publicdomain.okfn.org/faq/

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Mark MacGillivray <mark at cottagelabs.com> wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/20/british-library-google-digitisation-hippos
>
> digitising a lot of books, making them available via BL and google
> books - is this something to consider for public domain calculator? Or
> is it obvious they are public domain?
>
> Mark
>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

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