[pd-discuss] What We Hope the Digital Public Library of America Will Become

Tue Apr 23 13:13:58 UTC 2013

Copyright duration in the US is a mix of easy and hard rules.  There's
an easy rule of publication before 1923, and harder rules involving publication
after that point (and in some circuits, some foreign works published
before 1923 are also potentially copyrighted, per Peter Hirtle's chart at
http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm ).  And then
there's the mess with sound recordings, which I believe was discussed
here recently.

With about 1.5 million public domain items, HathiTrust has a large number
of the books that are eligible for DPLA inclusion.  (I also import their
records into The Online Books Page.)  And they've probably done the most
thorough copyright research of any large project (since they have a
team that'd researched these issues on tens of thousands of titles).
If one were planning to filter or search by US copyright status, Hathitrust's
rights information would be a good place to start.

John Mark Ockerbloom

On 04/22/2013 09:34 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
> DPLA is serving as a platform for services and metadata more than a
> creator of them.  A license-sensitive search is most desirable.  DPLA
> can do things such as encouraging all content hubs to include license
> data per record, where they have a non-default license, and
> encouraging search providers to include a license-search option,
> buidling on that data.
>
> In many cases, however, at least for material older than CC, what we
> need is a service like the Durationator which can take in the
> identifier for a work and look up its (c) status in a shared global
> database.
>
> SJ