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Background

Most works that are in the public domain are not 100% confirmed to be so -- due to ambiguities in (c) law before copyright started to be extended, effectively indefinitely.

Most published works that are not in the public domain are orphaned or out of print: there is no active mechanism for getting a copy, or for having reuse approved by the rightsholder.

One step towards fixing this is publishing a catalog of the best publicly-known estimate of current (c) terms, and clusters of related works, and providing a way for any curator or organization to update that catalog.

Distributed solutions

We need a dweb approach to cataloging existence, theoretical accessibility, and actual accessibility, for published works. This would provide a single referent for citations that can be shared across the web, and that record can highlight all of the ways to access the underlying source.

Important bits of such a catalog:

  • Estimates of (c) expiry, estimates of fair use options, an index of known digital copies (whether or not they are world-readable).
  • A published resource listing the above, that can be referenced when adding a single data point to Wikidata.
    • (in contrast: see NYPL's public db of OCR'ed and partially-cleaned records : it is a monolithic repo, hard to reference)
  • Processes that generate reasonable estimates of accessibility, between "complex, we don't know" and "we spent 10 hrs on (c) analysis".
  • Provenance (something like fatcat w/ confidence scores)
  • A framework for anyone who wants to speed up the work to claim a chunk and do so, or see what chunks are in progress.

See also

  • case.law does a good job at a centrally managed, definitive record.

Layers and components

  • Copyright status + expiry database: For each work, when is it out of (c), what alternate versions are out of (c) soonest, what types of fair use are available, who to contact for reuse?
  • Archival status + digitization: How has a work been digitized, how redundantly is this archived, how to contact the archives, how to mirror this?
  • Derivation, bulk analysis, metadata: How can scripts be run over copies of the work, what associated data exists?
  • Annotation: What annotation exists, how can new notes be added?

I'm looking for sources. Currently

  • NYPL has a small grant to digitize books records at $8/pg (no idea if/how they plan to extend to all others; but it's clear how parallelizing could happen).
  • JMO's work on serials has a wikidata fellow (no idea how well this is parallelizable)