January 2005 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] Canadian and American copyrights
by Wallace J.McLean 12 Jan '05

12 Jan '05

>From Andrew Sly <sly(a)victoria.tc.ca> > But I would argue that if the U.S. did not have > its unique copyright history, then Project Gutenberg > would be rather a different thing today. Absolutely. PG holds a great number of books which are PD under the general rule, but not PD in life+50 or life+70 countries. > Neither American or Canadian copyright laws are > "better", they are just different. Each provides > its own problems for those wanting to utilize the > public domain. Absolutely, but, assuming no further changes to either US or Canadian law, Canada already has a larger public domain, and will continue to have a larger public domain, and one which grows every January 1st. The US public domain is smaller and frozen for more than another decade. > And you also have the uncertain situations. Here is > a description from the LoC of a title that have > availible, if I want it: This is a major lacuna in the Canadian law; some other countries with life+ regimes have provisions which allow you to assume, in the absence of death-date information, that the work is PD after a certain efflux of time. Probably not long enough to take care of a 1930s-era imprint, though. On the other hand, I've currently got a book in copy.pglaf.org limbo because it doesn't contain a publication or copyright date, and the library information from various libraries give contradictory multiple US and British publication dates ranging from 1919 to 1926. Under Canadian law, I know for a fact that this book is unequivocally in the public domain, with an author who died in 1939. I'm trying to prove the publication date -- which I know to be 1920 from extrinsic sources -- but it's a tough slog to clear. > Personal Name: Powell, Van. [from old catalog] > Is it PD in Canada under life+50? Who knows? I've done some > searching and cannot find any dates for the author. If there's any chance this is a pseudonym, then it's public-domain in Canada (publication+50 rule).

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Re: gutvol-d Digest, Vol 6, Issue 27
by Wallace J.McLean 12 Jan '05

12 Jan '05

I'm being dead serious. What would you rather do: look up the publication dates for 1001 books and the death dates of the author(s) for a large subset thereof? look up just the death dates for < 1001 authors? There are more books than authors. Just by confirming the death dates for CS Lewis, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Anderson, Verdi, etc., gives me the public domain date for multiple books at a go. The US law is messy. The fact that it's nice and clean for pre-1923 imprints doesn't unmessy it. It's a goddamn mess. ----- Original Message ----- >From "Joshua Hutchinson" <joshua(a)hutchinson.net> Date Tue, 11 Jan 2005 15:53:17 -0500 To "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject re: [gutvol-d] Top 1000 collection list and suggestion Are you being serious? The US law is anything but messy. Instead of trying to find out exactly when the author died (and that can be harder than it sounds for obscure authors) or even more fun, all the editors, illustrators and contributors to a composite work, find out when they ALL died, take the one that died last .... With the US law, you just take the printed publication date and add 95 years. It is a ridiculously long copyright term, true, but it is very easy to determine. Josh Today's Topics: 1. re: Top 1000 collection list and suggestion (Wallace J.McLean) 2. re: Top 1000 collection list and suggestion (Joshua Hutchinson) 3. re: Top 1000 collection list and suggestion (D. Starner) 4. Re: Re: Problem in file retrieval (Philip Baker) 5. Canadian and American copyrights (Andrew Sly) 6. Re: Canadian and American copyrights (Robert Shimmin) _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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Re: Problem in file retrieval
by Marcello Perathoner 11 Jan '05

11 Jan '05

David Widger wrote: > A new quirk in access to our PG files and not a happy one. A main advantage of > the new directory system is direct access to a file when its url is entered and > until this morning that has been the case. I now find that when a direct link is > entered one is _not_ taken directly to the file but rather to the PG catalog. I > can only imagine this an unintended side effect of some program change. > > For example: > > http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/1/7/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm > > has for the past year taken users directly to Twain's "Innocents Abroad", now it > takes them to the bibrec where they have to choose again from a long confusing > list of files. I cannot reproduce this. Clicking the url in the mail or copy and pasting the url into a browser window gives me the file and not the bibrec. This is related to a recent change in the site programming which I am testing. I redirect all deep links to files from external pages to the bibrec page. This has some advantages: - the link won't go dead when we REPost the file - the user gets a choice of formats - the user doesn't get an outdated edition - our books get a better google ranking - the user gets to see our site. On the downside, sometimes you have to click some more to get the file you want. How does this work? _If_ the browser provides a referrer _and_ the referrer is not from our site, the user gets redirected. When opening the file from a bookmark or entering the url in the location bar, the browser should send _no_ referrer, and the user will not be redirected. When clicking on a link on a page, the browser should send a referrer (can be turned off). The list of "good" referrers, which will never be redirected, contains www.gutenberg.org only, but can be expanded to contain any "Independent Gutenberg Search" site. How did you access the file ? I'd like to try this approach for a few weeks and see if I hit any "hard" problems with it. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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re: [gutvol-d] Top 1000 collection list and suggestion
by Joshua Hutchinson 11 Jan '05

11 Jan '05

Are you being serious? The US law is anything but messy. Instead of trying to find out exactly when the author died (and that can be harder than it sounds for obscure authors) or even more fun, all the editors, illustrators and contributors to a composite work, find out when they ALL died, take the one that died last .... With the US law, you just take the printed publication date and add 95 years. It is a ridiculously long copyright term, true, but it is very easy to determine. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wallace J.McLean" <ag737(a)freenet.carleton.ca> > > I'm on it, but can only do it considering life+50 and life+70. I don't > have the time to apply the messy US law. I'll post up my results when > they're ready. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > > From Steve Herber <herber(a)thing.com> > Date Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:17:24 -0800 (PST) > To gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > Subject [gutvol-d] Top 1000 collection list and suggestion > > An annotated version of this list with two extra pieces of data would > make an interesting Project Gutenberg web page. I would like to see a > link to the Gutenberg edition and the date the item went into or will > go into the public domain. I think some people will start to see the > negative aspect of the long copyright times at the same time > discovering how > many documents are available from the Project. > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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re: [gutvol-d] Top 1000 collection list and suggestion
by Wallace J.McLean 11 Jan '05

11 Jan '05

I'm on it, but can only do it considering life+50 and life+70. I don't have the time to apply the messy US law. I'll post up my results when they're ready. ----- Original Message ----- >From Steve Herber <herber(a)thing.com> Date Mon, 10 Jan 2005 12:17:24 -0800 (PST) To gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org Subject [gutvol-d] Top 1000 collection list and suggestion An annotated version of this list with two extra pieces of data would make an interesting Project Gutenberg web page. I would like to see a link to the Gutenberg edition and the date the item went into or will go into the public domain. I think some people will start to see the negative aspect of the long copyright times at the same time discovering how many documents are available from the Project.

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Fw: [gweekly] 15,000th Project Gutenberg eBook Released
by Miranda van de Heijning 11 Jan '05

11 Jan '05

Perhaps I don't understand Moore's Law properly, but aren't we actually well behind on its schedule? If we published our 10,000th book at the end of 2003, doubling in 1.5 years means 20,000 books in mid-2005. At the current rate we are not likely to reach that figure--anywhere between 16k and 17k seems more realistic. It's not something to be ashamed of, as we are still extending the archive at a very respectable rate, so can we not just be honest about it and admit that we while we predicted 20,000 based on Moore's Law, we are no longer growing that quickly. I've always understood Moore's Law to be just a prediction, not a target, so we haven't failed anything. :-) Other than that, congratulations on reaching 15,000! What was posted as eBook 15000? To: "Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter" <gweekly(a)lists.pglaf.org> Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2005 8:00 PM Subject: [gweekly] 15,000th Project Gutenberg eBook Released > > Congratulations to the Project Gutenberg Volunteers!!! > > > In the last hour Project Gutenberg released their 15,000th eBook. > > More details will be available in Wednesday's email Newsletters. > > This far exceeds Moore's Law projections from 10 eBooks in 1990, > which would predict 15,000 around August, 2006, and which every > pundit has continually said was an impossible growth rate: > > Projected Growth Rate > > Total Date Doubled Years > > 10 Dec, 1990 0 0 > 20 Jun, 1992 1 1.5 > 40 Dec, 1993 2 3 > 80 Jun, 1995 3 4.5 > 160 Dec, 1996 4 6 > 320 Jun, 1998 5 7.5 > 640 Dec, 1999 6 9 > 1280 Jun, 2001 7 10.5 > 2560 Dec, 2002 8 12 > 5120 Jun, 2004 9 13.5 > 10240 Dec, 2005 10 15 > 15000 Aug, 2006 10.5 15+ <<< Predicted Date for ~15,000 > 20480 Jun, 2007 11 16.5 > > > Our many thanks to all the thousands of Gutenberg volunteers!!! > > > Michael S. Hart > > _______________________________________________ > gweekly mailing list > gweekly(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gweekly > >

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Re: PG editorial policy? [Re: [gutvol-d] Fw: [gweekly] 15,000th Project Gutenberg eBook Released]
by D. Starner 11 Jan '05

11 Jan '05

> You are touching here the problem of the (lack of) editorial policy of > PG / PGDP. Why is this a problem? And if you see it as a problem, why don't you fix it? Jon Ingram thought that PG was missing good, complete editions of Chaucer and Pope and Dryden and Wordsworth, but instead of trying to tell me what to scan, he started scanning complete editions of those authors. It's a much more productive solution. > All this makes for a not very coherent, consistent editorial policy. I > guess literature people can easily criticize the PG French catalog (some > very obscure books, and some blatant misses). It's called a library. I'm sitting in a library that reached two million volumes a few years ago, and they have some very obscure books, and at the same time has some blatant misses. (For example, they have only 10 volumes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and half of those are in special collections.) > They're not hackers, they > don't have this culture of "let's get involved, roll up our sleeves and > change the world", but still they could be useful to PG. How? Like many volunteer groups, we already have many people who want to run things already. Like many successful volunteer groups, PG goes out of its way to give a lot of freedom to the people actually doing the work. If they're not willing to roll up their sleeves and do something, how can they be useful to PG? -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Re: [gutvol-d] no flame. suggestion, comments, apology
by D. Starner 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

Instead of just general fiction, let me ramble on for a few minutes about a few niches I'm familiar with. A 28 year copyright term would be releasing the very first volumes in roleplaying games into the public domain. A 14 year copyright term might have some economic effect on the industry, but primarily on companies that bought the rights to reprint old material. (Looking at Dover, one could easily argue that they could stay in buisness.) Pretty much everyone who wants the mainstream material that's 15 years old either has a copy or can find a used copy cheap. The non-mainstream material is, as a general rule, gone. Not because it's bad, but the market is dominated by a few licenses and a few more-or-less generic games. The games where you roleplay crawfish in a post-apocalyptic future weren't bad, they were just odd. They're part of the long tail, as mentioned in the Wired article someone pointed out, hurt further by the fact the whole industry is part of the long-tail; big industry players consider 10,000 books to be a large print run. Twenty-eight years in the computer industry would hurt about 10 books. Andrew Tannenbaum and Donald Knuth would have to worry about people updating older editions and competing with them. Fortunately for them, the universities that employ them don't plan to stop paying them anytime soon. In exchange for slighly hurting those two dignitaries economically, we have access without question to a wealth of information about early computers and the early history of the industry, little of which is in print and equally little of which is available to the average programmer. But don't worry: all the precious books of BASIC programs for the Commodore 64 will still be under copyright for a long time to come. > Don't deprive millions of readers for the sake of a relatively > small number who want to read poor quality older books. The > really good stuff, the stuff people are actually interested in reading, > tends to stay in print. There's large volumes of niche material that is high quality and interesting, but is out of print because of the relatively small market. Even some highly lauded material, like the Lensman series, spent long periods of time out of print. Not everyone wants to read Stephen King or the other authors of the day, and not everything falls into the mass-market paperback category. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Re: [gutvol-d] Re: Problem in file retrieval
by Jim Tinsley 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 18:51:37 +0100, Marcello Perathoner <marcello(a)perathoner.de> wrote: > >This is related to a recent change in the site programming which I am >testing. I redirect all deep links to files from external pages to the >bibrec page. I would never have noticed this, since I block referer information from my browser precisely to prevent sites doing this to me. However, despite having no personal problem with it, I suggest you reconsider. I think that we're coming from different angles at this question. What you regard as "deep links", I regard as "the texts" -- the things we're here to make and distribute. David, I suggest you change your pages to point to archive.org, or Sailor, or something. That will allow readers to access your books directly. I'm sure any sites, especially search sites, pointing to us whose webmasters notice this will do the same. jim

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Re: National Web library do-able, affordable, visionary
by Wallace J.McLean 10 Jan '05

10 Jan '05

Also contact the Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Mr. Ian Wilson: Ian.Wilson(a)lac-bac.gc.ca

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