Copyright clearance for PG Canada
Copyright clearance for PG Canada is one of the issues that needs more attention. I believe Wallace has the most interest and understanading of Canadian copyright terms among the people on this list, but I thought I'd post this message here for general feedback. As the concept of public domain can be nebulous (I don't believe it is actually defined in our copyright laws), I was thinking we might want to prepare a list of different criterea we could use for copyright clearances, something along the lines of: http://www.gutenberg.org/howto/copyright-howto I was thinking, for our most often-used rule, something like: 1) An item which was produced by one author, whose date of death was over 50 years ago, where that date is common bibliographic knowledge, and the text was published during his lifetime. Some other possible situations could be: 2) Same as #1, only the text was published posthumously, but still more than 50 years ago. 3) Same as #1, only we have to do research to find the author's date of death, in which case we should keep a record of our source for that information. 4) An item published anonymously or pseudonymously over 50 years ago, where a reasonable search cannot determine the author's true identity. 5) An item where the author is known, but his date of death cannot be reasonably determined, and the work was published a certain number of years ago. (This would be for mid-nineteenth century and older works, where one can assume that, given a human life-span, the author could not have lived past a date of 50 years ago. I don't know how long ago this number should be.) 6) An item of joint authorship, where the terms of #1 apply, and the last surviving author died over 50 years ago. (This would also apply for anyone contributing to the intellectual content of the item, such as an editor or a translator.) #2-5 may also be applicable to works of joint authorship. 7) An item which was published by a Canadian government department over 50 years ago. I would suggest that for our "beta-stage" we just concern ourselves with texts which present no difficulties or uncertainties in copyright clearance. Andrew
On 21:27:21 Andrew Sly wrote:
5) An item where the author is known, but his date of death cannot be reasonably determined, and the work was published a certain number of years ago. (This would be for mid-nineteenth century and older works, where one can assume that, given a human life-span, the author could not have lived past a date of 50 years ago. I don't know how long ago this number should be.)
If you assume the age at death could have been as high as 100 and the age at publishing as low as 12, you wind up with 1867. 90 years and 20 years gives 1885. Anything that falls under this rule would be a shoo-in for PG USA, and it would be simplest to just post it there. ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@rogers.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.
Yes Gardner, you're right. But my understanding is that, at least for some volunteers, one goal is to include as much as possible from PG-us into the PG Canada system. A rule like the one below would facilitate some of that. Given the type of role model some are hoping PG Canada can be as promoter of a vibrant public domain, I'd rather have precise rules for what goes into the collection, rather than just saying "oh, I'm sure this book is ok", as you will see some online sources do. Andrew On Sat, 15 Jan 2005, Gardner Buchanan wrote:
On 21:27:21 Andrew Sly wrote:
5) An item where the author is known, but his date of death cannot be reasonably determined, and the work was published a certain number of years ago. (This would be for mid-nineteenth century and older works, where one can assume that, given a human life-span, the author could not have lived past a date of 50 years ago. I don't know how long ago this number should be.)
If you assume the age at death could have been as high as 100 and the age at publishing as low as 12, you wind up with 1867.
90 years and 20 years gives 1885.
Anything that falls under this rule would be a shoo-in for PG USA, and it would be simplest to just post it there.
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Andrew Sly -
Gardner Buchanan