On 31 October 2011 12:37, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yes we are coming up to January 1st when things go
public domain in
the UK. I understand there will be a bit of a party. Fireworks and
suchlike.
My list of works that go PD is a bit short at the moment and mostly
focused on the your paintings thing but I hope to expand it a bit
before the new year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Geni/1941_deaths
There is/was a basic Magnus Manske tool that searched interwiki to find
authors who met the (death year)+X criterion for the first time in 2012 or
whenever, according to jurisdiction.
To reply to both this mail and Mike's: WMUK missed participation in the
business of PDD on New Year's Day 2011; but with a longer lead time for
considering what to do that doesn't have to be the case for 2012. There is
http://www.publicdomainday.org/ and the chapter ought to find out who is
behind that, in concrete terms I think (point 1).
Point 2 is that international copyright law makes the whole business a
remarkably tiresome exposition; but there is no reason at all not to
document it and have a tool such as Magnus's to demonstrate some aspects of
it (illustrating both the global reach of the issue, depending on what
languages you read, and the strength of WP as a source of the required
data). This is for general interest in terms of the author's life +
criterion. There could be press interest in a well-packaged feature
proposal about this area, but it would have to be put together in November,
really. NB the media interest is not about the wrinkles of free content,
but about filling space with something showing originality.
Point 3: American PD. The 2010 experience showed those who participated in
the Telegraph story how tight the constraints are for anything to fall into
the public domain in the USA. Take this as a challenge, though. The more
lawyer-like amongst us could be well employed in researching the very
restricted class of new PD material, to see what can be found. I certainly
think, at the more specialist end of the market for discussion about free
content, this is a worthy little project.
Charles