[Foundation-l] How was the "only people who averaged two edits a week in the last six months can vote" rule decided?

Sat Aug 1 11:09:11 UTC 2009

2009/8/1 John Vandenberg <jayvdb at gmail.com>:
> On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Also...
>> *A wiki for book metadata, with an entry for every published work,
>> statistics about its use and siblings, and discussion about its
>> usefulness as a citation (a collaboration with OpenLibrary, merging
>> WikiCite ideas)
>
> Why not just do this in the Wikisource project?
>
> 99% percent of "every published work" are free/libre.  Only the last
> 70 years worth of texts are restricted by copyright, so it doesnt make
> sense to build a different project for those works.

I think your estimate's a little off, sadly :-)

Firstly, copyright lasts more than the statutory seventy years, as a
general rule - remember, authors don't conveniently die the moment
they publish. If we discount the universal one-date cutoff in the US
eighty years ago - itself a fast-receding anomaly - extant copyrights
probably last about a hundred years from publication, on average.

But more critically, whilst a hundred years is a drop in the bucket of
the time we've been writing texts, it's a very high proportion of the
time we've been publishing them at this rate. Worldwide, book
publication rates now are pushing two orders of magnitude higher than
they were a century ago, and that was itself probably up an order of
magnitude on the previous century. Before 1400, the rate of creation
of texts that have survived probably wouldn't equal a year's output
now.

I don't have the numbers to hand to be confident of this - and
hopefully Open Library, as it grows, will help us draw a firmer
conclusion - but I'd guess that at least half of the identifiable
works ever conventionally published as monographs remain in copyright
today. 70% wouldn't surprise me, and it's still a growing fraction.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk