[cc-community] Finding PD content on Gutenberg

Jonathan Gray jonathan.gray at okfn.org
Wed Apr 2 07:24:06 EDT 2008


Chris,

Yes - this has been on the cards for a while. We've been thinking about 
helping to build a set of 'public domain calculators' which would 
determine whether or not a give work was in the public domain in a given 
jurisdiction:

  http://okfn.org/wiki/PublicDomainCalculators
  http://www.publicdomainworks.net/

Sorry the link doesn't seem to work, try:

  http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/

Warm regards,

Jonathan


Chris Watkins wrote:
> Thanks Jonathon - good work.
>
> Did you look at ways to distinguish which documents are actually PD, 
> as opposed to some other form of permission?
>
> btw, https://project.knowledgeforge.net/svn/shakespeare/trunk doesn't work
>
> Chris
>
>
> On Fri, Mar 28, 2008 at 12:49 AM, Jonathan Gray 
> <jonathan.gray at okfn.org <mailto:jonathan.gray at okfn.org>> wrote:
>
>     Terry Hancock wrote:
>      > So, Gutenberg contains George MacDonald's "Princess and
>     Curdie", which
>      > is PD. But the header data at the top of the file that says
>     "This is a
>      > Project Gutenberg e-text... [blah blah blah]" is copyright Project
>      > Gutenberg and therefore NOT PD (and therefore so is the entire
>     file if
>      > left as-is).  In order to get the PD work, you have to strip
>     out all of
>      > the Project Gutenberg stuff at the beginning.
>
>     We noticed this when we were getting the text files for our Open
>     Shakespeare project. We wrote some code to strip out the header files:
>
>     https://project.knowledgeforge.net/svn/shakespeare/trunk
>     http://knowledgeforge.net/shakespeare/svn/trunk/shakespeare/gutenberg.py
>
>     I'm going to have a go at tinkering with this to generate PD
>     versions of
>     several other texts for some projects I'm working on.
>
>     There's also a note on the Gutenberg license at:
>
>       http://opendefinition.org/licenses
>
>
>     Jonathan
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>
>
>
> -- 
> Chris Watkins (a.k.a. Chriswaterguy)
>
> Founding admin at Appropedia.org, the wiki of:
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