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Distributed Proofreaders Posts 5,000th E-book
bbc writes "Distributed Proofreaders has posted its 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers.
Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR'ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg."
Rather than setting up a complicated system to make micro-payments that only some people would follow anyway, do what I do, determine a fair value for youself and make a donation. Not for one book, but estimate a year or two worth so you don't 'nickel and dime' the value of you donation with transaction fees.
I think it's really a shame that current copyright laws (and retroactive extensions) have limited project Gutenberg to texts from a little after the turn of the century and before.
I just don't understand the point of retroactive copyright extensions. The idea behind copyrights, like patents, is to encourage innovation by allowing the creator an exclusive right for a limited time. If people believe copyright terms need to be extended to achieve this goal, fine. I disagree, but whatever. However, I think it's ludicrous that terms should be extended on works that have already been created, unless maybe they think that extending terms retroactively will lead to more works being produced in the past?
It's so Disney can keep milking Mickey Mouse.
Here's what I want to see:
You get automatic copyright for 25 years. After that, you must pay $1 per year to keep something in copyright. If you can't be bothered to keep track of your stuff and pay the $1, it lapses into the public domain.
Disney will pay the $1 for Mickey ($1 for Steamboat Willy, $1 for each other cartoon, $1 for each book, etc.). But forgotten gems, like ancient Apple ][ games, will become legal public domain items.
I'd actually like to see a hard limit of 50 years or so for copyright, but even if you can't get that, at least the above scheme makes alot of stuff lapse into the public domain.
A cool feature: if the legal trail is tangled and murky, and no one knows who owns it anymore, no one will pay the $1 and it will fall into public domain. Let's say LSD Software wrote a fun game for the Commodore 64. Then ABC Games bought the game from LSD (who kept the rights to use the music in future games). Then ABC Games went under, but its assets were bought by PDQ Games, which later split into PDQ Software and Foo Bar Games. After that it gets REALLY complicated... anyway, after all that, who exactly owns that fun game? No one knows. It would take a court case to decide, but no one will bother so no one will ever know. Under the current system, you are technically a pirate if you keep the game, but there is no one you can pay a license fee and legally have the game! Catch-22.
Heck, Disney should want this. They make big bucks by Disney-ifying public domain stuff, so they should make sure things will actually go into the public domain in the future.
At the risk of going over very old and well-trodden ground, if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text, and used a markup that could have kept page numbers and other meta-information for scholars, while giving the common reader a clean text with a suitable style sheet. But even today on the PG website is a "justification" for sticking to plain text making it clear that scholars don't even figure in the intended audience for PG texts.