I face many of the same issues, with some differences:
I judged the barcode scanner solution to be a tad expensive for my needs. Also, I store more than half of my books in boxes, so they are not out, so I need to know which box they are located in.
here's my lowtech but efficient solution.
Create a spreadsheet, with fields for Author, Title, genre, pb/hb, notes, read?, box number, purchase date.
Other things like ISBN, UPC are also helpful, but I didn't want to complicate my life.
There are solutions that let you type in ISBN which will link to metadata, but you're not really saving a lot of time or mental energy.
Create it on your desktop (using excel or open office) and download it to your PDA (using PocketExcel). Then whenever you remove a book from a storage box, you can change the box number, so I know where it is. The PDA element is vital; Nobody's going to go to their PC every time they want to take something.
With a spreadsheet you can sort things easily and quickly view things by criteria.
I do keep a web copy.
Yes, I know there are web applications out there to try, but I don't see the need for a server-side solution if it's always in my pocket. (I do ftp the updated spreadsheet to my website, even saving as HTML on occasion.
I agree that in most circumstances donations don't work.
But I think the right kind of context and solicitation does make a difference. so does the content--how unique is it?
People are more inclined to tip an individual rather than a group or organization. They are more likely to tip creative content than commentary, more likely to tip people if they know all the money is going to the right person. Also, they're more likely to tip if they know that they are receiving a stream of content, not just a single 3 minute video.
Finally, most content creators still don't don't put tipjars on their website, so they just don't know if it works.
At the moment I'm working on a tip-based community site that I think will work--at least better than what we've seen before. Check back with me in 6 months; I might have success stories to brag about!
This sounds like an interesting book, and I'll probably buy it, but looking over the Table of Contents, this book is geared more toward Linux Multimedia Management (PVR, mp3s) than doing actual recording and capturing.
I'm a podcaster trying to figure out the best way to input mike/mixer into my linux laptop, and had the damnest time figuring out.
Mastering the software stuff is easy (relatively speaking). Much harder is figuring out how to get your hardware to work. About the best resource I've found for that is this usb device database . Under each multimedia device are user comments about how they made it work.
Also, a few months ago I reviewed a book, Digital Video Hacks. More about video production than linux, the book nonetheless a few things from a linux perspective. Highly recommended!
On another note, why hasn't anyone published a decent GIMP manual yet? The last book is a good three years old, and a lot has happened to gimp since then. I would love to see a Gimp Hacks book sometime. I could really use that!
I face this same issue, and in fact, after 6 months it will probably be the reason I'll be leaving this company very soon (i.e., in weeks).
My company gives somewhat generous training for semester long courses and certain short courses but no time to complete them.
That basically means no conferences or tutorials unless you take the time to take the day off.
I get the impression that bigger companies don't have a problem with training costs (reasonable ones). But they have a problem with granting you time off; a compromise solution would be to be allowed to take a leave of absence during the time you attend training classes. Yes, your paycheck would be lower, but at least it wouldn't interfere with vacation days.
Unfortunately, big companies are pretty much committed to the 40 hour work week, 52 weeks a year, 2 weeks of vacation.
Last year I used 5 of my 15 vacation/personal days on training. It sucks, it really sucks.
I was going to buy a laptop for running Fedora Core at the end of January. I was planning to spend 1000-1200$ Is this out of my league (and time frame)?
Linux/Unix users are a self-selected bunch. You need to decide whether your user persona should be Joe Clueless (who is put in a room and has to perform basic functions in Linux) or the Power User.
The Power User may turn out to be the more typical linux user (from the standpoint of HP/IBM), so the reactions of Joe Clueless may just not be useful. Good to have a specific goal in mind while running this study. Are you trying to help developers understand power users better? Or trying to help a company make mass market tools?
If dealing with Joe Clueless, be sure to give tasks about how to locate system documentation. I just installed Fedora Core and for the life of me couldn't find it (and I'm a fricking tech writer!)
Also, should you assume that users are dealing with a fully installed system (office/school user)? Or that users normally would need to figure out how to get their hardware to work (home user)? My "usability problems" have usually not been with the interface but just getting hardware to work, and that would not so much a problem if the Office/School made these decisions for me.
I would be very curious btw which of the package managers that users find the easiest to use. Crossdistribution comparison of how individual users used package managers would be really useful information!
This group does a lot of usability analysis http://openusability.org/index.php . Also, I seem to remember that a few years ago Sun did a usability study of the Linux desktops.
The assumption made here is that porn sites would object to being labeled "porn." I don't think that is the case. They would love a way to make it easy for content filters to block access for children. That makes their job easier, not harder.
There is a benefit to self-description, as long as the registering body isn't forced by that business's government to label certain things as porn. It has to be voluntary.
Ok, I see how edge-cases might raise questions, but why not just open the TLD and see what happens?
Judging from the time for the approval process, you would think they were trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Hey, guys, it's fricking three letters. What's the holdup?
I am an opensource guy, but even I ended up buying Abby for my mass scanning needs.
Here's what you do: Buy a 5.0 license of Abby Finereader off ebay. You can buy it for about 10$.
Buy the upgrade version of the latest version of Abby Finereader for $150.
It's still $160, but that's still considerably cheaper than paying the new price of $500-600. Abby finereader docs say specifically that the upgrade software will work successfully on ALL prior versions of finereader.
As far as feeding into a database, I'm afraid I can't be any help, but if any software has this functionality, finereader would.
I'm somewhat in agreement with this statement, even though John Dvorak usually overreaches with his generalizations.
Apple products are boutique items. They are products with style and image for people who care about such things (and with the money to pay for it).
In the educational world, Mac still has a dominant influence (where educational discounts abound). I once took an graduate instructional technology course and was amazed to find that all the computer labs we used were Mac based. (That was 4 years ago, when open source was still viewed with suspicion).
I don't like windows, and lots of open source people probably don't either. So by default does that mean we love Macs?
Well, no. For me, I am cost conscious. When talking about the MS tax, we must not forget that Mac hardware just is out of the league to comparable PC products.
The ipod/itunes products have represented major advances in their respective industries (although not too advanced;; dollar for dollar the iriver (for example) matches better against ipods, and even supports open source codecs like ogg. Itunes has innovations, yes, and usability, but more importantly they have implicit support from content providers and can cobrand their products with the music they sell. Pretty clever, but....how does that help consumers wanting to find new, cheap and independent music?
Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to the NYT in 2003 complaining about the inordinate amount of coverage of itunes/pay musical services...
"If 90-95% of all mp3's out are by unsigned artists who allow downloading and if the only download methods mentioned in your articles are subscriptions with multibillion dollar media companies, what does this say about the journalistic integrity of the New York Times? I know New York Times accepts advertisements from all of these companies, and this seems to be an example of how the Times is compromising its journalistic integrity by ignoring the vast majority of legal ways to obtain mp3's for free. These articles seem designed more to appease advertisers than to provide reliable newsworthy information."
(To be fair, after I sent that letter, NYT did provide light coverage of free and nonDRM download services. But every three months or so NYT does the obligatory roundup of pay music services, and every time it concludes that the best "deal" is to buy DRMed music from Universal/Sony/etc. )
People in the ebook community are eager to use this as an ebook reader. Price is still a little high, but its form factor are better suited to ebooks than the typical PDA.
Movies are a different matter, but from the standpoint of federal law, the public domain does not exist for pre-1972 recordings because they are not covered by federal copyright law. That's why you don't see much movement in multimedia sound recordings to establish a public domain.
These kinds of companies generally need call only once for the damage to be done. I can't remember many occasions where the same company has called several times.
That solution "tell them to put me on the do-not-call list" simply keeps the burden on the consumer, not the telemarketer. Also, how do you do it to recorded calls?
BTW, before the national registry, there was a law requiring all telemarketing firms to send out written copies of their do-not-call policies to consumers upon request. Any individual violations of the request to send written copies of the DNC policy was something you could sue for in small claims court. Most telemarketers had never heard of this rule, and most were never trained about it.
I quote: The copyright terms for sound recordings in most developed countries are reasonable and rational. For example, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most of the European Union countries, the term is 50 years after the year of fixation or of first public release. Thus, in these countries most (if not all) of the recordings from the pre-WW2 era are in the Public Domain, including those recorded in the United States. Other countries have slightly longer terms for sound recordings (e.g., 60 years in India, 70 in a few)--in such countries many to most pre-WW2 U.S. recordings are also Public Domain.
Under 17 U.S.C. 301(c), as recently amended by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (P.L. 105-298), the common-law copyright in these recordings, and state statutes offering copyright-like protection, will not be preempted by federal law until February 15, 2067. The potentially indefinite term of state law protection for these works will therefore end in 2067, 95 years after the recordings first became eligible for federal copyright in 1972.
This statute seems pretty easy to verify.
Well, hey, I have a free moment: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html (c) With respect to sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, any rights or remedies under the common law or statutes of any State shall not be annulled or limited by this title until February 15, 2067. The preemptive provisions of subsection (a) shall apply to any such rights and remedies pertaining to any cause of action arising from undertakings commenced on and after February 15, 2067. Notwithstanding the provisions of section 303, no sound recording fixed before February 15, 1972, shall be subject to copyright under this title before, on, or after February 15, 2067.
Hey, if you know something I don't, please share it. I don't have any special reason to believe this site. On the other hand, I don't have any special reason to disbelieve it. But it seems credible, and I haven't found any sources that contradict it. (And believe me, I have been googling around a bit today).
I've posted this question on two copyright mailing lists to find out opinions from other people who are lawyers. I've also emailed a prominent IP attorney for his thoughts. I think we need clarification about this.
Other than vague complaints, do you have any sources to back your denial up? I would love to believe that your skepticism is on the mark. But I'm afraid you're a little too complacent about what the public domain is entitled to. Neither of us are lawyers, so we should not jump to any conclusions. Only a few days ago I assumed that the 95 year rule was the only rule we need to worry about. Now it appears may be much more complicated.
This may simply mean that copyright claims pre 1972 are going to need to be resolved at the state, not the federal level. That would be a massive bitch, but it's not impossible to do.
(If this is true, I do have to wonder where archive.org is getting their recordings. Was this resolved already at the state level?)
However, the situation may be far more bleak that you or I realize. Public domain advocates were hoping that the US copyright office's forthcoming guidelines to orphaned works would allow works not registered in a new entry would fall into the public domain. However, if the feds don't even have jurisdiction on pre-1972 sound recordings, that would be a major major bitch.
If you want to continue this debate, I suggest you email me at: idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net Or follow my weblog, because I won't give up until I find an answer.
I will find the ultimate clarification to this question fairly soon.
And as for your implications about my motives ("astroturf" etc), I think my written record shows a substantial commitment to copyright reform and public domain and music sharing.
merely because they are governed by state laws doesn't imply they are forbidden for public use. It just means that you have to verify copyright protection differently.
I hope that the Copyright Office's current investigation on orphaned works will set forth some procedure by which these works can be considered orphans if the copyright owners fail to renew them. Otherwise, we can be in a situation where pre-1972 will require an onerous amount of research to prove it's out of copyright.
Truthfully, I don't know if the federal court even has jurisdiction to do this. IANAL, btw.
It seems there are three points here: 1)before 1972, copyright laws were governed by state regulations, not national regulations. 2)Merely because they are not covered by federal copyright laws doesn't imply that they are still owned by someone. The owners may be dead, or the original master unavailable. I don't understand the implications here. 3)It's unclear to me whether you can use a later phonograph/CD of an earlier recording to digitalize. For example, if I had a 1976 phonograph of a 1933 work, and then I decide to make an mp3 of it, it's unclear to me when it will go into the public domain.
Interestingly, they have already resolved the reproduction issue in the area of paintings and public domain in USA.
Accurate photographs of visual artworks lack expressive content and are automatically in the public domain once the painting's copyright has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923). All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.
I can't comment on precedent or how to implement this fairly, but it seems to me that we need some sort of public domain reform that removes protection of later digitally remastered copies when the term on an earlier recording expires. As long as the later digitally remastered copy is simply a faithful reproduction of the earlier work, the later digitally remastered work does not imply some new copyright protections.
As I said, this idea is currently unworkable and would be unfair to companies which in the 1970s and 1980s produced and sold remastered editions. However, at some point we need to ask ourselves why Columbia Records deserves this windfall for simply reproducing an artistic work. If Columbia Records, for example, owns the only pristine copy of Jelly Roll Morton's 1926 jazz songs and releases a remastered edition in 1985, it would be sad to think it won't go into the public domain until 2080 (150 years after the song was first recorded).
Please, somebody, point out some gap in my understanding or a loophole. But otherwise it looks as if it's going to be really hard for sound recordings to go into the public domain.
Slashdot Mirror
I face many of the same issues, with some differences:
I judged the barcode scanner solution to be a tad expensive for my needs.
Also, I store more than half of my books in boxes, so they are not out, so I need to know which box they are located in.
here's my lowtech but efficient solution.
Create a spreadsheet, with fields for
Author, Title, genre, pb/hb, notes, read?, box number, purchase date.
Other things like ISBN, UPC are also helpful, but I didn't want to complicate my life.
There are solutions that let you type in ISBN which will link to metadata, but you're not really saving a lot of time or mental energy.
Create it on your desktop (using excel or open office) and download it to your PDA (using PocketExcel). Then whenever you remove a book from a storage box, you can change the box number, so I know where it is. The PDA element is vital; Nobody's going to go to their PC every time they want to take something.
With a spreadsheet you can sort things easily and quickly view things by criteria.
I do keep a web copy.
Yes, I know there are web applications out there to try, but I don't see the need for a server-side solution if it's always in my pocket. (I do ftp the updated spreadsheet to my website, even saving as HTML on occasion.
I agree that in most circumstances donations don't work.
But I think the right kind of context and solicitation does make a difference. so does the content--how unique is it?
People are more inclined to tip an individual rather than a group or organization. They are more likely to tip creative content than commentary, more likely to tip people if they know all the money is going to the right person. Also, they're more likely to tip if they know that they are receiving a stream of content, not just a single 3 minute video.
Finally, most content creators still don't don't put tipjars on their website, so they just don't know if it works.
At the moment I'm working on a tip-based community site that I think will work--at least better than what we've seen before. Check back with me in 6 months; I might have success stories to brag about!
See my guide to Tipping: A Fast and Easy Guide (which I probably need to update).
Looks like a linux developer will be coming out with a gimp manual soon. I think she based it on a gimp course she taught online .
This sounds like an interesting book, and I'll probably buy it, but looking over the Table of Contents, this book is geared more toward Linux Multimedia Management (PVR, mp3s) than doing actual recording and capturing.
I'm a podcaster trying to figure out the best way to input mike/mixer into my linux laptop, and had the damnest time figuring out.
Mastering the software stuff is easy (relatively speaking). Much harder is figuring out how to get your hardware to work. About the best resource I've found for that is this usb device database . Under each multimedia device are user comments about how they made it work.
Also, a few months ago I reviewed a book, Digital Video Hacks. More about video production than linux, the book nonetheless a few things from a linux perspective. Highly recommended!
On another note, why hasn't anyone published a decent GIMP manual yet? The last book is a good three years old, and a lot has happened to gimp since then. I would love to see a Gimp Hacks book sometime. I could really use that!
I'm struggling with a decision about which laptop to buy. I'm going to be buying one in the next week, although I might be able to wait a little.
I want to run FC 5 on it, although I haven't figured out whether linux kernel is ok. Anyone know?
I face this same issue, and in fact, after 6 months it will probably be the reason I'll be leaving this company very soon (i.e., in weeks).
My company gives somewhat generous training for semester long courses and certain short courses but no time to complete them.
That basically means no conferences or tutorials unless you take the time to take the day off.
I get the impression that bigger companies don't have a problem with training costs (reasonable ones). But they have a problem with granting you time off; a compromise solution would be to be allowed to take a leave of absence during the time you attend training classes. Yes, your paycheck would be lower, but at least it wouldn't interfere with vacation days.
Unfortunately, big companies are pretty much committed to the 40 hour work week, 52 weeks a year, 2 weeks of vacation.
Last year I used 5 of my 15 vacation/personal days on training. It sucks, it really sucks.
Maybe I should rephrase the question:
Has Dell or HP or Lenovo announced release dates for Centrino Duo Notebooks? Or prices?
Ok, pardon me for asking the obvious question:
How much are these laptops going to cost?
When are they going to be available?
I was going to buy a laptop for running Fedora Core at the end of January. I was planning to spend 1000-1200$ Is this out of my league (and time frame)?
Linux/Unix users are a self-selected bunch. You need to decide whether your user persona should be Joe Clueless (who is put in a room and has to perform basic functions in Linux) or the Power User.
The Power User may turn out to be the more typical linux user (from the standpoint of HP/IBM), so the reactions of Joe Clueless may just not be useful. Good to have a specific goal in mind while running this study. Are you trying to help developers understand power users better?
Or trying to help a company make mass market tools?
If dealing with Joe Clueless, be sure to give tasks about how to locate system documentation. I just installed Fedora Core and for the life of me couldn't find it (and I'm a fricking tech writer!)
Also, should you assume that users are dealing with a fully installed system (office/school user)? Or that users normally would need to figure out how to get their hardware to work (home user)? My "usability problems" have usually not been with the interface but just getting hardware to work, and that would not so much a problem if the Office/School made these decisions for me.
I would be very curious btw which of the package managers that users find the easiest to use. Crossdistribution comparison of how individual users used package managers would be really useful information!
This group does a lot of usability analysis http://openusability.org/index.php .
Also, I seem to remember that a few years ago Sun did a usability study of the Linux desktops.
hi, there, why is the parent at 0?
The above link is great. I'll link there again.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3675.txt
The assumption made here is that porn sites would object to being labeled "porn." I don't think that is the case. They would love a way to make it easy for content filters to block access for children. That makes their job easier, not harder.
There is a benefit to self-description, as long as the registering body isn't forced by that business's government to label certain things as porn. It has to be voluntary.
Ok, I see how edge-cases might raise questions, but why not just open the TLD and see what happens?
Judging from the time for the approval process, you would think they were trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. Hey, guys, it's fricking three letters. What's the holdup?
Robert nagle
I am an opensource guy, but even I ended up buying Abby for my mass scanning needs.
Here's what you do: Buy a 5.0 license of Abby Finereader off ebay. You can buy it for about 10$.
Buy the upgrade version of the latest version of Abby Finereader for $150.
It's still $160, but that's still considerably cheaper than paying the new price of $500-600. Abby finereader docs say specifically that the upgrade software will work successfully on ALL prior versions of finereader.
As far as feeding into a database, I'm afraid I can't be any help, but if any software has this functionality, finereader would.
I'm somewhat in agreement with this statement, even though John Dvorak usually overreaches with his generalizations.
Apple products are boutique items. They are products with style and image for people who care about such things (and with the money to pay for it).
In the educational world, Mac still has a dominant influence (where educational discounts abound). I once took an graduate instructional technology course and was amazed to find that all the computer labs we used were Mac based. (That was 4 years ago, when open source was still viewed with suspicion).
I don't like windows, and lots of open source people probably don't either. So by default does that mean we love Macs?
Well, no. For me, I am cost conscious. When talking about the MS tax, we must not forget that Mac hardware just is out of the league to comparable PC products.
The ipod/itunes products have represented major advances in their respective industries (although not too advanced;; dollar for dollar the iriver (for example) matches better against ipods, and even supports open source codecs like ogg. Itunes has innovations, yes, and usability, but more importantly they have implicit support from content providers and can cobrand their products with the music they sell. Pretty clever, but....how does that help consumers wanting to find new, cheap and independent music?
Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to the NYT in 2003 complaining about the inordinate amount of coverage of itunes/pay musical services...
"If 90-95% of all mp3's out are by unsigned artists who allow downloading and if the only download methods mentioned in your articles are subscriptions with multibillion dollar media companies, what does this say about the journalistic integrity of the New York Times? I know New York Times accepts advertisements from all of these companies, and this seems to be an example of how the Times is compromising its journalistic integrity by ignoring the vast majority of legal ways to obtain mp3's for free. These articles seem designed more to appease advertisers than to provide reliable newsworthy information."
(To be fair, after I sent that letter, NYT did provide light coverage of free and nonDRM download services. But every three months or so NYT does the obligatory roundup of pay music services, and every time it concludes that the best "deal" is to buy DRMed music from Universal/Sony/etc. )
People in the ebook community are eager to use this as an ebook reader. Price is still a little high, but its form factor are better suited to ebooks than the typical PDA.
Unfortunately, the price point is still high.
Sorry, this pre-1972 preemption by state law applies to AUDIO recordings, not VIDEO recordings.
i n_films
See also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Public_doma
Movies are a different matter, but from the standpoint of federal law, the public domain does not exist for pre-1972 recordings because they are not covered by federal copyright law. That's why you don't see much movement in multimedia sound recordings to establish a public domain.
- 01Nov2003.html
Shocking, eh?
Here's a project to try to work around this restriction
http://www.projectgramophone.org/TeleRead-Article
Recently, there's been social pressures on uncommercial works to be released into something called the public domain.
These kinds of companies generally need call only once for the damage to be done. I can't remember many occasions where the same company has called several times.
That solution "tell them to put me on the do-not-call list" simply keeps the burden on the consumer, not the telemarketer. Also, how do you do it to recorded calls?
BTW, before the national registry, there was a law requiring all telemarketing firms to send out written copies of their do-not-call policies to consumers upon request. Any individual violations of the request to send written copies of the DNC policy was something you could sue for in small claims court. Most telemarketers had never heard of this rule, and most were never trained about it.
I heard Joel spolsky talk about this book on itconversations.com
The first thing I had to ask myself is:
Why doesn't somebody just list the URL's of all the articles somewhere so I can download everything?
If any of you know these essays, how about url's?
I searched for my alias/weblog idiotprogrammer.
Number one search result is hairlossworld.info
Way to go google!
I haven't used Cinelerra, although I played around with the interface a little.
I always found its system requirements to be extremely steep, even for a NLE (which are usually pretty steep to begin with).
I'd prefer something that demands a little less memory and firepower.
here's the best source of information I've been able to find so far:
t ml#106768614604144566
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2003_10_26_archive.h
I quote:
The copyright terms for sound recordings in most developed countries
are reasonable and rational. For example, in Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and most of the European Union countries, the term is 50 years
after the year of fixation or of first public release. Thus, in these
countries most (if not all) of the recordings from the pre-WW2 era are
in the Public Domain, including those recorded in the United States.
Other countries have slightly longer terms for sound recordings (e.g.,
60 years in India, 70 in a few)--in such countries many to most pre-WW2
U.S. recordings are also Public Domain.
From one of the articles:
Under 17 U.S.C. 301(c), as recently amended by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (P.L. 105-298), the common-law copyright in these recordings, and state statutes offering copyright-like protection, will not be preempted by federal law until February 15, 2067. The potentially indefinite term of state law protection for these works will therefore end in 2067, 95 years after the recordings first became eligible for federal copyright in 1972.
This statute seems pretty easy to verify.
Well, hey, I have a free moment:
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap3.html
(c) With respect to sound recordings fixed before February 15, 1972, any rights or remedies under the common law or statutes of any State shall not be annulled or limited by this title until February 15, 2067. The preemptive provisions of subsection (a) shall apply to any such rights and remedies pertaining to any cause of action arising from undertakings commenced on and after February 15, 2067. Notwithstanding the provisions of section 303, no sound recording fixed before February 15, 1972, shall be subject to copyright under this title before, on, or after February 15, 2067.
Hey, if you know something I don't, please share it. I don't have any special reason to believe this site. On the other hand, I don't have any special reason to disbelieve it. But it seems credible, and I haven't found any sources that contradict it. (And believe me, I have been googling around a bit today).
I've posted this question on two copyright mailing lists to find out opinions from other people who are lawyers. I've also emailed a prominent IP attorney for his thoughts. I think we need clarification about this.
Other than vague complaints, do you have any sources to back your denial up? I would love to believe that your skepticism is on the mark. But I'm afraid you're a little too complacent about what the public domain is entitled to. Neither of us are lawyers, so we should not jump to any conclusions. Only a few days ago I assumed that the 95 year rule was the only rule we need to worry about. Now it appears may be much more complicated.
This may simply mean that copyright claims pre 1972 are going to need to be resolved at the state, not the federal level. That would be a massive bitch, but it's not impossible to do.
(If this is true, I do have to wonder where archive.org is getting their recordings. Was this resolved already at the state level?)
However, the situation may be far more bleak that you or I realize. Public domain advocates were hoping that the US copyright office's forthcoming guidelines to orphaned works would allow works not registered in a new entry would fall into the public domain. However, if the feds don't even have jurisdiction on pre-1972 sound recordings, that would be a major major bitch.
If you want to continue this debate, I suggest you email me at:
idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net Or follow my weblog, because I won't give up until I find an answer.
I will find the ultimate clarification to this question fairly soon.
And as for your implications about my motives ("astroturf" etc), I think my written record shows a substantial commitment to copyright reform and public domain and music sharing.
Robert Nagle
I should add:
merely because they are governed by state laws doesn't imply they are forbidden for public use. It just means that you have to verify copyright protection differently.
I hope that the Copyright Office's current investigation on orphaned works will set forth some procedure by which these works can be considered orphans if the copyright owners fail to renew them. Otherwise, we can be in a situation where pre-1972 will require an onerous amount of research to prove it's out of copyright.
Truthfully, I don't know if the federal court even has jurisdiction to do this. IANAL, btw.
Robert Nagle
That's what I first thought, but then I read some more. Guess what. It's basically correct.
h tm0 7.html
a mmer/?p=83398276
See also:
http://www22.brinkster.com/paradio/pages/pre1972.
http://www.legallanguage.com/lawarticles/Clarida0
It seems there are three points here:
1)before 1972, copyright laws were governed by state regulations, not
national regulations.
2)Merely because they are not covered by federal copyright laws
doesn't imply that they are still owned by someone. The owners may be
dead, or the original master unavailable. I don't understand the
implications here.
3)It's unclear to me whether you can use a later phonograph/CD of an
earlier recording to digitalize. For example, if I had a 1976
phonograph of a 1933 work, and then I decide to make an mp3 of it,
it's unclear to me when it will go into the public domain.
Interestingly, they have already resolved the reproduction issue in
the area of paintings and public domain in USA.
After doing web research, I wrote here
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogr
Accurate photographs of visual artworks lack expressive content and
are automatically in the public domain once the painting's
copyright
has expired (which it has in the US if it was published before 1923).
All other copyright notices can safely be ignored.
I can't comment on precedent or how to implement this fairly, but it
seems to me that we need some sort of public domain reform that
removes protection of later digitally remastered copies when the term
on an earlier recording expires. As long as the later digitally
remastered copy is simply a faithful reproduction of the earlier work,
the later digitally remastered work does not imply some new copyright
protections.
As I said, this idea is currently unworkable and would be unfair to
companies which in the 1970s and 1980s produced and sold remastered
editions. However, at some point we need to ask ourselves why
Columbia Records deserves this windfall for simply reproducing an
artistic work. If Columbia Records, for example, owns the only
pristine copy of Jelly Roll Morton's 1926 jazz songs and releases a
remastered edition in 1985, it would be sad to think it won't go into
the public domain until 2080 (150 years after the song was first
recorded).
Please, somebody, point out some gap in my understanding or a
loophole. But otherwise it looks as if it's going to be really hard
for sound recordings to go into the public domain.