December 24, 2012 in Public Domain, Public Domain Review
To celebrate the season our Public Domain Review project has put together a digest of festive public domain images and texts – including a selection of Christmas diary entries, a pictorial history of Santa Claus, and a beautiful book of snowflake illustrations.
From all of us at the Open Knowledge Foundation, we wish you festive cheer, a peaceful break and a happy 2013.
by Adam Green
December 12, 2012 in Featured, Public Domain
This is a cross-post from The Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
Top Row (left to right): Stefan Zweig; Bronislaw Malinowski; Francis Younghusband
Middle Row (left to right): L.M. Montgomery; A.E.Waite; Edith Stein; Robert Musil
Bottom Row (left to right): Grant Wood; Bruno Schulz; Franz Boas; Eric Ravilious
Pictured above is The Public Domain Review‘s top pick of artists and writers whose works will, on 1st January 2013, be entering the public domain in those countries with a ‘life plus 70 years’ copyright term (e.g. most European Union members, Brazil, Israel, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, etc.). An eclectic bunch have assembled for our graduation photo – including the two founding fathers of anthropology from different sides of the Atlantic, an Army officer turned “premature hippy”, the painter of one of America’s most iconic images, and a canonised Catholic saint who studied with Martin Heidegger. The unifying factor bringing them all together is that all died in the year of 1942, many sadly as a result, directly or indirectly, of the Second World War.
Below is a little bit more about each of their lives (with each name linking through to their respective Wikipedia pages, if you would like to find out more). In the new year, when their works shall enter the public domain, links to works shall be included on the original Public Domain Review post.
BRUNO SCHULZ
Bruno Schulz (July 12th 1892 – November 19th 1942) was a Polish writer and artist most famous for his collection of short stories The Street of Crocodiles (1934) which centre on a merchant family from a small town in the Galician region. The book, with its inventive and unique use of metaphor, helped establish Schulz’s reputation as one of the great Polish-language writers of the 20th century. He led a relatvively solitary life, teaching drawing in a Polish school in his hometown of Drohobych from 1924 to 1941. Following the Nazi invasion during the Second World War, being Jewish, Schulz was forced to live in a ghetto but for a while was protected by a Nazi Gestapo officer named Felix Landau who was an admirer of his artwork. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau’s home in Drohobych. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was walking home through the “Aryan quarter” with a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther, a rival of Landau’s. Subsequently, Schulz’s mural was painted over and forgotten until its discovery by a German documentary film crew in 2001. At the time of his death Schulz was working on a novel called The Messiah which has subsequently been lost.
Robert Musil (November 6th 1880 – April 15th 1942) was an Austrian writer whose huge tome of an unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. The story, set in Vienna on the eve of World War 1, deals with the moral and intellectual decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire through the eyes of the book’s hero Ulrich, a former mathematician who has failed to engage with the world around him in such a manner that would allow him to possess ‘qualities’. In 1932 Musil’s contemporary Thomas Mann (who had set up the Robert Musil Society that same year), when asked to name an eminent contemporary novel, cited exclusively The Man Without Qualities. Despite this support from high literary circles Musil’s work was far from gaining mass popular appeal in his lifetime. Indeed after his death from a stroke in 1942, incurred while he was on the run from the Nazis with his Jewish wife Martha, his work was largely forgotten in the German speaking world and it was not until the 1950s that it began to garner attention once more. The first translation of The Man Without Qualities in English was published in 1953, 1954 and 1960 – with an updated translation, included previously unpublished drafts, was published in 1995. More recently the philosophical aspect of his writing has come under the spotlight with the philosophy journal The Monist seeking submissions for a special issue on “The Philosophy of Robert Musil” to be published in January 2014.
FRANZ BOAS
Franz Boas (July 9th 1858 – December 21st 1942) was a German-American pioneer of modern anthropology and has been called the “Father of American Anthropology”. With his emphasis on research first, followed later by generalizations, a methodology patterned after the natural sciences, Boas went against the British school of “armchair anthropologists” who tended to only do fieldwork to prove or disprove grand generalisations already made. In the early 20th century he would establish anthropology as a discipline in its own right, one orientated around two basic questions: “Why are the tribes and nations of the world different, and how have the present differences developed?” He was pivotal in moving the study of cultures away from racist assumptions surrounding forming a hierarchy of “civilizations” toward a more relativistic approach. In his 1963 book, Race: The History of an Idea in America, Thomas Gossett wrote that “It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.” He died of a stroke at the Columbia University Faculty Club on December 21, 1942 in the arms of fellow anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Bronisław Malinowski (April 7th 1884 – 16 May 1942), a Polish born British-naturalised citizen, was one of the most important anthropologists of the 20th-century. In 1910, at the age of 26 he moved to England to study exchange and economics at the London School of Economics, analysing patterns of exchange in aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914 he made an expedition to the South Pacific region but was forbidden to return to England as, after the outbreak of WW1, he was considered an enemy of the British commonwealth. The Australian government did, however, allow him to study the locals in Melanesia where he conducted research on the Trobriand people of Papua – the foundations for his groundbreaking ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific which he would write in after his return to England following the end of the war. Finally published in 1922 the work which established him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time. The ethnography described the complex institution of the Kula ring, and became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange. Like his American counterpart Franz Boas, Malinowksi is credited with being the first to bring anthropology “off the verandah”, that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasized the importance of detailed participant observation and argued that anthropologists must have daily contact with their informants if they are to adequately record the “imponderabilia of everyday life” that are so important to understanding a different culture. He emphasised that the goal of the anthropologist, or ethnographer, is “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”.
Grant Wood (February 13th 1891 – February 12th 1942) was an American painter from Iowa best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. His most famous work is American Gothic, considered by many to be one of the iconic images of the 20th century. The painting depicts a stern but calm man holding a pitchfork (modelled by Wood’s dentist) and a younger woman, the man’s spinster daughter (modelled by Wood’s sister), stood in front of an unusual house – the classic wooden American farmhouse but with an arch-shaped window reminiscent of a more European Gothic architecture. The painting became popular after it won third prize at big competition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the guise of many different interpretations the painting went on to capture the imagination of the American public, at the time going through the Great Depression.
Stefan Zweig (November 28th 1881 – February 22th 1942) was an Austrian writer who at the height of his literary career in the 1920s and 30s could lay claim to being one the most famous writers in the world – extremely popular in the USA, South America and Europe, though not so much in Britain. He mixed with the intelligentsia of his time, befriending Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and being a particular favourite of the composer Richard Strauss, for he who’s The Silent Woman he wrote the libretto. Zweig’s style as a writer was simple and easy – his plaudits emphasising its humanity and grace, his critics (mostly in Britain) seeing it as effected and pedestrian. He is best known for his novellas such as, The Royal Game, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman); his novels such as, Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings, and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl and his biographies, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles and also posthumously published, Balzac. Being Jewish he spent the 30s in exile from the encroachment of the Nazi regime, first to England and then in 1940 to America, a flight which he recounts in his autobiographical The World of Yesterday. On February 23rd 1942 he and his wife were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the Brazilian city of Petrópolis, holding hands. In despair over the destruction of his beloved Europe he and his wife had taken their own lives. In a suicide note he wrote: “I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth. I send greetings to all of my friends: May they live to see the dawn after this long night. I, who am most impatient, go before them.”
Edith Stein (October 12th 1891 – August 9th 1942) – also known as Saint Teresia Benedicta of the Cross, informally also known as Saint Edith Stein – was a German Roman Catholic philosopher and nun, regarded as a martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. She was born into an observant Jewish family but by her teenage years was an atheist. At the age of 24, after receiving a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Göttingen with a dissertation under Edmund Husserl, On the Problem of Empathy, she worked as an assistant to Husserl alongside a certain Martin Heidegger. During her summer holidays in Bergzabern in 1921 Stein read the autobiography of the mystic St. Teresa of Ávila and she was subsequently converted to Roman Catholicsm. She became baptised in 1922 and gave up her assistantship with Husserl to teach at the Dominican nuns’ schools school in Speyer from 1923 to 1931. While there, she translated Thomas Aquinas’ De Veritate. In 1932 she became a lecturer at the Institute for Pedagogy at Münster, but antisemitic legislation passed by the Nazi government forced her to resign the post in 1933. She went to a monastery in Cologne where she wrote Finite and Eternal Being which tries to combine the philosophies of Aquinas and Husserl. To avoid the growing Nazi threat she was transferred to the Netherlands where she wrote The Science of the Cross: Studies on John of the Cross. In 1942, following a new decree to round up all previously spared converts from Judaism, Stein and her sister Rosa, also a convert, were captured and shipped to the Auschwitz concentration camp where they are presumed to have been gassed on August 9th 1942.
A.E.WAITE
Arthur Edward Waite (October 2nd 1857 – May 19th 1942) was a scholarly mystic who wrote extensively on occult and esoteric matters, and co-created the widely used Rider-Waite Tarot deck. He was a prolific author with many of his works being well received in academic circles. He wrote occult texts on subjects including divination, esotericism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, and ceremonial magic, Kabbalism and alchemy; he also translated and reissued several important mystical and alchemical works. A number of his volumes remain in print, The Book of Ceremonial Magic (1911), The Holy Kabbalah (1929), A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1921), and his edited translation of Eliphas Levi’s Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual (1896). Waite is perhaps best known as the co-creator of the popular and widely used Rider-Waite Tarot deck and author of its companion volume, the Key to the Tarot, republished in expanded form the following year, 1911, as the Pictorial Key to the Tarot, a guide to Tarot reading.
Sir Francis Younghusband (May 31st 1863 – July 31st 1942) was a British Army officer, explorer, and spiritual writer. He is remembered chiefly for his travels in the Far East and Central Asia; especially the 1904 British expedition to Tibet, which he led, during which a massacre of Tibetans occurred. It was on the retreat from this disastrous mission while in the moutains that he had a mystical revelation which suffused him with “love for the whole world” and convinced him that “men at heart are divine.” This conviction led him to regret his invasion of Tibet, and eventually, in 1936, to found the World Congress of Faiths (in imitation of the World Parliament of Religions). He went on to pen a number of fantasictally titled books including Mother World (in Travail for the Christ that is to be) (1924), and Life in the Stars: An Exposition of the View that on some Planets of some Stars exist Beings higher than Ourselves, and on one a World-Leader, the Supreme Embodiment of the Eternal Spirit which animates the Whole (1927). This last was particularly admired by Lord Baden-Powell, the Boy Scouts founder. Key concepts include what would come to be known as the Gaia hypothesis, pantheism, and a Christlike “world leader” living on the planet “Altair” (or “Stellair”), who radiates spiritual guidance by means of telepathy. Younghusband also played a key role in the first ascent of Mount Everest, being elected President of the Royal Geographical Society in 1919, and two years later became Chairman of the Mount Everest Committee which was set up to coordinate the initial 1921 British Reconnaissance Expedition to Mount Everest.
ERIC RAVILIOUS
Eric Ravilious (July 22nd 1903 – September 2nd 1942) was an English artist from the county of Sussex reknowned for his watercolours of the South Downs. Apart from a brief experimentation with oils in 1930 – inspired by the works of Johan Zoffany – Ravilious painted almost entirely in watercolour. He was especially inspired by the landscape of the South Downs around Beddingham. He frequently returned to Furlongs, the cottage of Peggy Angus, where some of his most famous works were carried out, such as Tea at Furlongs. As well as watercolours, Ravillous engraved more than four hundred illustrations and drew over forty lithographic designs for books and publications during his lifetime for large publishing houses such as Jonathan Cape, Lanston Corporation and smaller, less commercial publishers, such as the Golden Cockerel Press, the Curwen Press and the Cresset Press. His woodcut of two Victorian gentlemen playing cricket has appeared on the front cover of every edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack since 1938. In 1936 Ravilious was invited by Wedgwood to make designs for ceramics. His work for them included a commemorative mug to mark the coronation of Edward VIII, the “Boat Race” bowl and the “Garden” series of plates, in which each size of plate showed a diffferent plant. In 1940 Ravilious was appointed an official war artist, with the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines. During that year he painted at the Royal Naval Barracks at Chatham and Sheerness; sailed to Norway and the Arctic on board HMS Highlander, which was carrying out escort duties, and painted submarines at Gosport and coastal defences at Newlyn. In August of 1942 he was transferred to Iceland, where he was killed accompanying a Royal Air Force air sea rescue mission that failed to return to its base.
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30th 1874 – April 24th 1942), called “Maud” by family and friends and publicly known as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. The central character, Anne, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. Mark Twain said Montgomery’s Anne was “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice”. She went on to publish 20 novels (8 of which were in the Anne of Green Gables series) as well as more than 500 short stories, an autobiography, and a book of poetry. She was honoured by being the first female in Canada to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and by being invested in the Order of the British Empire in 1935. After struggling with looking after her mentally ill husband for many years in their home “Journey’s End” in Ontario, she died in 1942 in a suspected suicide.
And a few others that didn’t make it to the class photo….
Flinders-Petrie
Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson (Xavier Mayne)
Dorothy Wall
Charles Henry Chomley
Caroline Frances Eleanor Spurgeon
Violet Hunt
Ernest Bramah
Roberto Arlt
Walter Sickert
To learn more about Public Domain Day visit publicdomainday.org. Here you can discover what celebratory events might be planned in your area and peruse an in-progress ‘public domain in 2013′ list. If there are some names you would like to add then please do so on this spreadsheet.
You can also keep up to date with issues involving the public domain on the OKFN’s “public domain discuss list” – sign up here.
For more names whose works will be going into the public domain in 2013 see the Wikipedia page on 1942 deaths and also a list being compiled here. Adrian Pohl has also put together this excellent list.
We also came across this great public domain advent calendar project (in French).
See the “Class of 2013″ post in all its original full page width glory over at The Public Domain Review.
November 22, 2012 in COMMUNIA, Open Access, Policy, Public Domain, WG EU Open Data
Horizon 2020 is the EU’s proposed new programme for research and innovation, which would run from 2014 to 2020. The programme would create an “Innovation Union” with a budget of €80million, bringing together current research and innovation funding available through a number of sources. On 28th November MEPs are set to vote on the proposals, which involve 6 different pieces of legislation.
It is clear that the EC’s aim of “breaking down barriers to create a genuine single market for knowledge, research and innovation” can only be met through bold steps towards open access.
The COMMUNIA Association (of which the OKFN is a member) has published a policy paper entitled “Position on EC Horizon 2020 Open Access policy” in the run-up to this month’s vote, which will be circulated among MEPs. The paper is based around two of the policy recommendations produced by members of the network. The core principles are that:
Based on this, COMMUNIA recommends a clear tripartite Open Access policy to be included in the Horizon 2020 plans:
We hope that MEPs will take note of these recommendations when it comes to voting on the proposals next week. The full policy paper is available as a PDF, and on the Communia website.
If you’re interested in discussing open access policy at the Open Knowledge Foundation, you can join our open-access mailing list.
November 21, 2012 in Featured, Open GLAM, Public Domain, Public Domain Works, WG Public Domain
This blog post is based on Christina’s paper, “The Myth of European Term Harmonisation – 27 Public Domains for 27 Member States”. This is a shortened version of the post – the full version is available on the OpenGLAM blog.
Copyright is supposed to be a temporary right: once it has expired, works automatically fall into the public domain for free public access and enjoyment. The importance of this arrangement is especially essential today, in view of the opportunities that internet technologies offer for the online distribution and reuse of out-of-copyright works: electronic repositories of culture such as Europeana, Project Gutenberg or Google Books are currently attempting to digitise and make available online out-of-copyright works, while modern participatory culture means that even individual users can more easily share old works or incorporate them into their own creative output.
Public domain calculators are technical tools to help determine when a work falls into the public domain. The idea is to provide a measure of legal certainty to cultural heritage institutions, as well as the average user, that they are not inadvertently infringing creators’ copyright, allowing them to confidently work with material for which copyright has expired and thus helping to sustain a vibrant, up-to-date and functional public domain.
As has been mentioned before on this blog, as part of the EuropeanaConnect project, Kennisland and the Institute for Information Law (IViR) of the University of Amsterdam set about creating one such calculator, concentrating on the term of protection rules in Europe. With the final tool now ready and available online, below we shall lay out some of the main conclusions drawn during their building process on the intricacies and limitations of European term of protection rules.
When does a work enter the public domain? In EU Member States, the answer to this question should at least be “at the same time” – the Term Directive, one of the first European copyright directives adopted, was intended to leave no room for national deviations from the harmonised European norm.
Nevertheless, careful examination of the Directive’s rules reveals that it has not entirely succeeded in this objective. The way in which the rules laid down by the Directive have been incorporated into national law has differed from Member State to Member State, leading to divergences of up to fifty years for particular works! As a result, the composition of the public domain differs from country to country, as works fall out of copyright on different dates in different EU Member States: the European public domain contracts and expands along the pattern set by national legislative quirks.
The construction of the Public Domain Calculators helped identify the following main sources of legislative variability in this area:
Inconsistency in substantive legal terms is rife, leading inevitably to inconsistency in term calculations. A work may qualify as a work of joint authorship in one jurisdiction, a collective work in another and as a collection of two or more separate works in a third, producing totally different periods of protection. The European Commission has addressed this problem with the recent amendment of the Term Directive in September 2011 for co-authored musical works, but has left the problem in other areas looming.
The next problem is the array of explicit exceptions within the Term Directive. These occur in three areas: transitional provisions preserving longer terms of protection already running in a Member State (of which there are plenty); moral rights, an area generally left untouched by European legislation; and related rights over subject matter originating from outside the EU.
The Term Directive limits itself to the related rights of performers, producers of phonograms, broadcasting organisations and producers of first fixations of films. But Member States are allowed to introduce or maintain other related rights whose term will be determined exclusively by national law.
A variety of such rights can be found across the EU, from non-original photographs (Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden) to the typographical arrangement of a published edition (Greece, Ireland, Spain, UK), producing a maze of different rights each with its own term of protection.
Finally, divergences between Member State rules might simply result from the incorrect implementation of the Term Directive. Although this is obviously a risk run with any harmonising attempt, the complicated calculations, hierarchy of rules and transitional provisions of the Term Directive do not lend themselves to smooth transposition.
The calculation of the term of protection ought to be a straightforward exercise that any copyright layperson (or at least those with enough copyright knowledge to be able to properly identify the applicable rights) should be able to confidently undertake. Yet this is far from the case.
This effect was illustrated in the Public Domain Calculators by the need for separate electronic tools, giving on occasion very different results, for each of the 30 jurisdictions covered, including the 27, ostensibly harmonised, EU Member States. This effectively illustrates the way in which the incomplete harmonisation of the term of protection increases the complexity of the calculation process in Europe x27! The Calculators are as a result accompanied by a broad disclaimer, explaining that they cannot replace the case-by-case assessment by a legal expert, while it is also for the above reasons that the very concept of automated calculation is warily approached by copyright experts.
But the problem lies not with the concept of electronic term of protection calculation in itself, but with outdated, badly harmonised and obscure rules that fail to live up to the requirements of the internet era, thus hampering end-users and cultural heritage organisations from taking full avail of the new opportunities now technically available. Certainly, the full harmonisation of European rules on the term of protection would not do away with the difficulties created by the current, particularly convoluted, calculation process – but it would go a very long way towards simplifying the requirements for rights clearance across the EU by replacing 27 sets of complicated rules with only one.
Readers are invited to give feedback on the Public Domain Calculator on the pd-discuss list.
October 8, 2012 in External, Public Domain
New research shows that the traditional arguments for copyright extension are as flawed as we always suspected.
Copyright is generally defended in terms of the stimulus it gives to creative production: what motivation would anyone have to do anything ever if they don’t get decades of ownership afterwards? But then how do you justify the continual increase in copyright terms which has taken place over the last century, and applies retrospectively to works made in the past? Extending their copyright protection can’t stimulate their production – they’ve already been made!
Three main arguments are advanced: that works which fall into the public domain will be under-exploited, because there will be no incentive to produce new works; that they will be over-exploited, with too many people using them and therefore reducing their worth; and that they will be tarnished, by being reproduced in low quality ways or associated with undesirable things.
All three arguments, it seems, are nonsense. A new research paper, “Do Bad Things Happen When Works Enter the Public Domain?:Empirical Tests of Copyright Term Extension”, has taken the example of audiobook reproductions of public domain and copyrighted works, and investigated the three potential types of damage that are thought to occur in the transition to public domain status::
Our data suggest that the three principal arguments in favor of copyright term extension—under-exploitation, over-exploitation, and tarnishment—are unsupported There seems little reason to fear that once works fall into the public domain, their value will be substantially reduced based on the amount or manner in which they are used. We do not claim that there are no costs to movement into the public domain, but, on the opposite side of the ledger, there are considerable benefits to users of open access to public domain works. We suspect that these benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.
Our data provide almost no support for the arguments made by proponents of copyright term extension that once works fall into the public domain they will be produced in poor quality versions that will undermine their cultural or economic value. Our data indicate no statistically significant difference, for example, between the listeners’ judgments of the quality of professional audiobook readers of copyrighted and public domain texts.
It’s getting to be that time again, when Mickey Mouse gets closer and closer to the public domain — and you know what that means: a debate about copyright term extension. As you know, whenever Mickey is getting close to the public domain, Congress swoops in, at the behest of Disney, and extends copyright.
The results are clear. The so-called “harm” of works falling into the public domain does not appear to exist. Works are still offered (in fact, they’re more available to the public, which we’re told is what copyright is supposed to do), there are still quality works offered, and the works are not overly exploited. So what argument is there left to extend copyright?
May 28, 2012 in Public Domain, Public Domain Review, WG Public Domain
‘All Things Come To Those Who Wait’ is an older version of the more common proverb ‘Good Things Come To Those Who Wait’.
When the poor fellow waiting in the picture above was published, copyright in printed matter in the UK expired at the same time the author did. By 1842 copyright outlived the author by 7 years. By 1911 it became 50 years post mortem. Now copyright lasts for 70 years after the author’s demise. Admittedly rather a long wait.
At least our very patient friend above has time on his side. And at least he can console himself with the fact that – if he can wait long enough – everything will enter the public domain eventually 1.
If, like us, you probably won’t be able to wait that long, you can catch a glimpse of a bright, free, copyright-unencumbered world at The Public Domain Review. If you like what you see then you can sign up for free articles and collections to your inbox, and follow it on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.
If you can think of somewhere nice to put it, the graphic is on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike license.
With the strange and wonderful exception of Peter Pan, that incorrigible rascal who has fallen out of copyright, but nevertheless keeps compelling everyone – except the Disney Corporation – to give to Great Ormond Street Hospital for children. ↩
May 10, 2012 in External, Open Content, Open Textbooks, Public Domain
If you are at all familiar with the open textbook world, you’ve likely heard of the startup called Boundless Learning. Leveraging information in the public domain, as well as dipping into the enormous stockpile of learning that is Open Education Resources, Boundless Learning has a created a tool that hopes to eventually replace the traditional textbook model.
Just like “open” anything, however, Boundless Learning has not gone without its fair share of trouble from vested industry interests. Recently, the textbook publishing giant Pearson, along with MacMillan and Cengage, filed a complaint alleging copyright infringement. Even though Boundless Learning culls its information from material available to the public through Creative Commons licensing, the publishers allege that “Defendant [Boundless Learning] exploits and profits from Plaintiffs’ successful textbooks by making and distributing the free “Boundless Version” of those books in the hopes that it can later monetize the user base that it draws to its Boundless Web site. In short, to build its business on Plaintiff’s intellectual property rights.”
Boundless Learning, on the other hand, claims that the accusations are patently false. The startup states that it only uses information already in the public domain, and said in a Boston.com article, “you can’t copyright facts and ideas. When you look at educational information, it’s primarily facts and ideas.” Boundless Learning will soon send out a legal response, and has expressed disappointment that the textbook publishers didn’t communicate with Boundless Learning amicably before resorting to litigation.
So what does this mean for the open textbook movement? Can we expect more lawsuits of this nature against innovative businesses? For one, Boundless Learning has truly launched a paradigm-shifting product. Most open textbooks are presented to students in PDF format using e-readers and other devices. However, Boundless Learning has extended beyond just digitizing traditional books by offering more. Their content is distinctly interactive, and students may build upon Boundless Learning material in a way that closely resembles both Facebook and Wikipedia. You can study along with other students, help each other in the learning process, and do it all online. For free.
Lawsuits of this sort aren’t anything new, and it’s important for those of us who are believers in the open textbook movement that we understand what we’ll have to fight against to live in a more open society. While Boundless Learning may have been careless in copying the format of copyrighted textbooks, down to the pagination, it does offer a platform that is new, that goes beyond mere open versions of closed textbooks. It’s with this innovative spirit that we can effectively, legally, and affordably, make information available to all. The world is not yet open, but we can get it there.
This guest post is contributed by Katheryn Rivas, who writes on the topics of online university. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: katherynrivas87@gmail.com.
April 24, 2012 in COMMUNIA, External, Open Access, Public Domain, WG Humanities, WG Public Domain
Open Book Publishers is the first UK academic publisher to have made all its books freely available
online, publishing peer-reviewed research in subjects across the Humanities and Social Sciences. They are “committed to the idea that high quality scholarship should be available to readers everywhere regardless of their income or access to university libraries”.
This week sees their most recent release hit the virtual shelves, The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture, edited by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, co-founder and chair of Communia, and Juan Carlos De Martin. From the Press Release:
This book brings together essays by academics, librarians, entrepreneurs, activists and policy makers, who were all part of the EU-funded Communia project. Together the authors argue that the Public Domain — that is, the informational works owned by all of us, be that literature, music, the output of scientific research, educational material or public sector information — is fundamental to a healthy society.
The essays range from more theoretical papers on the history of copyright and the Public Domain, to practical examples and case studies of recent projects that have engaged with the principles of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the current debate about copyright and the Internet. It opens up discussion and offers practical solutions to the difficult question of the regulation of culture at the digital age.
Open Book Publishers argue that “One of the fundamental aims of academia is to spark thought and debate in both the academic and wider community. Open Access helps spread educational materials to everyone, globally, not just to those who can afford it. A large proportion of scholarly research is publicly funded, so it seems only reasonable that its results be made available as widely as possible.”
The free PDF edition of this title was made possible by generous funding received from the European Union (eContentplus framework project ECP-2006-PSI-610001). Get your copy here, and have a browse of their other titles at www.openbookpublishers.com.
March 9, 2012 in External, Featured Project, Open GLAM, Public Domain, WG Cultural Heritage, WG Public Domain
This is a shortened version of a post from the OpenGLAM blog, where you can keep up-to-date with goings-on around open data in heritage and arts.
Historical plaques by their very nature are objects in the public domain, so creating a platform to collect them with the public – and for the collected data to be available for the broadest possible public use – seemed an obvious starting point. That’s why Open Plaques data has been open data from birth.
Those little historical markers dotted around buildings and other places we see everyday are physical portholes through time, connecting past and present. The caveat being, our experience of them is largely fleeting, easily forgotten. Even in the UK a myriad of bodies large and small put up plaques, and the digital data provided is mixed, often non-existent. But what if each encapsulated story was instantly accessible, its backstory and context linked? How would our experience of places change if we could knit plaques in the material world together with the fabric of the web?
‘We’ is the operative word with Open Plaques, a project born out of two basic thoughts: how could you feasibly tackle collecting all these plaques together and what could be done with the tapestry of stories then woven if the data was open?
What the journey so far has made clear to us is this: open data is great, but just being open isn’t enough. You need to be either (a) vitally useful enough to attract resources to pour into your service, or (b) interesting enough to attract sufficient people who care about what you’re doing and enjoy helping. We fall into the latter category; a plaque map doesn’t save lives or make the trains run on time after all. But without one or both of these drivers it’s just inert data, unlikely to grow and going nowhere. And even if you have (a) or (b), it’s still (c) a lot of hard work. But being a Type-B open data project, we’re also highly motivated
Our community of contributors, collaborators and supporters is an enthusiastic mish mash of people who like collecting plaques, playing with cultural data, finding out about history, supporting heritage and tourism, curating archives, exploring their area and further afield, and learning by having fun whilst discovering and mapping these noteworthy objects that dot the landscape. Having said that, the data we’re gathering is far from trivial and tells us huge amounts about our surroundings and past and present-day world. It’s a goldmine of location-based history.
Apps built from our data so far include two iPhone apps from Radical Robot and London Smartphone and another forthcoming from PlaceWhisper, a Kindle ebook ‘London’s Blue Plaques In a Nutshell’, and an optical character recognition (OCR) challenge. Our data has also been used at History HackDay 2011, and loaded into a TomTom satnav. A further new app is in the pipeline. Read more about the apps here.
These are a mixture of free and paid for services but as the core database grows, especially beyond the UK, so does the potential for other interesting re-uses. Recently Ireland has seen an increase in listings – with two sizeable datasets contributed by Limerick Civic Trust and Waterford City Council, and purely community-driven growth in Dublin. Other big clusters already exist in our New York and Toronto listings. These are historic cities that could benefit from savvy re-use of the data, whether by tourism bodies, cultural organisations or local entrepreneurs. We are here to facilitate them.
At the end of February, the histonauts2 pervasive gaming event demonstrated the scope for re-using and contributing data creatively. Held as part of Manchester Histories Festival, the organisers simply referred to our online list of unphotographed Manchester plaques, and set daily missions for people taking part in their digital treasure hunt around the city to find and photograph the plaques. They posted the resulting pictures on Flickr with CC licenses, and added the relevant machine tags. The upshot being the players augmented our data whilst tracking history in the real world, and 20% of the unphotographed plaques locally got an image!
The data is there if you want to look at it, published under ‘Public Domain Dedication and License 1.0′. Or you can help us build it – add new plaque listings and photos if you find any, or contact us about contributing to the web development. We’re a museum of the street, and we’d love to get more organisations and individuals contributing to the collection.
So feel free to unlock your inner plaquetivist!
February 15, 2012 in OKF Projects, Our Work, Public Domain, Public Domain Works, WG Public Domain
Last month, the glorious Public Domain Review celebrated its first birthday.
The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well-known.
It’s been a fantastic year for our online compendium of public domain treasures: here’s a little round-up of some of the highlights – take what you like, and find more on the website!
Julian Barnes told the story of when a young Guy de Maupassant was invited to lunch at the holiday cottage of Algernon Swinburne. A flayed human hand, pornography, the serving of monkey meat, and inordinate amounts of alcohol, all made for a truly strange Anglo-French encounter.
Utriusque Cosmi (1617-1621), the masterwork of physician and polymath Robert Fludd, was explored by Urszula Szulakowska, who looked at the philosophical and theological ideas behind the extraordinary images found in the second part of the work, which you can access through the post.
Julie Gardham took a look at the book that was said to have spurred a young Isaac Newton onto the scientific path, The Mysteries of Nature and Art by John Bate. In this picture you can see “Another manner of forcing water, whereby water from any spring may be forced unto the top of a hill”
And in Bugs and Beasts Before the Law, Nicholas Humphrey explored the strange world of medieval animal trials, with murderous pigs sent to the gallows, sparrows prosecuted for chattering in Church, a gang of thieving rats let off on a wholly technical acquittal.
We’re also constantly expanding our collections of film, image, text and audio. Check out the collection of maps by Piri Reis, a sixteenth century Ottoman Admiral famous for his detailed and accurate maps and charts of the Mediterranean.
Alexandria
Or the these pages from Giambattista della Porta’s 1586 book on physiognomy De humana physiognomonia libri IIII, courtesy of the National Library of Medicine via Wikimedia:
The first year of the Public Domain Review was made possible by seed funding from the Shuttleworth Foundation. We are now, however, relying solely on support from our readers to keep the project going, so please, if you enjoy the site and wish to see it continue and grow do consider becoming a patron! Your generosity will help keep us afloat while we scour the web in search of the most interesting and unusual public domain artefacts that we can find, and the most erudite and entertaining voices to write about them. It will also ensure the continuation of our work behind the scenes with institutions (universities, libraries, museums, etc.) trying to ensure that works in the public domain remain in the public domain when they go online.
