2009/8/1 John Vandenberg <jay...@gmail.com>: > On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Samuel Klein<meta...@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.g...@dunelm.org.uk _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
