brainwagon

Kevin Kelly had a very nice New York Times Op-Ed piece entitled Making My Own Music, which clearly elucidates the way that I’ve come to think about copyright issues and the value of the public domain.

One small quote:

Given the benefits of digitized films, there is little question that film buffs, powered only by passion, would rush to convert the 500 to 1,000 films that fall out of copyright each year — if the copyright period is not extended.

This is an old article, written before the decision in Eldred v. Ashcroft, and unfortunately for the country (although perhaps good for the Mouse), the arbitrary and excessive extension of automatic copyright protection was held to be consitutional.

I guess I wasn’t paying attention: the Internet Archive has added a Feature Films section. The selection is fairly unremarkable for now, but contains a few films of interest: Night of the Living Dead, the classic Edmond O’Brien film D.O.A. , and the classic horror film The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Enjoy!

It’s no secret I’m a huge fan of the public domain: the bits of our culture that are actually free for individuals to use as they see fit. I’ve promoted a couple of interesting public domain resources here, mostly Project Gutenberg. I’ve also had the pleasure of meating Brewster Kahle when he brought the Internet BookMobile to Hackers a couple of years back. I still have the copy of Alice in Wonderland that we printed, bound and cut. Nifty stuff.

Eric Eldred relates an interesting story in the archive.org forums. He decided to take the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, MA, the location immortalized in Thoreau’s classic Walden. For those of you who haven’t heard of the Internet Bookmobile, it’s a van equipped with satellite Internet, a high capacity color laser printer, and all the necessary equipment to print and bind books. They drive around and promote the use of the Internet and public domain resources to illustrate their value to the public.

Eldred intended to print and hand out copies of Walden for those who came to the park. A damn nice and altruistic gesture, and a good way to promote literacy, the Internet and a bit of our collective history and culture. Unfortunately, the park supervisor didn’t see it that way, since they are in the subsidized by a concession to the Thoreau Society which makes money by selling copies of Walden. Since Eldred was competing with them, they denied him a permit to hand out literature, and asked that he be removed from the park.

Given that Walden Pond is part of the Massachuesetts State Parks and Recreation district, does it seem right that a state agency is denying an individual the right distribute free, legally obtained information to promote literacy and understanding amidst the public at large?

You can, of course, get Walden via Project Gutenberg.

Today’s Gutenberg Gem is Edward Lasker, a rather colorful individual in the history of chess. He won the championship of Paris in 1912, in London in 1914, the New York City championship in 1915 and the Chicago championship in 1916, and then went on to become an International Master at the age of 75. He also wrote one of the first English language texts on Go. He should not be confused with his cousin, Emanuel Lasker, who was world chess champion from 1894-1921, and he liked to play Go too.

Try this link for two works of Lasker’s, Chess Strategy and Chess and Checkers: the Way To Mastership.

While perusing a random copy of Scientific American from June 18, 1887, I ran across an interesting little nugget of mathematical niftiness: Lewis Carroll’s technique for computing the day of the week for any date in your head. Cool! It’s not quite as simple as the Doomsday algorithm, but then we are talking about Lewis Carroll.

Picture this: you run across a reference to a patent that you want to read, but you are too cheap to spend the money that the U.S. Patent Office charges you to download images of the patent in question. What do you do? Apparently you use pat2pdf, a cool bash shell script that downloads TIFF images from the U.S. Patent Office and neatly assembles them into a PDF file. For instance, check out this patent which originally spawned the search for such a gadget. Much thanks to Oren Tirosh for writing this useful little script.

Just another example of an image that I scanned from the Dover book and colorized. I kind of like it!

Now, the correction: in reviewing Fishman’s book on the Public Domain, I am reminded that the term “copyright free” is not synonymous with “public domain”. From Fishman, page 3/27,

The words “copyright free” are often used to describe works (particularly photos and clip-art) that are under copyright, copies of which are sold to the public for a set fee rather than under a royalty arrangement.

So it remains to be seen whether these images are in fact in the public domain. These old style woodcuts appear to be of a style which suggests they predate possible copyright protections, but I suppose it’s vaguely possible that they are not public domain.

Till then, enjoy the images under the appropriate use of their “license”. I’ll investigate more, and probably end up writing them to find out what they think their position is.

Addendum: I found this site on Copyright for Collage Artists, which contains good information which seems sound.

Along with my usual rash of bills, today’s mail call included a DVD from
Project Gutenberg. This
CD contains 4 gigabytes of public domain texts, about 9500 individual volumes.
Nifty! A single DVD which could be the start of a serious library. I’ve got some
ideas for projects that make use of some of these texts, perhaps similar to the
PDF version of The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus that I made last Christmas.