blog/data/2017-12-13-verk-i-det-fri-filmer-usa.txt

   1 Title: Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA
   2 Tags: english, opphavsrett, verkidetfri
   3 Date: 2017-12-13 10:15
   4
   5 <p>While looking at
   6 <a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
   7 for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
   8 an idea occurred to me.  The number of renewals are so few per year, it
   9 should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
  10 the corresponding IMDB title ID.  This would give the (presumably)
  11 complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
  12 enter the public domain for the transcribed year.  By fetching the
  13 list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
  14 with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
  15 are now in the public domain.  For the year 1955 (which is the one I
  16 have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
  17 21.  For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
  18 500-600 pages.  It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
  19 small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
  20 time.</p>
  21
  22 <p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
  23 listed for 1955):</p>
  24
  25 <p><blockquote>
  26   ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
  27   Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
  28   10Jun55; R151558.
  29 </blockquote></p>
  30
  31 <p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
  32 enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
  33 DDmmmYY).  The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
  34 IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found.  I am not
  35 quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
  36 reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.</p>
  37
  38 <p>Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
  39 a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
  40 movie title using for example
  41 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all">http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all</a>.
  42 Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
  43 first renewal entry from 1955 is
  44 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
  45
  46 <p>I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
  47 web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
  48 down IMDB title IDs.  In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
  49 the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
  50 conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
  51 away.  By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
  52 possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
  53 be able to discover any typos introduced.  But I will need help to
  54 make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
  55 own.  If you would like to help, please get in touch.  Perhaps you can
  56 draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?</p>
  57
  58 <p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
  59 <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
  60 copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, but I have
  61 not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
  62 have copies of renewal for written works.  I have not been able to find
  63 any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far.  Perhaps they exist
  64 somewhere?</p>
  65
  66 <p>I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
  67 domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder.  At least
  68 for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
  69 people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
  70 It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
  71 do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
  72 person involved in making movies and their death year.</p>
  73
  74 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  75 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  76 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>