While looking at
the scanned copies
for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA,
an idea occurred to me. The number of renewals are so few per year, it
should be fairly quick to transcribe them all and add references to
the corresponding IMDB title ID. This would give the (presumably)
complete list of movies published 28 years earlier that did _not_
enter the public domain for the transcribed year. By fetching the
list of USA movies published 28 years earlier and subtract the movies
with renewals, we should be left with movies registered in IMDB that
are now in the public domain. For the year 1955 (which is the one I
have looked at the most), the total number of pages to transcribe is
21. For the 28 years from 1950 to 1978, it should be in the range
500-600 pages. It is just a few days of work, and spread among a
small group of people it should be doable in a few weeks of spare
time.
A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
listed for 1955):
ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
10Jun55; R151558.
The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
enough to locate by a program (split on first comma and look for
DDmmmYY). The rest of the text is not required to find the movie in
IMDB, but is useful to confirm the correct movie is found. I am not
quite sure what the L and R numbers mean, but suspect they are
reference numbers into the archive of the US Copyright Office.
Tracking down the equivalent IMDB title ID is probably going to be
a manual task, but given the year it is fairly easy to search for the
movie title using for example
http://www.imdb.com/find?q=adam+and+evil+1927&s=all.
Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
first renewal entry from 1955 is
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/.
I suspect the best way to do this would be to make a specialised
web service to make it easy for contributors to transcribe and track
down IMDB title IDs. In the web service, once a entry is transcribed,
the title and year could be extracted from the text, a search in IMDB
conducted for the user to pick the equivalent IMDB title ID right
away. By spreading out the work among volunteers, it would also be
possible to make at least two persons transcribe the same entries to
be able to discover any typos introduced. But I will need help to
make this happen, as I lack the spare time to do all of this on my
own. If you would like to help, please get in touch. Perhaps you can
draft a web service for crowd sourcing the task?
Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
transcribed
copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols, but I have
not been able to find any film renewals there, so I suspect they only
have copies of renewal for written works. I have not been able to find
any transcribed versions of movie renewals so far. Perhaps they exist
somewhere?
I would love to figure out methods for finding all the public
domain works in other countries too, but it is a lot harder. At least
for Norway and Great Britain, such work involve tracking down the
people involved in making the movie and figuring out when they died.
It is hard enough to figure out who was part of making a movie, but I
do not know how to automate such procedure without a registry of every
person involved in making movies and their death year.
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
