<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
<atom:link href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/index.rss" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
+ <item>
+ <title>Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 13 Dec 2017 10:15:00 +0100</pubDate>
+ <description><p>While looking at
+<a href="http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/">the scanned copies
+for the copyright renewal entries for movies published in the USA</a>,
+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.</p>
+
+<p>A typical copyright renewal entry look like this (the first one
+listed for 1955):</p>
+
+<p><blockquote>
+ ADAM AND EVIL, a photoplay in seven reels by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
+ Distribution Corp. (c) 17Aug27; L24293. Loew's Incorporated (PWH);
+ 10Jun55; R151558.
+</blockquote></p>
+
+<p>The movie title as well as registration and renewal dates are easy
+enough to locate by a program (split on first command 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.</p>
+
+<p>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
+<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>
+Using this search, I find that the equivalent IMDB title ID for the
+first renewal entry from 1955 is
+<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0017588/</a>.</p>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<p>Note, Project Gutenberg already have some
+<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=copyright+office+renewals">transcribed
+copies of the US Copyright Office renewal protocols</a>, 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?</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
+activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
+<b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Is the short movie «Empty Socks» from 1927 in the public domain or not?</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Is_the_short_movie__Empty_Socks__from_1927_in_the_public_domain_or_not_.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Visualizing GSM radio chatter using gr-gsm and Hopglass</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Visualizing_GSM_radio_chatter_using_gr_gsm_and_Hopglass.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Fri, 29 Sep 2017 10:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>Every mobile phone announce its existence over radio to the nearby
-mobile cell towers. And this radio chatter is available for anyone
-with a radio receiver capable of receiving them. Details about the
-mobile phones with very good accuracy is of course collected by the
-phone companies, but this is not the topic of this blog post. The
-mobile phone radio chatter make it possible to figure out when a cell
-phone is nearby, as it include the SIM card ID (IMSI). By paying
-attention over time, one can see when a phone arrive and when it leave
-an area. I believe it would be nice to make this information more
-available to the general public, to make more people aware of how
-their phones are announcing their whereabouts to anyone that care to
-listen.</p>
-
-<p>I am very happy to report that we managed to get something
-visualizing this information up and running for
-<a href="http://norwaymakers.org/osf17">Oslo Skaperfestival 2017</a>
-(Oslo Makers Festival) taking place today and tomorrow at Deichmanske
-library. The solution is based on the
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Easier_recipe_to_observe_the_cell_phones_around_you.html">simple
-recipe for listening to GSM chatter</a> I posted a few days ago, and
-will show up at the stand of <a href="http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/">Åpen
-Sone from the Computer Science department of the University of
-Oslo</a>. The presentation will show the nearby mobile phones (aka
-IMSIs) as dots in a web browser graph, with lines to the dot
-representing mobile base station it is talking to. It was working in
-the lab yesterday, and was moved into place this morning.</p>
-
-<p>We set up a fairly powerful desktop machine using Debian
-Buster/Testing with several (five, I believe) RTL2838 DVB-T receivers
-connected and visualize the visible cell phone towers using an
-<a href="https://github.com/marlow925/hopglass">English version of
-Hopglass</a>. A fairly powerfull machine is needed as the
-grgsm_livemon_headless processes from
-<a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/gr-gsm">gr-gsm</a> converting
-the radio signal to data packages is quite CPU intensive.</p>
-
-<p>The frequencies to listen to, are identified using a slightly
-patched scan-and-livemon (to set the --args values for each receiver),
-and the Hopglass data is generated using the
-<a href="https://github.com/petterreinholdtsen/IMSI-catcher/tree/meshviewer-output">patches
-in my meshviewer-output branch</a>. For some reason we could not get
-more than four SDRs working. There is also a geographical map trying
-to show the location of the base stations, but I believe their
-coordinates are hardcoded to some random location in Germany, I
-believe. The code should be replaced with code to look up location in
-a text file, a sqlite database or one of the online databases
-mentioned in
-<a href="https://github.com/Oros42/IMSI-catcher/issues/14">the github
-issue for the topic</a>.
-
-<p>If this sound interesting, visit the stand at the festival!</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
</rss>
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff