New post on public domain movies.

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+Title: Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA
+Tags: english, opphavsrett, verkidetfri
+Date: 2017-12-13 10:15
+
+<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>