- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_finding_all_public_domain_movies_in_the_USA.html">Idea for finding all public domain movies in the USA</a></div>
- <div class="date">13th December 2017</div>
- <div class="body"><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 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.</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>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/opphavsrett">opphavsrett</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/verkidetfri">verkidetfri</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
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