From 0dfbc4c31567e29fba9410f07f0b6987ecad0b5b Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alex Cabal Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2018 12:26:32 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] Update PD dates to 1923-and-earlier. Hooray! --- www/about/index.php | 2 +- www/contribute/art.php | 28 +++++++++---------- .../producing-an-ebook-step-by-step.php | 6 ++-- 3 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-) diff --git a/www/about/index.php b/www/about/index.php index 970af0ae..cfcb0057 100644 --- a/www/about/index.php +++ b/www/about/index.php @@ -57,7 +57,7 @@ require_once('Core.php');

The public domain is a priceless resource for all of us, and for the generations after us. It’s a free repository of our culture going back centuries—a way for us to see where we came from and to chart where we’re going. It represents our collective cultural heritage.

In the past, copyright was a limited boon, designed not to enrich a creator and their children’s children a hundred years from now, but rather to allow a creator to profit by granting a temporary monopoly on reproduction, in exchange for their work to be returned to the public after a few years. Our ancestors—in fact, the framers of the US Constitution—recognized that art builds on art, and that locking up culture benefits a handful but harms the the greater public.

Today, large corporations are putting a lot of money into twisting our laws to slowly but surely strangle the public domain, making it increasingly remote and inaccessible so they can continue seeking rent on ideas and culture nearly a century old. Today laws lock up work not just for the author’s entire lifetime, but for the lifetime of their children, and their children. Copyright can’t enrich the dead, but it can enrich powerful corporations … at our—at everyone’s—expense.

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Dedicating the work Standard Ebooks produces to the public domain is our small way of letting the world know how important it is to fight that. If corporations have their way, the last liberated and free culture you’ll ever have is what was published before 1923.

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Dedicating the work Standard Ebooks produces to the public domain is our small way of letting the world know how important it is to fight that. If corporations have their way, the last liberated and free culture you’ll ever have is what was published before 1924.

What a sad world that would be.

diff --git a/www/contribute/art.php b/www/contribute/art.php index fcdcd132..9269e995 100644 --- a/www/contribute/art.php +++ b/www/contribute/art.php @@ -109,10 +109,10 @@ require_once('Core.php');

Cover image artwork rules

Once you’ve set up cover.svg, it’s time to find a suitable fine art painting to use for the cover image.

The paintings we use are all in the U.S. public domain (PD). Your task is to locate a painting suitable for the kind of book you’re producing, and then demonstrate that the painting is indeed in the U.S. public domain.

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U.S. copyright law is complicated. Because of this, we require that you provide a link to a page scan of a 1922-or-older book that reproduces the painting you selected. This is a hard requirement to demonstrate that the painting you selected is in fact in the U.S. public domain. Just because a painting is very old, or Wikipedia says it’s PD, or it’s PD in a country besides the U.S., doesn’t necessarily mean it actually is PD in the U.S.

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U.S. copyright law is complicated. Because of this, we require that you provide a link to a page scan of a 1923-or-older book that reproduces the painting you selected. This is a hard requirement to demonstrate that the painting you selected is in fact in the U.S. public domain. Just because a painting is very old, or Wikipedia says it’s PD, or it’s PD in a country besides the U.S., doesn’t necessarily mean it actually is PD in the U.S.

The painting you select must be a fine-art oil painting. We require this to maintain a consistency in the overall style of all of our covers.

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Tips for location 1922-or-older reproductions of cover art

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To actually demonstrate that a painting is PD, you must locate a reproduction of that painting in a 1922-or-older book.

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Tips for location 1923-or-older reproductions of cover art

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To actually demonstrate that a painting is PD, you must locate a reproduction of that painting in a 1923-or-older book.

This can be quite difficult. Many people find this to be the most time-consuming part of the ebook production process.

Because of the difficulty, finding suitable cover at is all about compromise. You’re unlikely to find the perfect cover image. You’ll find a lot of paintings that would be great matches, but that you can’t find reproductions of and thus we can’t use. So, be ready to compromise.

General tips

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Gotchas

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Each of those sources allows you to filter results by publication date, so make sure you select 1922 and earlier to ensure they’re in the US public domain.

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Each of those sources allows you to filter results by publication date, so make sure you select 1923 and earlier to ensure they’re in the US public domain.

If you can’t find scans of your book at the above sources, and you’re using a Project Gutenberg transcription as source material, there’s a good chance that PGDP (the sister project of Project Gutenberg that does the actual transcriptions) has a copy of the scans they used accessible in their archives. You should only use the PGDP archives as a last resort; because their scans are not searchable, verifying typos becomes extremely time-consuming.

Please keep the following important notes in mind when searching for page scans: