"A Google engineer has tracked down, munged and XMLified the copyright renewal notices for all the books the U.S. Copyright Office knows about—now there’s a one-click way to discover if an old book is in the public domain (more or less) and who holds the copyright if it isn’t." – Boing Boing via MR.
The TeleRead take: Why was it left up to Google for this to happen? Doesn’t this say something about Washington’s priorities? And what are D.C.’s goals? Not making creation easier or encouraging PG-style works–but instead to protect the big corporations that profit off the current mess? More sensible copyright laws and a better records would help companies of all sizes.
Related: Lessig on the proposed Orphaned Works Act: ‘Unfair and unwise,’ in the Wall Street Journal’s law blog, including reader comments. Read Lessig‘s original New York Times op-ed here, from last month. He writes that the bill would "have us rely on a class of copyright experts who would advise or be employed by libraries. These experts would encourage copyright infringement by assuring that the costs of infringement are not too great. The bill makes no distinction between old and new works, or between foreign and domestic works. All work, whether old or new, whether created in America or Ukraine, is governed by the same slippery standard." Any helpful changes in the bill since he wrote the op-ed?
Detail: Google’s download page for copyright records.
Caveat: BIG file! Any suggestions on how to deal with the problem?
Zipped it’s 56.5MB!! God knows what that will mean UNzipped. What program can be used to open and search that?
Any decent old text editor such as Textpad or Notepad ++ should be able to search thru that fairly quickly.
I haven’t yet dl’d the file so I can’t say for certain what this file looks like but many xml files can be quite ugly/painful to read by mere human eyes but searching for a string should still be quite easy/painless.
I’ll actually download the file and play with it in a couple of hours.
Got the file – it unzips to 380,517KB and has 16,222,410 lines!
TextPad (my favorite text editor) searches thru the file very quickly – it will find a string anywhere in the file in about 4 seconds max (YMMV).