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Copyright and Public Domain
Where do we get large volumes of books From the public domain, which
contains books whose copyright term has expired and thus have been returned
to the people. In our project we are scanning books in order to make them
available at low cost. In this way anyone can own a collection of Tswana classic
literature.
Our primary objective is of course reading, the secondary being linguistic
resources. It is these linguistic resources that can lead to some exciting
language tools. The linguistic data present in public domain works allows us to
create spell checkers, grammar checkers, text-to-speech engines and machine
translation.
Other sources of public domain data that we are interested in and in which
Translate is developing solutions include:
1. Assisting with the capture and dissemination of Hansard (the verbatim
transcripts of parliamentary debates produced in a number of commonwealth
nations)
2. Government website translation – in countries where translations of
government resources is regularly performed or mandated by law these
translations are a valuable linguistic resource for the language.
These sources of open linguistic data are critical for the advancement of
marginalised languages. Thus it is important that marginalised languages are
active in ensuring that linguistic resources such as these are made available
for the advancement of the language. In making these resources available it is
critical that their availability be judged not by access to the resources, but by
what new resources can be produced from them. Thus licensing that allows
academic use but prevents the creation of a commercial spell checker are not in
the best interests of the language or the community.
In a similar vein the ongoing extension of copyright is problematic for
marginalised languages. By extension we mean the move from the current
international norms of 50 years of copyright to terms in excess of 70 years.
Each extension means that more works are not available to the language. If
we consider that copyright approximately 100 years ago was anything from
14 to 28 years and that now it ranges from 50 to 70+years we realise that
marginalised languages have lost much of their public domain content. For
marginal languages it is important to consider what benefit copyright extension
has to the overall health of the language.
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