Breakthrough for digitising books in the EU

"Key European stakeholders have approved a “ground-breaking” set of principles for digitising and making publicly available out-of-print books and journals. The accord could serve as a template for dealing with the vexing problem of orphan works, those for whom the copyright owner cannot be found, according to International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations CEO Olav Stokkmo."

Read all about it here

Photo of the day 18-9--2011

Winter approaches.

S4C and Local TV (UK)

CM 7180 is now available

"BROADCASTING
An Agreement Between
Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Culture,
Olympics, Media and Sport and
the British Broadcasting Corporation"

This document reveals the funding and governance agreements with special regard to the BBC World Service, the BBC / S4C "partnership", and the development of local TV in the UK.

It makes clear that the BBC will be responsible for funding S4C from 2015, which for those not following the acrid debate in Wales, may be deemed as bad news for the service and the future of Welsh language TV and new media.

Slings and Arrows

Electronic clearance of orphan works via the ARROW system significantly accelerates mass digitisation, according to the BL. It would take one person 1000 years to clear 500,000 works (books?), however, with ARROW, it can takle 5 minutes per item.

The BL study can be downloaded here, or for a quick overview, the highlights are included in their press summary here

The British Library, as part of the wider EU funded ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works) project[1], has today published a study into rights clearance and mass digitisation which examines the issue of orphan works - works for which the rights holder is untraceable.

'Seeking New Landscapes: A rights clearance study in the context of mass digitisation of 140 books published between 1870 and 2010’ found that more efficient ways of clearing rights and providing cultural institutions with legal certainty over their activities are needed to ensure that h

The British Library, as part of the wider EU funded ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works) project[1], has today published a study into rights clearance and mass digitisation which examines the issue of orphan works - works for which the rights holder is untraceable.

'Seeking New Landscapes: A rights clearance study in the context of mass digitisation of 140 books published between 1870 and 2010’ found that more efficient ways of clearing rights and providing cultural institutions with legal certainty over their activities are needed to ensure that highly valuable research materials don’t remain out of reach of the vast majority of citizen

A software path to video migration

Cube-Tec and the Fraunhofer Institute have announced a new method of analogue video digitisation.

From their press release "The Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS in Erlangen and Cube-Tec International GmbH are jointly developing a new procedure for the high-quality and automated digitalization of analogue video cassettes. In this new procedure the complete signal processing path of tape machines is realized via computer software. This enables new forms of quality control, signal processing and the generation of technical meta data, which was previously not possible with the use of video recorders."

Their press release can be found here.

EU extension to copyright of sound recordings

The 11th hour for the crazy, illogical and damaging extension of copyright. CC blog post.

Photo of the day 6-9--2011

Drinking Fountain, Amalfi.