Wikidata:Property proposal/Copyright status of author

copyright status as a creator

Originally proposed at Wikidata:Property proposal/Person

   Done: copyright status as a creator (P7763) (Talk and documentation)

Description	states if the oeuvre of a creator is still copyrighted or in the public domain
Represents	copyright status of set (Q73568642)
Data type	Item
Domain	human (Q5),
Allowed values	works protected by copyrights (Q73555012);copyrights on works have expired (Q71887839) and for specific cases: part of the copyrights on oeuvre has expired (Q75700125);work of author in whom no copyright is vested (Q77430932)
Example 1	Damien Hirst (Q294326) → works protected by copyrights (Q73555012)
Example 2	Rembrandt (Q5598) → copyrights on works have expired (Q71887839)
Example 3	Bedford Master (Q726437) → copyrights on works have expired (Q71887839)
Example 4	National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Q23548) → work of author in whom no copyright is vested (Q77430932)
Planned use	add copyright status to photographers and other artists, add status to infobox in Commons
See also	copyright status (P6216) copyright representative (P6275)

Motivatie

This property states if the oeuvre of an artist is still copyrighted. Currently we provide copyright information for each work of an artist, but we don’t have information in the item of the artist if the works of that artist are still in copyright. While we can do 70 years pma SPARQLing, not every artist has a date of death:

• some artists are in the public domain but don’t have a date of death as that is unknown. We sometimes have work period, floruit, related works with a date, date of birth, date of marriage or other dates we can do a calculation if the author is for sure more than 70 years pma.
• some artists are living persons, so don’t have a date of death. We sometimes do have date of birth, but there are also many artists without that information. That could be because of privacy, or because that information is not known. What we sometimes have is related information (employer, works, Linkedin-profiel, work locations with start and end time) to know when a person was alive.
• When a date of death is not available, to query 70 pma is almost impossible as we have so many variables to detect when a person was alive.

Another issue is that, certain exceptions exist. For example, some artists in France have a 100 pma because of the war. In Spain, authors before 1987 are 80 year pma, after 1987 70 years pma. In the US we have a situation that recently authors have a 70 pma, and before it was related to the publication of their works. And works of artists died long enough ago are in the US public domain as well. We also have authors with multiple dates of death and other conflicting information.

When we do have a property for the copyright status of author the evaluation can be done en mass, but also refined for special groups and exceptions. We can use qualifiers: applies to jurisdiction (P1001) when the legal atatus differs for some Berne member states, and we can add determination method (P459).

use cases:

• Easier to divide (museum) collections in artists that are have copyrights and are in public domain for bulk uploads to commons.
• Easier to query copyright situation for works with multiple authors. This is especially beneficial for composed /derivative works like song versions, translation of books, films etc
• Use the status in Wikimedia Commons to warn users when uploading material of that artist. --Hannolans (talk) 22:44, 11 December 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

•  Support - We have discussed this with Hanno in several occasions and I think it's a necessary property, even when it goes against some of the underlying logic of the current copyright environment (where works are the ones protected, not the authors in themselves).  – The preceding unsigned comment was added by Scann (talk • contribs) at 22:54, December 11, 2019‎ (UTC).
•  Support - For some of the practical reasons stated here (being able to determine the status of GLAM collections, were the copyright issue is such a big obstacle for sharing on Wikimedia platforms), which I believe outway the arguments for only adding copyright status to the seperate works of the artist. Furthermore, proposal seems well tought through and thorough. SIryn (talk) 08:36, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
•  Support, seems useful. Nomen ad hoc (talk) 16:59, 12 December 2019 (UTC).
•  Comment As with all such status properties, I'm concerned with how it will be kept up to date. What about having a'date after which all works are in public domain" property, that can be checked similarly but will not need to be constantly updated? Also the label says "author" while the English description says "artist" - maybe "creator" should be used, or something similar, as a general term? ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:15, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
  • we thought about such a date as well, but for living people, we don't have that date. For those who have a date of death, we can work with an end date for the copyrighted situation, we did that here as a proof of concept in the field copyright representative Ernest William Haslehust (Q15978985). The amount that yearly switch to the public domain is not huge (otherway around will not happen). If we have 100.000 copyrighted modern artists, and artists live ca 80 years, we will have 1.250 artists that become public domain yearly. End of this year we detected 187 artists in collections that become public domain. --Hannolans (talk) 23:37, 12 December 2019 (UTC)
    • Ok, that doesn't sound too bad. ArthurPSmith (talk) 18:39, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
      • @Hannolans, ArthurPSmith: A generic new qualifier property "future end date" might be useful, for a variety of circumstances beyond just this one, to indicate when a statement will cease to be true, while allowing queries still to test just for the presence of "end date" (without requiring any further filtering) to identify statements which as of right now are no longer true. Jheald (talk) 21:46, 16 December 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Generally a good idea, although ArthurPSmith makes good points above. Do we plan to qualify these assertions with start and end times? Bovlb (talk) 20:15, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
  • When we use determination method (P459) as a qualifier bots can automatically add end and start dates calculated from the date of death and switch the preferred status to the public domain when that date arrives. --Hannolans (talk) 17:02, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
•  Support Next creation should be for "Copyright status of publication" So we have a start sate for the copyright of Time magazine and others, but it is more complicated. --RAN (talk) 02:36, 14 December 2019 (UTC)
  • We have copyright status (P6216) for works, so that might also be useful for Time Magazine, or do you mean a status for that company? --Hannolans (talk) 17:02, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

It will require two new fields "date of first issue renewal" and "date of first article renewal" for a publication like a magazine, Time magazine is more complex because they started the renewal process then let it lapse for a few years then started up again. See http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/firstperiod.html for the type of information I would like to capture. --RAN (talk) 00:12, 21 December 2019 (UTC)

This should be doable with qualifiers, but perhaps needs annual items for the magazine. Note that this is not related to copyright status of author, but to the individual works. The value for this property would be part of the copyrights on oeuvre has expired (Q75700125).

•  Support Useful property Ecritures (talk) 14:01, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

@Nomen ad hoc, SIryn, Bovlb, ArthurPSmith, Hannolans, Richard Arthur Norton (1958- ): @Ecritures, Jheald:  Done: copyright status as a creator (P7763). − Pintoch (talk) 18:00, 30 December 2019 (UTC)