How do you do? Search for older provenience?

[ACCLA-Mike]

Ed, I believe that copyright for Alex Malloy's catalogs passed to his daughter on his death in 2020.

Can anyone provide pointers to sources of information on what happens to copyright for entities? Does the copyright simply expire or does it pass to a related entity (who could then make it open access)? Or does copyright remain vacuously in the ether until the given time expires? These days nonprofits include information on dissolution in their bylaws but this was not past practice. 

Edited August 23, 2023 by ACCLA-Mike

[Sulla80]

5 minutes ago, ACCLA-Mike said:

Ed, I believe that copyright for Alex Malloy's catalogs passed to his daughter on his death in 2020.

Can anyone provide pointers to sources of information on what happens to copyright for entities? Does the copyright simply expire or does it pass to a related entity (who could then make it open access)? Or does copyright remain vacuously in the ether until the given time expires? These days nonprofits include information on dissolution in their bylaws but this was not passed practice. 

In the US: like any other property, typically ownership of copyrights is transferred to the heirs of an estate. (potentially more complicated with local state laws)

https://copyrightalliance.org/what-happens-to-your-copyrights-after-you-die/

As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. 

https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-duration.html

[rNumis]

Here's an idea. What if one were to create a web-searchable index of the older auction catalogs. You're not going to reproduce the lot descriptions or plate images, so maybe a way to avoid copyright issues. Maybe. 

Someone could then at least generate a list of older auctions where a certain type/mint/ruler had appeared. Not perfect, but it would point you in the right direction and could save a lot of time-consuming page flipping. 

Just a thought. 

[Ed Snible]

14 hours ago, ACCLA-Mike said:

Ed, I believe that copyright for Alex Malloy's catalogs passed to his daughter on his death in 2020.

Can anyone provide pointers to sources of information on what happens to copyright for entities? Does the copyright simply expire or does it pass to a related entity (who could then make it open access)? Or does copyright remain vacuously in the ether until the given time expires? These days nonprofits include information on dissolution in their bylaws but this was not past practice. 

https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/36309/what-happens-to-copyright-owned-by-a-defunct-publisher-company

"If the owner is a business that has ceased to operate, but has not sold the copyright, then the shareholders or proprietor has the right to sell or license it (technically the business still owns it). If the business goes through legal bankruptcy, the copyright would be sold, possibly as a part of "and all its other assets and good will", or else would escheat to the state."

[Ed Snible]

13 hours ago, rNumis said:

Here's an idea. What if one were to create a web-searchable index of the older auction catalogs. You're not going to reproduce the lot descriptions or plate images, so maybe a way to avoid copyright issues. Maybe. 

@rNumis you already know this, but as background there are several very good web-searchable indexes of auction catalogs.

The American Numismatic Society has been cataloging its holdings for more than a century (since 1883!). They have 100,000+ books, periodicals, and catalogs.  Here is an example:

Leu Numismatik Auction 1, 10/25/2017, by by Leu Numismatik AG (Zuerich, Switzerland)

• Description: 221 p. : ill., col. pls., Bibl. ; 28 cm.
• Subject(s): Coins, Celtic | Coins, Ancient Greek | Coins, Medieval | Coins, Roman
• Summary: Includes celtic, greek, roman, byzantine and early medieval coins, and renaissance medals.
• https://donum.numismatics.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?biblionumber=198475

rNumis calls this catalog LEUN_2017_10_25.  rNumis currently doesn't say much about this catalog because it is not online.  Note that rNumis knows the date.  The ANS library allows queries by date.  Four auctions occurred on November 25 2017.  @rNumis's programmers could easily query the ANS library for every rNumis ID, and link to either the ANS library URL or incorporate the summary into rNumis.

It would not be particularly difficult to set up a wiki, perhaps even using a free wiki like wikidot.com, with a page for either every catalog in rNumis or every catalog in the ANS library.  Perhaps most catalogs on the wiki would be ignored, but perhaps people who are interested in some catalogs might post useful things to the wiki.  Such as "I have an example for sale", "I found a copy on issue.com", or "the prices realized is online at https://..."

Large portions of the ANS library have been scanned, but because of copyright cannot be shared.  However, it is likely that there are people who can access the scans.  It seems likely that, if funding could be found, scanned catalogs could be OCRed and queried for rulers and locations, which could then be linked to the other ANS tools and to http://nomisma.org/ .  The ANS librarian only had the time to write "Includes celtic, greek, roman, byzantine and early medieval coins, and renaissance medals."  Perhaps a bot could count items of each category, provide breakdowns of the estimates, or counts of rulers and cities.  None of these things infringe today's copyright law.

People are already talking about what kind of law will apply to summaries created by AIs.  It might make sense to give the Wall Street Journal a cut of the money if a bot summarizes its front page.  It doesn't make sense to block a bot from summarizing the contents of a sales catalog from 1997.  Let's hope the law moves in the right direction. 

[rNumis]

8 hours ago, Ed Snible said:

@rNumis you already know this, but as background there are several very good web-searchable indexes of auction catalogs.

The American Numismatic Society has been cataloging its holdings for more than a century (since 1883!). They have 100,000+ books, periodicals, and catalogs.  Here is an example:

@Ed Snible some great suggestions there! 

Huge fan of donum at ANS. I did add an underlying donum field in my database some time ago - after I got their permission to link to their webpages - but I haven't got very far populating the data yet. So far, those few donum entries I have added only show up in the 'Provenance' parts of rNumis. You can see a donum link on this page, for example:

https://www.rnumis.com/greek_coins_detail.php?dbid=KLN_20211029_27

I think adding donum links in the main catalog tables at rNumis is a great idea and I'm thinking about how to make that happen.

What I wasn't suggesting in my previous post was replicating donum. I should have said a "web-searchable index of the contents of older auction catalogs", I didn't mean a searchable index of the catalogs themselves.  So... more along the lines of your comments on OCR and ruler, location queries. By no means an easy project and I was curious if the provenance-hunters would find that useful. It would avoid a lot of copyright issues. 

 

Cheers,

 

Steve

 

 

Edited August 24, 2023 by rNumis