Kahle v. AshcroftLost History – Old Catholic Church
originally submitted by Andreas Trawöger:
One thing a lot people are unaware is that current copyright laws are a big burden for minorities.
I'm member of the Austrian Old Catholic church ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Catholic_Church). And we have one big problem: We are loosing our history.
Most of the books of the Old Catholic where shortly of the Old Catholic church was found (between 1870 – 1920 and where never reprinted since them. The only possible way to access them is reading them in the Austrian National Library.
This is prohibitive for most people either because they don't live in Vienna or don't have the time sitting in a library for hours (you are not allowed to lend the books).
The result is that the nobody within the old catholic really knows the origins of the old catholic church.
I'm about to start a project where we want to publish this books on the Internet. This is in generell no problem with books written between 1870 – 1890, but most books written between 1890 – 1920 are still protected by copyright laws.
My biggest Problem is a book called „History of the Austrian Old Catholic Church“ written in 1914 by Hannes Josef Demmel who was a member of the Old Catholic Young Men movement at the time of writing.
It's difficult to trace somebody 90 years later. But in this case it seams like the author became bishop of the German Old Catholic Church in 1952 and later died in 1972. Which gives me some hints, but how I'm supposed to find the copyright holders of a book when the author died 30 years ago (Old Catholic Bishops are allowed to marry).
The problems are many fold. Main problem is that the current copyright holders are most likely unaware that they still own the copyright. It's also quite likely that after the author died it wasn't decided which relativ owns the copyright to which books (at the time the author died the book was out of print for 58 years).
Which means i either have to wait another 40 years. Or try to find all relatives of someone who died 30 years ago. Explain them that they still own the copyright and get a permission from everybody (because it's unclear who really owns the copyright) that they allow me to retype the book and publish it one the Internet.
Stifled uses
Andreas Trawöger:
Publish it on the Internet.