A copyright holder has the exclusive “right to copy” an original creation. In more commercial terms, the holder charges a fee for every copy of the work. Almost any intellectual property can be copyrighted. Books, art, music and software are every day examples of works which are normally copyrighted. To copy or distribute protected works or products without the permission of the owner is called piracy. Piracy is illegal. Most works remain copyrighted for 50 years after the author’s death. If the work is created by a company rather than an individual, than the copyright persists for 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever is shortest. With the advent of the cheap and abundant digital age, non-copyrighted material is being transferred to electronic form for the whole world to enjoy.
Malta has numerous works that are out of copyright. If the item being digitized is a work of art, one would need to take high resolution scans and make them available to all to enjoy from any corner of the connected world. Annotations about the scanned works would help those looking at it to understand and appreciate it more.
With manuscripts and publications, scanning the source would constitute the logical first step since this would ensure that the original need not be handled from that point onwards. With text a lot more possibilities can exist; such as converting the scanned documents to machine readable text which users could search through or copy to a PDA or other device to read offline? Moving one step forward, one could read the documents thereby creating an audio book of the works. The ultimate achievement would be to translate the works from the source language such as ancient Italian or Maltese dialects into their modern equivalent or into a completely different language.
A digitizing process can also be applied to sound and audio-visual recordings. In Malta, some productions are lost forever because in the early days of radio transmissions were aired live and no recording was taken. Another economic measure was the reuse of tapes. Radio and TV programs would be recorded over existing material thereby permanently destroying the original. A functioning machine capable of reading in the source material would need to be hooked up to a gadget that converts the source information to computer data. Additional processes, such as cleaning up the material and transcribing it are thereafter possible. Researching the recordings further so as to fill in supporting details such as when the program was aired and the people who were involved in it together with additional notes of interest add considerable value.
The above sounds complex and costly. While the process is not terribly complex once a proper framework is in place, it is costly mainly because it involves a lot of human intervention. Every passing year results in further deterioration of the original making it more difficult to digitize it accurately. Catastrophes such as fire, water and earthquakes as well as acts of vandalism and theft may permanently take away the original leaving no copy of it in any form.
If we look around us we can learn a lot about what the rest of the world is doing on this front:
Besides the obvious benefits listed above, such tasks would help promote Malta from a cultural standpoint. Showing potential tourists previously inaccessible content along side the fortifications and churches normally depicted in tourist brochures would entice those to learn more about this country.
Alan is the managing director of onNeutral Ltd an ICT firm specializing in security, data retrieval and crime investigation services. onNeutral Ltd's web site is at http://www.onNeutral.com.
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