Just caught this story on the Guardian culture page about the heirs of Jack Kirby seeking to extend the copyright on the Marvel characters that he co-created with Stan Lee. From what I understand, comic copyrights appear to be fairly complicated (certainly more so than book publishing) and perhaps it is an issue that needs to be opened up and simplified.
Given the recent heckling over Google Books and publishing, it seems that this rolling issue will carry on into a new area.
I’ve finally posted the first draft of the Dickens website here: http://austgate.co.uk/dickens/index.php?author=Dickens. The idea is that it will allow users to derive networks across the a variety of Victorian authors as and when I can develop the datasets.
I’ve also been developing a small text ontology to add to the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and Dublin Core (DC) ontologies. I’ll post details later. The database schema is still under development but I hope to get that change done soon so that I can get on with the XML changes.