The Story of the Durationator.

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For over a decade, we worked on the challenge of coding copyright law.  We were successful.  We could run a work through the system to determine the copyright status of a work, say in Argentina that was first published in South Africa.  It was not easy.  We have over 100 students work on the project.  We took field trips around the world to gather laws. And we learned a lot -- we were on the cusp of thinking through how law interacted with code.  And we ran into a problem:  we needed data -- from Copyright Records, from publishing records, etc. -- that was not readily available.  It stopped the project.  We found that our commercial partner could not provide the data we needed, nor others that we worked with.  And libraries wanted something that was automated, but we couldn't guarantee that the data was accurate, and that was beyond the scope of the project.

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But we learned a lot.  And that's in the book above. We still do reports -- we use our own tools as a starting point. But in the end, we just couldn't be responsible for data that would lead to inaccurate results.

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We are still engaged with Durationator -- and we still have institutions and individuals that we work with.  But the dream of automation, at least for now, is on hold, as accurate data catches up to what we created.