Working towards more public books, fewer orphan works

Public domain determination becomes clearer cut, more books entering the public domain thanks to … Google? Jacob Kramer-Duffield explains how Google and Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders put their book-scanning and OCR-ing smarts into trying to solve the thorny orphan works problem to determine which out of print books have had their copyrights renewed and which haven’t. Neat. [via joho]