While looking to the future of copyright in the Speaker Series, we are also engaging in a two-year project Usable Past Copyright Project (funded by a Tulane Research Enhancement Grant) to investigate what legal impediments exist to making more accessible public domain works of all kinds.
To that end, we are working on the DurationatorTM, a software tool that will assist in determining the status of a copyrighted worked, both in the US and abroad. We plan to debut the DurationatorTM at the WIP IP conference in October 2008. The project is headed by Professor Elizabeth Townsend Gard, assisted in the contruction phases by Tulane Law School students.