By digitizing venerable translations, they’re bringing the world’s literary history to Punjabi speakers
Imagine a world where you grew up in a world where the greatest literary works in history never existed. For many of the world’s language speakers, this can be their functional reality. Titles like these have either never been translated, or were translated decades ago and now hide in ancient paper-bound texts on dusty library….
A bunch of media just entered the public domain. Here’s why that matters.
The black-and-white film flickers as a wealthy young woman, sitting on a bench in a garden, bats her eyes at the gardener’s son she is not allowed to marry. In her self-portrait, an artist wears masculine clothes against a bleak urban backdrop, dark eyes meeting the viewer’s gaze from the shadow of a broad-brimmed riding….
Wikimedia Foundation removes The Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law requirements
Today, in an unfortunate example of the overreach of the United States' current copyright law, the Wikimedia Foundation removed the Dutch-language text of The Diary of Anne Frank from Wikisource.