lowlorenz/german-newspaper-pages-unknown-rights

📋 On the licensing of this data

Every item here is labelled to the best of my ability. The rights statement is taken per issue from what the holding institution recorded in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, captured at download time — never inferred, and never applied at newspaper level to issues that may differ.

Labelling at this scale is imperfect. If you believe anything here is mislabelled, or you hold rights in any of this material, please write to lorenz.hufe@posteo.de — I will resolve it immediately.

🚧 WORK IN PROGRESS — rights status unresolved

The copyright status of this material has not been determined. Every issue here carries the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek rights statement lizenzen/unbekannt — "rights unknown". That is an absence of a determination by the holding library, not a grant of permission and not an assertion of copyright.

I am actively working to clarify the rights on these pages with the holding institutions. Until that is done, please treat this dataset as provisional:

• Do not assume it is public domain. It is not labelled as such by anyone.
• It is published for research and rights-clarification purposes. If you reuse it, satisfy yourself that your use is lawful in your jurisdiction.
• Rights holders: if you hold rights in any of this material and want it removed, please open a discussion on this dataset or contact the dataset owner. It will be taken down promptly, no questions asked.
• The set may be withdrawn, re-licensed, or partly removed as clarification proceeds.

Material whose rights are cleared as public domain lives in the companion release ai-historian/german-newspaper-pages (7,000,060 pages, CC0 / PD Mark). If you just want usable data, use that one.

⚠️ Content notice · Inhaltshinweis

This collection contains National Socialist propaganda and other historical material that is antisemitic, racist and otherwise discriminatory. It is published solely as a historical source, for research, teaching and documentation.

The material runs from 1900 to the 1930s and includes the German press under National Socialism: state and party propaganda, antisemitic agitation, notices naming persecuted individuals, and reporting that legitimised persecution and war. The OCR text reproduces this language verbatim.

Reproduction here is documentary and implies no endorsement. German law permits use of such material for civic education, research, teaching, art and reporting on history — the social-adequacy clause of §§ 86, 86a StGB. Users are responsible for lawful use in their own jurisdiction.

Diese Sammlung enthält nationalsozialistische Propaganda sowie weiteres historisches Material antisemitischen und rassistischen Inhalts. Sie wird ausschließlich als historische Quelle zu Zwecken der Forschung, der Lehre und der Dokumentation bereitgestellt. Die Wiedergabe erfolgt dokumentarisch und stellt keine Billigung dar.

German Newspaper Pages — Rights Unresolved

689,804 pages from 83,030 issues of German newspapers, held by libraries that have not determined the copyright status. Same structure, models and processing as the public-domain release, so the two can be used together once rights are settled.

Pages	689,804
Issues	83,030
Rights statement	DDB lizenzen/unbekannt (unresolved) — all pages
Period	1900s–1930s (nothing before 1900)
Format	WebDataset tar shards, images at 2400 px long edge, JPEG q82
Scaled down from	~3.25 TB at original resolution (median long edge 6,115 px)

Why this exists separately

The parent crawl covered ~9.16 M OCR'd pages. Filtering strictly per issue on the rights statement recorded at download time gave 7.0 M public-domain pages (published separately) and left 2.14 M pages that are not PD. Those split three ways:

Rights statement	Pages	Published?
In Copyright (InC 1.0)	1,191,749	no
Rights unknown (this set)	689,804	yes, provisionally
Copyright Not Evaluated (CNE 1.0)	257,304	no

Only the unknown slice is here. "In Copyright" is an explicit assertion and is not published. "Not Evaluated" is being reviewed separately — much of it is pre-1900 and very likely public domain under § 66 UrhG, but that needs confirming, not assuming.

Contents of a sample

Key <date>_<issuehash>_<pageid>, as in the public-domain release:

Member	Always?	What it is
.jpg	yes	page scan, long edge capped at 2400 px, JPEG q82
.json	yes	metadata + layout regions with boxes and OCR text
.alto.xml	some	the library's own ALTO, verbatim, where the crawl got one

.json boxes are in the coordinates of the .jpg beside them; .alto.xml keeps the original full-resolution coordinates, with image.scale_from_original bridging the two. Layout from PP-DocLayout_plus-L, transcription from churro-3B.

Limitations

• Not full resolution. Originals are ~2.5× larger; fetch them from the ddb_url in each record if you need archival quality.
• OCR is machine output. The model loops or truncates on a minority of regions; filter on finish_reason if clean text matters.
• Layout boxes are detections, not verified structure.
• Coverage reflects what happens to be digitised and rights-unresolved, not what was printed.

Acknowledgements

These pages were digitised and catalogued by German libraries and archives and made available through the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Each record carries provider_ddb_id and ddb_url identifying the holding institution — please credit it. Only the layout boxes and OCR text originate with this project.