Copyright Issues Relevant to the Creation of a Digital Archive: A Preliminary Assessment
Copyright
Besek explains how the collecting and preserving of digital content poses challenges to the intellectual property rights that libraries and archives are use to following. A balance between copyright owners and users is an ongoing process; therefore, Besek offers a paper in which she describes the copyright rules and exceptions. She also focuses on issues those involved with libraries and archives might encounter if involved in the creation of a digital archive. Besek explains that numerous factors exist when determining the copyright implications for works being considered for inclusion in an archive. Some of these factors include: the purpose of the archive, its subject matter, the manner in which it will acquire materials, and who will have access to the archive, and from where, and under what conditions. The purpose of Besek’s paper is not to go in-depth about copyright, but to provide the reader and potential archive creator, with information about basic copyright matters, so that the creator might recognize areas of concern as he/she plans the archive.
Besek, June
Council on Library and Information Resources
2003
Polk, Victoria
Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress
Report
http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub112/pub112.pdf
Copyright and Related Issues Relevant to Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Unpublished Pre1972 Sound Recordings by Libraries and Archives
Copyright
This report discusses what archives must do in order to provide access to unpublished sound recordings from 1972 and earlier. Unpublished sound recordings may have been created for private use or broadcast, but were not distributed to the public. They may have been such recordings as live musical performances or interviews. Unpublished sound recordings rights are different from commercial recordings intended for sale. Archives and libraries may have purchased them or have had them donated. Some may be significant because they may be the only recordings of a particular event. The report’s review of copyright law finds that libraries are liable for preserving, copying, and streaming unpublished sound recordings from pre-1972. However, it finds it unlikely that libraries will ever be held liable for these laws, especially since sound recordings and their legal protection vary so much.
Besek, June M.
Council on Library and Information Resources
2009
Polk, Victoria
CLIR
Report
hhttp://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub144
Lawrence Lessig on Copyright Laws at SES Chicago 2008
Copyright
In this video interview, Lawrence Lessig speaks about the nature of copyright in the digital age. Speaking at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo in Chicago, 2008, Lessig explains that due to our ability to produce infinite and vast numbers of copies, our current copyright laws are now outdated. He recommends creating a new architecture for copyright that functions more like a shared economy, than a motive to protect creators. The sharing economy best serves the public because it neither punishes the creator nor the consumer.
Lessig, Lawrence
SES Conference Expo
2008-12-09
Polk, Victoria
Video Recording
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaKD055Tang.
Do Copyright Laws Stifle Creativity?
Copyright
Lessig presents a variety of music videos which have been copied and parodied by ordinary people and uploaded to YouTube. One of the parodies features a baby dancing to music protected by copyright, which ultimately led to the publisher’s cease and desist request to the video's creator. Lessig questions our social values, when such harmless derivations of copyrighted work result in harsh or punitive consequences. He contrasts the “end of the era of passivity” to the current creative movement in digital media and the corresponding restriction by owners of copyright.
Lessig, Lawrence
FORA.tv
2009
Polk, Victoria
Video Recording
http://youtube.com/JXwB9FlkNXA
Exploring the Evolution of Access: Classified, Privacy, and Proprietary Restrictions
Copyright
The three authors of this article discuss three different repositories which house confidential, legally protected content and describe measures each institution takes to balance the archival values of preserving and providing access to its holdings against the equally important archival value of protecting the privacy rights and concerns of its donors. William C. Carpenter recounts the history of declassifying military and government documents and commends the succession of presidential orders that established automatic declassification in response to the ever-growing accumulation of military and government documents. While governments frequently halt declassification of certain documents during crises, such as 9-11, or open documents as in the Abu-Ghraib debacle, the automated declassification system places the onus on the donating agencies for keeping records sealed.
Business archives, on the other hand, enjoy greater legal protection for sealing its records from public access. Sara A. Polirer explains U.S. trade laws and property rights consider business records economically valuable assets despite their intangible nature. Because digitization and Internet commerce place marketable ideas at greater risk of copyright infringement, and because economic value is a fundamental factor in writing legislation, business archives must implement policies that promote business needs over the public’s right to know. The archival practice, “due diligence” applies to business archives in the careful classification of content and anticipation of what future researchers may need to know.
Health science archives face an especially difficult challenge in balancing the public’s right to know with protecting the privacy of patient records. Judith A. Wiener discusses the rationale for the patient privacy act, HIPAA, and identifies the problems incurred by health related archives ingesting health records. Because HIPAA does not designate time limits (as do military and government declassification regulations), nor does it provide guidelines for reformatting and digitizing health records, health science archives have had to restrict access and impede potential research and scholarship. In response, individual repositories and institutions are developing policies including the redactment of personally identifiable information and inserting time limits to both protect the privacy of the donors while providing access to the historically rich records.
Carpenter, William C.
Nichols, Charlene
Polirer, Sarah A.
Wiener, Judith A.
The American Archivist
2011
Polk, Victoria
Journal Article
http://www2.archivists.org/sites/all/files/AAOSv074-Session602.pdf
The Right to Preserve: The Rights Issues of Digital Preservation
Copyright
The project's goal was to research how and whether licensed access to digital content and copyright legislation affected the capability of libraries to offer long-term availability to that specific content, and to advise possible answers for any issues identified. This article looks at the international perspective of general identified issues pertaining to copyright laws and publisher licenses.
Ayre, Catherine
Muir, Adrienne
D-Lib Magazine
2004
Victoria Polk
Digital Preservation
Journal Article
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march04/ayre/03ayre.html
Acquiring Copyright Permission to Digitize and Provide Open Access to Books
Copyright
Scholarly communications librarian Denise Troll Covey elaborates the difficulties and challenges of digitizing and providing access to books. Reporting on three separate studies sponsored wholly or in part by the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, Covey cites the labor and time intensive work behind securing publisher and author permissions for not merely digitizing, but also providing access to previously printed works. Despite the open access initiatives by scholars and international consortium, such as the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002,she reports fewer than half of the targeted collections become available to the public. While continuing to encourage and promote efforts to secure copyright permissions for digitizing and publishing books, Covey acknowledges current U.S. copyright laws must be changed and advocates lobbying legislative officials to develop both laws and technologies that do not impinge upon the public's right to know. Notwithstanding recent measures to curtail "copyright misuse" (overly restrictive practices by copyright holders), Covey notes that legal protection for creative expression and doctrines such as Fair Use and library copying privileges have weakened in response to aggressive publisher and author tactics to secure and restrict access to digitized books.
One solution for scholarly institutions countering restricted access has been to create institutional repositories. Although these measures facilitate research and scholarly exchange, they do not meet the larger public's rights to information and creative expression. As each of the Carnegie Mellon studies reveal, the status of copyright permission for digitizing individual books is often unknown or unattainable, erring on the conservative side and therefore, rendering such books unavailable. Covey provides sources for locating copyright status and suggests diplomatic means for requesting and securing rights to digitize and make available previously printed books.
Covey, Denise Troll
Council on Library and Information Resources
2005
Polk, Victoria
©2014 Council on Library and Information Resources. All rights reserved.
E-Book
ISBN 1-932326-22-7
ISBN 978-1-932326-22-2
Bibliographic Indeterminacy and the Scale of Problems and Opportunities of “Rights” in Digital Collection Building
Copyright
John P. Wilkin, executive director of <a href="http://www.hathitrust.org/">HathiTrust</a> and associate research librarian for the University of Michigan, provides an in-depth report on the current percentages of published works that are at various stages of public domain and in-copyright. He explains that ascertaining the extent of the institution’s collections, the number of orphan works (holder of copyright unavailable), and the number of works in-copyright, enables librarians and archivists to develop strategies for storage and circulation of items particularly suited for academic institutions. A comprehensive bibliography with complete metadata enables scholarship found lacking in many large-scale bibliographic resources, including WorldCat and Google Books. Although Wilkin acknowledges these sources facilitate discovery through their search and retrieval interfaces, the quality of information provided is limited primarily to publication data. He suggests a significant amount of gray literature and orphan works are unavailable due to copyright restrictions and minimal cataloging. Thus, even within academic institutions, the patrons are unaware of potentially valuable resources. Using HathiTrust’s resources to survey the scope and categories of works ranging from public domain to in-copyright status, Wilkin concludes that the largest percentage of academic library collections are comprised of orphan works. In addition to the patron’s lack of access to these rich materials, these institutions incur great cost and unnecessary duplication of printed material for storage and maintenance.
Wilkin, John P.
Council on Library and Information Resources
2011
Polk, Victoria
CLIR
Report
http://www.clir.org/pubs/ruminations/01wilkin
Legal issues relating to the archiving of Internet resources in the UK, EU, USA and Australia: A study undertaken for the JISC and Wellcome Trust
Copyright
Andrew Charlesworth, senior research fellow in IT at the University of Bristol, reports on copyright permissions and legislation affecting the archiving of Internet sources in the UK, Europe, Australia, and the United States. In this report, Charlesworth identifies the national legal and technical responses for protecting intellectual property, and describes countermeasures taken by libraries and archives to obtain and open access to these Internet sources.
While Charlesworth notes that the U.S. system is both "pragmatic and confusing," he illuminates key issues for U.S. digital archivists and librarians including laws favoring primarily "physical" and "decisional" privacy rights. This translates into government protection mainly for individuals and not for third parties, such as libraries and archives. The principles of fair use and rights to create archival copies do not necessarily afford a web archive's right to preserve and disseminate web content. Charlesworth cites two major U.S. web archiving projects, the Library of Congress' "Minerva" and the Internet Archive. Although Minerva served primarily to gauge user response to a limited number of archived web sites, the Internet Archive continues to expand as it adheres to its mission to preserve all "publicly accessible materials displayed on the Internet." Charlesworth contrasts the lack of selection policy and surface web crawling against European and Australian more clearly defined guidelines and licensing options. The U.S. web archiving practices, indicated by Minerva and the Internet Archive, do not have clearly defined legal permissions and are thus vulnerable to legal redress as well as losing potentially valuable information in the "deep" (private) web.
Charlesworth, Andrew
Joint Information Systems Committee
2003-02-25
Polk, Victoria
CC BY-NC-ND
Document
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/uploaded_documents/archiving_legal.pdf
Intellectual Property Rights: Issues for Creation of Institutional Repository
Digital humanities
Nath, Shasni S.
Sridhara, B.
Joshi, C.M.
Kumar, Puneet
Journal of Library and Information Technology
2008
Polk, Victoria
Creative Commons License: CCAttribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
Journal Article
http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/216