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Cornell library removes all restrictions on use of public domain reproductions
In a "dramatic change of practice," Cornell University Library has decided it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. I congratulate Cornell and hope that other libraries will follow this precedent.
"The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks." The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell). "Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."[HT BoingBoing!] Continue reading
When Google and others impose licenses on government documents and other works in the public domain
Access to Old Information, by Steven M. Bellovin, SMBlog, 8 March 2009. Bellovin notes that Google "requests" you use public domain books you download from books.google.com for "personal, non-commercial purposes." This isn't a new issue, of course, and Bellovin points out that Congressional Information Services, Inc. claims that its microfilms of a U.S. government documents cannot be reused "except for individual research." He continues:
What we are seeing is the use of contract law to obtain rights not granted by copyright. If we are not careful, we will see public information locked up. Worse yet, digital records can be protected by so-called Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, making them inaccessible except on terms dictated by the physical record's owner. ...We need to ask about the fate of public documents (such as government records) and about the role of libraries.... [I]f a private company is going to be the designated publisher, it should not control how the documents are used.He also calls on libraries to do their part to keep this from happening, for "By agreeing to stringent restrictions, above and beyond what would be permitted under the Fair Use doctrine of copyright law, [libraries] undermine their own goals. I would add that, in the digital age, one way we can ensure free access to government information is by making the raw, complete digital information universally freely and accessible. Private sector companies can then add value and put their restrictions on their added value services, not on the content. Continue reading
change.gov changes its copyright statement, gets it *almost* right
We've been following the Obama transition team's change.gov site for a few weeks now and were dismayed that the change.gov site had been copyrighted -- remember, government documents, including Web sites in the .gov domain, are in the public domain according to copyright law. I was just alerted by a tweet from John Wonderlich, that change.gov has changed their copyright statement to a Creative Commons attribution license -- meaning visitors are 1) free to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work; and 2) to Remix/adapt the work as long as they "attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor." That CC license is "approved for free cultural works." While I applaud the change to a creative commons license as a step in the right direction, I still believe that change.gov -- and all .gov sites -- need to be explicitly in the public domain (which as you remember is a statutory requirement According to Copyright Law 17 U.S.C. § 105). If site administrators wanted the geek street cred that comes with creative commons, why didn't they choose the creative commons public domain dedication? This is an open government issue; the public domain is critical to open and transparent government operations. If the Obama administration is serious about ethics and open government, then they will change their copyright statement on change.gov and donate the site's information to the public domain. Is that so much to ask? If you agree, please contact the change.gov administrator(s) and politely but strongly urge them to support the public domain. I just did. --that is all. Continue reading
Librarians acknowledged in new work on the public domain
James Boyle, professor at Duke Law School's Center for the Study of the Public Domain(!), has a new book out called, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. There are many reasons to be excited about this new tome. Not only is it an empassioned and highly readable treatise on why it's important to protect the public domain -- which starts with the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich (read the preface :-) ) -- but Professor Boyle has put his book out under a creative commons license so you can get a free download in addition to purchasing the book for your library or for your own bookshelves. But best of all, Boyle acknowledges the tireless work of librarians in protecting public access to knowledge (you're welcome, Professor Boyle ;-) ).
The entire community of librarians deserves our thanks for standing up for free public access to knowledge for over two hundred years. Librarians are my heroes. They should be yours, too. -- Acknowledgement p. XContinue reading
Copyfraud
- There is a good article in Searcher Magazine that documents specialists and other interested in public domain materials should read:
- Title: 'Copyfraud' and Public Domain Works.
- Author: Ebbinghouse, Carol
- Source: Searcher; Jan2008, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p40-52, 9p
- Ms. Ebbinghouse does a good job of explaining how some try to usurp the public domain through fraudulent notices and/or slight alterations of materials. Her opening gives a good flavor of what's to come:
You find a PDF version of the Federalist Papers on the internet that is just what you need, but it carries a copyright date of 2001. Now that's odd, considering that the last Federalist paper was written and published in 1788. Cautious, you find an ASCII text version, but it has a copyright date of 1999. Can you download this one? Does the fact that one is an image and the other plain text make any difference? And how the heck does anything written in the 18th century end up with post-1923 copyright dates?
Can someone legitimately move public domain text into copyright? What about when you go to an archive, only to find open source and nonpublic domain titles mixed in with public domain items, but the archive seems to put restrictions on your subsequent use of everything (no copying without permission; no commercial re-use, etc.)?
- What leads some vendors to attempt to convince people that public domain materials are really under copyright? In part, because there's little legal cost to doing so, According to Ms. Ebbinghouse:
- As Jason Mazzone points out, "Copyright law suffers from a basic defect: The law's strong protections for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain. Accordingly, copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The limited penalties for copyfraud under the Copyright Act, coupled with weak enforcement … give publishers an incentive to claim ownership, however spurious, in everything. Although falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act [17 U.S.C. §506(c)] prosecutions are extremely rare. Moreover, the Copyright Act provides no civil penalty for claiming copyrights in public domain materials. … [and] no federal agency is specially charged with safeguarding the public domain."
- Reading this paragraph gives rise to an interesting idea. What if there were substantial fines for removing works from the public domain and the fines were used to run an orphan copyright registry that people could use without fear of prosecution. What if the American Library Association could get together with large foundations and start suing corporations for violations of the public domain? Would it lead to a world where if you weren't certain of a work's, you presumed it was public domain for fear of the consequences of an illegal claim of copyright? We could live with that.
- Waking up from that daydream, I want edto point out this articles to readers of FGI because so much government information is both public domain and often repackaged as being in copyright. And occaisionally like the first edition of the Iraq Study Group report, government documents have copyrighted materials embeded into them. Ms. Ebbinghouse's article can help you navigate these difficult issues and help you deal with the copyfrauds out there.
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