DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

 

Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

The Cornell University Library has eliminated use restrictions on reproductions of public domain works, including over 70,000 e-books.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

In a dramatic change of practice, Cornell University Library has announced it will no longer require its users to seek permission to publish public domain items duplicated from its collections. Instead, users may now use reproductions of public domain works made for them by the Library or available via Web sites, without seeking any further permission.

The Library, as the producer of digital reproductions made from its collections, has in the past licensed the use of those reproductions. Individuals and corporations that failed to secure permission to repurpose these reproductions violated their agreement with the Library. "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."

Institutional restrictions on the use of public domain work, sometimes labeled "copyfraud," have been the subject of much scholarly criticism. The Cornell initiative goes further than many other recent attempts to open access to public domain material by removing restrictions on both commercial and non-commercial use. Users of the public domain works are still expected to determine on their own that works are in the public domain where they live. They also must respect non-copyright rights, such as the rights of privacy, publicity, and trademark. The Library will continue to charge service fees associated with the reproduction of analog material or the provision of versions of files different than what is freely available on the Web. All library Web sites will be updated to reflect this new policy during 2009.

The new Cornell policy can be found at cdl.library.cornell.edu/guidelines.html.

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Lifts Use Restrictions on Reproductions of Public Domain Works, Including over 70,000 E-Books

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney « Just TV

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney « Just TV 

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney

My textbook, Television and American Culture, has hit the streets (or at least the postal system - order yours now!). I received my first copy yesterday, and am happy to say that it looks great. This is due not to my own work (I’m solely to blame for the content), but the excellent staff at Oxford University Press who made the design and editing process a pleasure, with great results as well.

One decision that my editor and I made early in the process was that the book’s internal illustrations would be frame-grabs from DVDs and over-the-air broadcasts, and that we would claim fair use for these images instead of seeking permissions. This is in keeping with a longstanding position articulated by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies back in 1993 (I’m a member of the SCMS Public Policy Committee and we are currently working to update this position statement for the digital age). As far as we know, the use of frame-grabs as fair use has never been challenged in court - if a publisher supports this right, they will not bend to pressure from copyright holders. And OUP has certainly been supportive of our fair use rights in this regard, encouraging me to use dozens of images (and using high-quality paper to make them look great).

The use of images becomes complicated regarding cover art. Fair use applies within books and articles, as the function of the illustrations is educational and critical, used to deepen and support analysis. Cover images can have that function, but they also help market the book. So the tradition is that publishers (or authors) license rights for images on book covers for a fee. The book’s cover design, which I love, features seven screens in need of content - the designer selected images that connect to examples discussed in the book, creating a wonderful visual collage of devices and programming. OUP’s staff set-out to license these images, after which the book went to press.

The problem emerged when ABC-Disney, who’d agreed to license the image of Lost in the center of the cover, asked what other ABC-Disney illustrations were in the book. OUP replied that the others were frame grabs under fair use provisions, and thus required no permissions. ABC-Disney then maneuvered into what my SCMS colleague and fair use guru Pat Aufderheide termed “a hostage situation”: they said that they would not agree to license the cover image unless we paid for the internal illustrations. The book was already at the printers, so nothing could be changed except at great cost. OUP paid the ransom for the internal images, and the book came out as designed.

To be clear, ABC-Disney did nothing illegal - they own the image of Lost, and we were required to pay for its use on the cover on their terms. The terms they stipulated had strings attached that, while morally wrong and based on a misreading of copyright law, are within their rights to demand. We paid for the internal images not because of copyright, but because ABC-Disney demanded it in exchange for the cover image. They made the decision to hijack fair use in exchange for a fee of less than $1,000, petty cash for a corporation like ABC-Disney. This was not the only option, as NBC-Universal had rights to the majority of cover images and licensed their use with no strings attached.

So what are the lessons to be learned here? Many media companies want to assert their copyright privileges beyond legal limits - not for petty cash, but for petty power. They aim to establish the precedent that they are in control, regardless of their legal standing. I’d guess the last thing ABC-Disney would want is to sue me or OUP over the frame grabs, as a loss in court would firmly establish the limits of their claims (and an unlikely win would yield little in revenue anyway). What they really want is bully power, the ability to make outsiders assume that rights holders also hold all the power. Unfortunately because the book was already in press, we had to yield - if we were able to, both my editor and I wanted to swap out the cover Lost image to avoid having to pay for the frame grabs that we had the right to use, thereby implying that fair use did not apply.

We do have some power here to push back. ABC got some of OUP’s money this time around, but I can say that no future editions of Television & American Culture will have ABC-Disney images on the cover. Instead we’ll use many ABC-Disney framegrabs without paying, via our fair use rights - and I encourage fellow scholars to follow suit. And I’ll use my own bully pulpits of this blog, my work with SCMS, and the tight-knit community of scholars interested in fair use to spread the word that ABC-Disney is willing to hold a non-profit academic press hostage over a tiny amount of money. Hopefully that kind of publicity offsets the pittance they received from us.

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney « Just TV

| The Public Domain |

| The Public Domain | 

Our music, our culture, our science and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press) James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free under a Creative Commons license.

Boyle’s book is a clarion call. In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that we can first understand and then protect the public domain – the ecological center of the “information environment.”

With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, from Internet file sharing and genetic engineering to patented peanut butter sandwiches, this articulate and charming book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates, including what Boyle calls the “range wars of the information age”: today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Intellectual property rights have been viewed as geeky, technical and inaccessible. Boyle shows that, as a culture, we can no longer afford the luxury of this kind of willed ignorance.   The “enclosure of the commons of the mind” matters and it matters to all of us. “Boyle has been the godfather of the Free Culture Movement since his extraordinary book, Shamans, Software, and Spleens set the framework for the field a decade ago,” says Lawrence Lessig,  “In this beautifully written and subtly argued book, Boyle has succeeded in resetting that framework, and beginning the work in the next stage of this field. The Public Domain is absolutely crucial to understanding where the debate has been, and where it will go. And Boyle’s work continues to be at the center of that debate.”

| The Public Domain |