Peter Hirtle has updated his Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States chart, the chart for anyone who needs to begin evaluating the copyright status of a work produced in the United States. This version has a new URL, so update any links you had before. The chart also includes new sections on sound recordings and architectural works.

For the two or three of you that haven’t heard, the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has decided to license permissions to copyrighted material (note that on the left-hand side of that screen you can read an overview of the license itself in PDF). They say that this will be convenient (well yeah, you’ve already paid) and that you’ll gain “confidence” and “peace of mind.”

As much as I hate to say it, I think they’ll gain a lot of customers on those last two points alone. Nothing makes people squirm as much as copyright permissions. Everyone always doubts their fair use analysis and forgets that “multiple copies for classroom use” is written right into the fair use clause of the law.

But why might you not want to sign up for that license? James Boyle of the Financial Times has a great piece on that, as does Peter Hirtle of the LibraryLaw blog (his analysis is here). In short, here are the key issues as I see them (both of which figure large in Hirtle’s post):

• Paying for permission when you don’t have to erodes fair use arguments in the future by increasing the market value of the work.
• Permissions come in many shapes and sizes. What is the use of licensing permissions from the CCC when we already pay licensing fees from databases, for example?

I would hate to see my library go this route, especially since I imaging that the CCC fee structures are based on a fairly -er- “optimistic” interpretation of fair use. And yet I feel sympathy for libraries that either don’t have the staff to go through the permissions process, or don’t have the training to determine fair use on their own.

At the same time, just writing that last sentence makes me feel like I’ve just said, “It’s just too bad some kids don’t have the wherewithal to learn to read…” I recognize that licensing will be an attractive option, but I think it’ll cripple us.

I’ve been learning more and more about copyright ever since I landed in the group on campus that wrote our copyright policy. But I’ve almost exclusively learned about copyright from the content user’s perspective rather than the content creator’s perspective. Well, lately I’ve begun to learn about that other side of copyright law.

A few months ago I was asked to write a chapter for an upcoming ACRL publication. Right away I asked, “Can I have a co-author, and can we put our finished product into our institutional repository?” The answers came back in the affirmative, which was very encouraging all around.

Then we got our copyright agreements in the mail and the cover letter said, “This form grants you the copyright to your work, allows you to use your work elsewhere after the original publication, and allows deposit in your institutional repository.” Woohoo! But….

The agreement itself said, “…. the Author hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher … all copyrights therein or relating thereto…” Hmmmm…

Further down, the agreement says that “Publisher hereby grants to Author a royalty-free license to publish the Work in any book of which the Author is the author or editor, provided the Work is identified as having first been published in the original publication cited above. The Publisher also grants to the Author the right to file the work in their institutional repository.” So that’s very, very nice, but it’s not the same as keeping our copyrights.

So, after talking it over with some people in the LSW chat room, I asked the publisher if I’d gotten the right agreement. It’s been known to happen that there is more than one possible agreement and that the author receives the wrong one.

But it turns out I got the right one. ACRL’s response was very encouraging, though. They said they’ve never been asked about this before and wondered what would be better. So I suggested removing that bit about “you get to keep your copyrights” from the cover letter, and then adding a clause saying that copyrights revert to authors X number of months or years after the book officially goes out of print. Sound reasonable? I hope they think so.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to our copyright group on campus that we should add a “what to think about before you sign away your rights” facet to our copyright training.

[Update: It looks like ACRL thinks this is reasonable! They are even thinking of asking their lawyers to draw up something even more permissive.]

[Update 2: They're thinking of making the agreement explicit that they own the copyright, but we get to use the work in any old way we want as long as we cite it as having been published first in this ACRL volume. Sounds wonderful to me!]

Stanford has released a very slick Copyright Renewal Database. From their “About” page:

Copyright status of works published in the US between 1923 and 1963 is of particular concern, as it is dependent on whether the original copyright was renewed. Changes in copyright law have removed this question for works published after 1963. The Copyright Office has never made available in machine-readable form the renewals it received between 1950 and 1977, which would generally cover renewals for books published between 1923 and 1950. This has made it difficult for libraries and archives to determine which books are in the public domain.

Several organizations have taken steps to make the Copyright Office’s records more accessible. Most noteworthy is Project Gutenberg, which scanned and transcribed the printed renewal records. You can view their work here. This database builds on their work, making the text searchable by field in a single file. We are also grateful for the early efforts of Michael Lesk in the creation of this database.

Just to emphasize the point: this is finally one single place to search for these records. No more juggling two or three clunky tools. Yay!