Category: Copyright

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!]

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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!

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Cory Doctorow writes about copyright in the digital world:

Copyright law is hard. It used to only govern relations between giant industrial players. Copyright didn’t regulate reading an interesting tidbit from the newspaper for a friend. It didn’t regulate watching movies. But now, sharing a newspaper article with a friend (by blogging it) involves copying, and so triggers copyright. Now watching a movie (by downloading it) involves copying, so it triggers copyright. The rules that are supposed to be interpreted by lawyers at Fortune 100 companies now apply to every single kid working on a project for her class’s website.

This is like having to file with the SEC every time you loan a buddy $5 for lunch.

The rest of the post is interesting too. Apparently the MPAA is finding it hard to believe in the sanctity of other people’s intellectual property even though it has strictly enforced the sanctity of it’s own. (Found via Copy This Blog)

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Lessig’s post on Orphan Works, and the presentation he includes, will be useful to me later.

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