LOC Workshop on Etexts by Library of Congress (the reading list .txt) 📕

the ability to use compulsory licenses is extremely limited. Thus, clearinghouses and other collectives comprise one option that has succeeded in providing for use of a work. Often overlooked when one begins to use copyrighted material and put products together is how expensive the permissions process and managing it is. According to PETERS, the price of copyright in a digital medium, whatever solution is worked out, will include managing and assembling the database. She strongly recommended that publishers and librarians or people with various backgrounds cooperate to work out administratively feasible systems, in order to produce better results.

In the lengthy question-and-answer period that followed PETERS’s presentation, the following points emerged:

 

* The Copyright Office maintains that anything mechanical and

totally exhaustive probably is not protected. In the event that

what an individual did in developing potentially copyrightable

material is not understood, the Copyright Office will ask about the

creative choices the applicant chose to make or not to make. As a

practical matter, if one believes she or he has made enough of those

choices, that person has a right to assert a copyright and someone

else must assert that the work is not copyrightable. The more

mechanical, the more automatic, a thing is, the less likely it is to

be copyrightable.

 

* Nearly all photographs are deemed to be copyrightable, but no one

worries about them much, because everyone is free to take the same

image. Thus, a photographic copyright represents what is called a

“thin” copyright. The photograph itself must be duplicated, in

order for copyright to be violated.

 

* The Copyright Office takes the position that X-rays are not

copyrightable because they are mechanical. It can be argued

whether or not image enhancement in scanning can be protected. One

must exercise care with material created with public funds and

generally in the public domain. An article written by a federal

employee, if written as part of official duties, is not

copyrightable. However, control over a scientific article written

by a National Institutes of Health grantee (i.e., someone who

receives money from the U.S. government), depends on NIH policy. If

the government agency has no policy (and that policy can be

contained in its regulations, the contract, or the grant), the

author retains copyright. If a provision of the contract, grant, or

regulation states that there will be no copyright, then it does not

exist. When a work is created, copyright automatically comes into

existence unless something exists that says it does not.

 

* An enhanced electronic copy of a print copy of an older reference

work in the public domain that does not contain copyrightable new

material is a purely mechanical rendition of the original work, and

is not copyrightable.

 

* Usually, when a work enters the public domain, nothing can remove

it. For example, Congress recently passed into law the concept of

automatic renewal, which means that copyright on any work published

between l964 and l978 does not have to be renewed in order to

receive a seventy-five-year term. But any work not renewed before

1964 is in the public domain.

 

* Concerning whether or not the United States keeps track of when

authors die, nothing was ever done, nor is anything being done at

the moment by the Copyright Office.

 

* Software that drives a mechanical process is itself copyrightable.

If one changes platforms, the software itself has a copyright. The

World Intellectual Property Organization will hold a symposium 28

March through 2 April l993, at Harvard University, on digital

technology, and will study this entire issue. If one purchases a

computer software package, such as MacPaint, and creates something

new, one receives protection only for that which has been added.

PETERS added that often in copyright matters, rough justice is the outcome, for example, in collective licensing, ASCAP (i.e., American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers), and BMI (i.e., Broadcast Music, Inc.), where it may seem that the big guys receive more than their due. Of course, people ought not to copy a creative product without paying for it; there should be some compensation. But the truth of the world, and it is not a great truth, is that the big guy gets played on the radio more frequently than the little guy, who has to do much more until he becomes a big guy. That is true of every author, every composer, everyone, and, unfortunately, is part of life.

Copyright always originates with the author, except in cases of works made for hire. (Most software falls into this category.) When an author sends his article to a journal, he has not relinquished copyright, though he retains the right to relinquish it. The author receives absolutely everything. The less prominent the author, the more leverage the publisher will have in contract negotiations. In order to transfer the rights, the author must sign an agreement giving them away.

In an electronic society, it is important to be able to license a writer and work out deals. With regard to use of a work, it usually is much easier when a publisher holds the rights. In an electronic era, a real problem arises when one is digitizing and making information available. PETERS referred again to electronic licensing clearinghouses. Copyright ought to remain with the author, but as one moves forward globally in the electronic arena, a middleman who can handle the various rights becomes increasingly necessary.

The notion of copyright law is that it resides with the individual, but in an on-line environment, where a work can be adapted and tinkered with by many individuals, there is concern. If changes are authorized and there is no agreement to the contrary, the person who changes a work owns the changes. To put it another way, the person who acquires permission to change a work technically will become the author and the owner, unless some agreement to the contrary has been made. It is typical for the original publisher to try to control all of the versions and all of the uses. Copyright law always only sets up the boundaries. Anything can be changed by contract.

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SESSION VII. CONCLUSION

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GENERAL DISCUSSION Two questions for discussion Different emphases in the Workshop Bringing the text and image partisans together Desiderata in planning the long-term development of something Questions surrounding the issue of electronic deposit Discussion of electronic deposit as an allusion to the issue of standards Need for a directory of preservation projects in digital form and for access to their digitized files CETH’s catalogue of machine-readable texts in the humanities What constitutes a publication in the electronic world? Need for LC to deal with the concept of on-line publishing LC’s Network Development Office exploring the limits of MARC as a standard in terms of handling electronic information Magnitude of the problem and the need for distributed responsibility in order to maintain and store electronic information Workshop participants to be viewed as a starting point Development of a network version of AM urged A step toward AM’s construction of some sort of apparatus for network access A delicate and agonizing policy question for LC Re the issue of electronic deposit, LC urged to initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed responsibility Suggestions for cooperative ventures Commercial publishers’ fears Strategic questions for getting the image and text people to think through long-term cooperation Clarification of the driving force behind both the Perseus and the Cornell Xerox projects

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In his role as moderator of the concluding session, GIFFORD raised two questions he believed would benefit from discussion: 1) Are there enough commonalities among those of us that have been here for two days so that we can see courses of action that should be taken in the future? And, if so, what are they and who might take them? 2) Partly derivative from that, but obviously very dangerous to LC as host, do you see a role for the Library of Congress in all this? Of course, the Library of Congress holds a rather special status in a number of these matters, because it is not perceived as a player with an economic stake in them, but are there roles that LC can play that can help advance us toward where we are heading?

Describing himself as an uninformed observer of the technicalities of the last two days, GIFFORD detected three different emphases in the Workshop: 1) people who are very deeply committed to text; 2) people who are almost passionate about images; and 3) a few people who are very committed to what happens to the networks. In other words, the new networking dimension, the accessibility of the processability, the portability of all this across the networks. How do we pull those three together?

Adding a question that reflected HOCKEY’s comment that this was the fourth workshop she had attended in the previous thirty days, FLEISCHHAUER wondered to what extent this meeting had reinvented the wheel, or if it had contributed anything in the way of bringing together a different group of people from those who normally appear on the workshop circuit.

HOCKEY confessed to being struck at this meeting and the one the Electronic Pierce Consortium organized the previous week that this was a coming together of people working on texts and not images. Attempting to bring the two together is something we ought to be thinking about for the future: How one can think about working with image material to begin with, but structuring it and digitizing it in such a way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and find a common way of building text and images together so that they can be used jointly in the future, with the network support to begin there because that is how people will want to access it.

In planning the long-term development of something, which is what is being done in electronic text, HOCKEY stressed the importance not only of discussing the technical aspects of how one does it but particularly of thinking about what the people who use the stuff will want to do. But conversely, there are numerous things that people start to do with electronic text or material that nobody ever thought of in the beginning.

LESK, in response to the question concerning the role of the Library of Congress, remarked the often suggested desideratum of having electronic deposit: Since everything is now computer-typeset, an entire decade of material that was machine-readable exists, but the publishers frequently did not save it; has LC taken any action to have its copyright deposit operation start collecting these machine-readable versions? In the absence of PETERS, GIFFORD replied that the question was being actively considered but that that was only one dimension of the problem. Another dimension is the whole question of the integrity of the original electronic document. It becomes highly important in science to prove authorship. How will that be done?

ERWAY explained that, under the old policy, to make a claim for a copyright for works that were published in electronic form, including software, one had to submit a paper copy of the first and last twenty pages of code—something that represented the work but did not include the entire work itself and had little value to anyone. As a temporary measure, LC has claimed the right to demand electronic versions of electronic publications. This measure entails a proactive role for the Library to say that it wants a particular electronic version. Publishers then have perhaps a year to submit it. But the real problem for LC is what to do with all this material in all these different formats. Will the Library mount it? How will it give people access to it? How does LC keep track