The WLA Blog: WLA 2009: Canoe the Open Content Rapids

Canoe the Open Content Rapids
Dorothea Salo, UW System Digital Content Group

Instruction

Digital storytelling - copyright issues over pulling from files found on Google Images - sets a bad example
Scholarship reasons to provide copyright education, provide proper information sources
Different from country to country
Instructors tend to violate copyright, as well as avoid activities that are probably fine

Copyright

Limited monopoly over original works that are fixed in a tangible medium (includes stuff on Internet)
It's in the Constitution - not about making money, about promoting "progress of science and the useful arts"
Life of author + 70 years; 95 years corporate entities
OK to copy for scholarship, parody/satire, library preservation, classroom use; limited copying for other reasons = "fair use"
You can: a) sell in whole/part, b) give it away for free, c) license it for free/payment
Faculty generally fall into (b) without realizing it - they think because they wrote an article, they own it
Fair use - only way you know for certain is if you're sued and win
General guidelines do exist
Legislation has become more and more restrictive; results - culturejamming

Public domain

Prefer to think of things as "rising" into the public domain, not "falling"
Google Books - includes items clearly in the public domain (pre-1923), others clearly under copyright, others are "orphan works" because we don't know who owns copyright (or if they're alive etc.)
Hathi Trust will decide whether items Google is vacillating about are actually in the public domain
Musopen - building collection of online recordings - raise money for your group to record a piece (long-dead composers, score acquired legally) and upload
Flickr Commons - photographs in public domain; allows libraries and other digitizers to share and receive comments
Project Gutenberg - one of the first; scanned, transcribed public domain texts
Gov docs - work produced by fed employees in course of jobs is in public domain (except classified works); includes images
State gov docs = depends on the state

Open access

Includes peer-reviewed works, digital collections, working papers, technical reports, conference presentations, crowd-sourced solutions to mathematical problems
"Green" open access - "self-archiving" (not really), repositories (Dorothea doesn't like the term)
"Gold" open access - originally published open access, no subscription fees, no cost to access
"Mandates" - FACULTY granting to their institutions the right to post their research results online (some places aren't considering publications towards tenure unless they're deposited in repository; controversy over whether open access publications are getting a citation edge); FUNDERS especially federal agencies want taxpayer-funded research results to be available freely to the public; LIBRARIES at research institutions]
Biggest tool to find OA materials = OAIster (soon to become part of WorldCat); also DOAJ, Google, Google Scholar
Open Courses - controversial - http://ocwfinder.com
Learning materials - OER Commons, MERLOT (long-standing) - points to materials stored elsewhere, ODEPO directory
Creative Commons - generate license granting specific rights for your works (attribution, no derivatives, non-commercial use, requirement to release the new work under the same license)
Flickr has a Creative Commons search, or Flickr Storm has advanced CC license search
Music (ccMixter, Incompetech, Jamendo)

To Do

When you accept a work for digitization, educate the creator and ask for their desired status for the items
Read all publication agreements, and ask for what you want - Dorothea hasn't heard of any publishers taking back their decision to publish based on copyright addenda
Instead of libraries and librarians being the "copyright cop" - promote Creative Commons

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