Everybody's Libraries

January 2, 2011

Public Domain Day 2011: Will the tide be turned?

Filed under: copyright — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 12:40 am

This year’s Public Domain Day, the day on which a year’s worth of copyrights expire in many countries, is getting particular attention in Europe, where events in various European cities commemorate authors who died in 1940, and whose works are now in the public domain there.

Or, to be more precise, they’ve returned to the public domain there.  Although the reigning international copyright standard, the Berne Convention, requires copyrights to run at least for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years, the European Union in 1993 mandated a retroactive copyright extension to life plus 70 years, to match the longest term in any of its member countries at the time.  Twenty years of the public domain were buried by this extension.  For at least the next 3 years, all we’ll be seeing in Europe is the old public domain re-emerging.

The public domain has seen losses and freezes in much of the rest of the world since.  In 1998, after years of lobbying by the entertainment industry, the US enacted its own 20-year copyright extension.  Thankfully, this extension only froze the public domain instead of rolling it back, but we will wait another 8 years before more publications enter the public domain here due to age.  The 1998 extension was just the latest of a series of copyright extensions in the United States.  In 1954, US copyrights ran a maximum of 56 years, so all of the works published before 1955 would now in the public domain here were it not for later extensions.   (Instead, we still have copyrights in force as far back as 1923.)

There’s no clear end in sight to further extensions.  Since 1998 I’ve steadily been seeing country after country extend its terms, often pushed by trade negotiations with Europe or the United States.  “Life+50″ may still be the global standard, but bi-lateral and region-specific trade agreements have pushed terms up to “life+70″ in many countries around the world.  Some countries have gone even longer — Mexico, for instance, is now “life+100″– making convenient targets for further rounds of copyright extensions in the name of international “harmony”.

There are some bright spots, though.  Many countries continue to hold the line at life+50 years, including Canada (despite years of pressure from its southern neighbor).  As of today, residents of “life+50″ countries are now free to republish, adapt, reuse, and build upon works by authors who died in 1960 or before, in whatever way they see fit.   I hope to show some of what this means as I introduce listings from projects like Gutenberg Canada to The Online Books Page this year.

In the US, where many copyrights prior to 1964 didn’t run for their full length unless renewed, a number of digitization projects (most notably Hathi Trust) have been finding post-1922 works with unrenewed copyrights, and making them freely readable online.  These works tend not to be the best-sellers or popular backlist titles, but collectively they embody much of the knowledge and culture of the mid-20th century.  I’ve also been very happy to list many of these works over the past year.

At the same time, there’s been a growing awareness that copyright need not be “one size fits all”, particularly for works that no longer have much commercial value.  This insight helped lead various authors’ and publishers’ groups to negotiate a blanket license to Google to make out of print works generally available online.  The license, part of the Google Books Settlement, is not without its controversy or problems, and might or might not eventually get court approval.  But it suggests political feasibility for similar efforts to free older, more obscure cultural and scholarly works now languishing under exclusive copyright control.

We’ve even seen at least one entertainment industry spokesman speculate out loud that re-introducing simple formalities to maintain copyright might not be such a bad idea.  Such formalities are forbidden by the Berne Convention, so they could not be introduced across the board without re-negotiating that treaty.  That would be no easy task.

But the recent round of copyright extensions may at least provide an opening for international experimentation.  Now that copyright terms go past the Berne minimum in many countries, the post-Berne portion of the copyright term could potentially be made subject to requirements that Berne doesn’t allow (such as the renewal of copyrights in some suitable international registry system).  That could not only free many older “orphan works” for reuse, but if it works well it could also lead to negotiating a farther-reaching international registry system. Such a system could make it easier both to contact copyright holders for permissions, and to free works for the public domain whose owners no longer cared (or who never did want) to maintain exclusive rights.

I’ve been practicing a self-imposed system of “formalities” myself over the last few years.  On every Public Domain Day, I’ve been freeing published works of mine more than 14 years old, except for works where I explicitly opt to reserve copyright.  (Copyrights in the US originally ran for 14 years unless renewed for another 14.)  So: All works of mine published in 1996 for which I control the copyright are hereby released to the public domain.  (Legally, you can consider them all to be declared CC0.)  Much of the publication I did that year online can now be found through sites like the Internet Archive, which started crawling my web sites in late 1996.

I’d be very happy to hear about other gifts people are making to the public domain, as well as successes in bringing more of the public domain to light online, and in expanding the scope of the public domain as a whole.  Happy Public Domain Day to all!

October 18, 2010

Book liberation with open data (or, how The Online Books Page just got much bigger)

Filed under: copyright,discovery,metadata,online books,open access,subjects — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 12:43 pm

As we begin Open Access Week, it’s worth noting the importance of open access not only to research articles, data, teaching materials, and the like, but also to books.  We are fortunate not only that millions of historic volumes are now openly accessible from various digitization projects, but also that many recent volumes are also available as open access from a variety of academic presses, government and nonprofit agencies, and other individuals and groups.

One thing that’s been slowing down the use of open access books is that information about them has not been distributed and exploited as widely as it could be.  While you can search for lots of books in places like Google Books and the Internet Archive, the interfaces and metadata they provide is not always ideal for finding what you want.  It may be hard to find multi-volume works, for instance, or to browse by subject area to the level of detail that researchers expect, or to find information about books not actually managed by the site you’re searching.

Part of the problem is that the library community faces its own open access issues with its cataloging data.  Many libraries use OCLC’s WorldCat to collaborate on cataloging books, but WorldCat is not open access, as defined by projects like the Budapest Open Access Initiative (which uses a definition that includes free reuse and redistrihution of “open access” material by anyone).  After months of debate (including some discussion on this blog), OCLC decided to adopt a policy that allows access and reuse of WorldCat-mediated data by OCLC members, but limits use and redistribution outside the membership.

A number of libraries and library-related organizations, however, have taken a more open approach.  For instance, several German libraries and the biblios.net project make their bibliographic data available for reuse without restriction.  The British Library is now making its bibliographic data generally available for non-commercial use.  And the Open Knowledge Foundation has also released a draft of working principles for open bibliographic data, recommending that bibliographic data be made available with as few restrictions as possible (ideally, with public domain dedication).

Once you’ve opened your data, lots of people can reuse and adapt it in useful ways.   For instance, I have harvested metadata provided without restriction by Hathi Trust on over 1 million freely readable online volumes they have in their digital collections.  Today I have made it browsable and searchable on The Online Books Page.  Not only does this let users search across lots of books digitized by Google, Microsoft, and various other projects large and small, but it also provides new ways of exploring the Hathi collection not previously possible, such as browsing through subject maps of the collection.  (See, for instance, how you can explore various battles and campaigns of the American revolution, with both Hathi and non-Hathi titles.)  My announcement on The Online Books Page has more details about the new Hathi books, and the new “extended shelves” that will eventually include additional collections as well.

The Hathi data I’m using is not as rich as full MARC catalog data would be.  (I’m getting it from their OAI data export, which strips out some information from the original catalog records, and I’m currently using their Dublin Core data instead of their MARC data.)  Fortunately, I can use other open data to make automated improvements to the data I get from Hathi.  In particular, I’m using open subject authority data provided by the Library of Congress to automatically update many of the subject headings in the Hathi data, so that they’re compatible with present-day cataloging practice.   (I describe the basic technique in a previous post.)  In the future, I plan to use further data sources and automated methods to make author names and subject assignments for books more consistent and complete as well.

I hope the new extended shelves will be useful to users of both The Online Books Page and Hathi Trust’s online book collection.  Others are free to reuse the same data I used to create similar, or better, book searching and browsing indexes. I’d like to thank Hathi Trust, the Library of Congress, Google, and the other digitization, preservation and copyright-clearance partners of Hathi for providing the open data that makes it possible to liberate all of these books.  And I’d love to hear from readers browsing the new, extended online bookshelves.

October 15, 2010

Journal liberation: A community enterprise

Filed under: copyright,discovery,open access,publishing,serials,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 2:53 pm

The fourth annual Open Access Week begins on Monday.  If you follow the official OAW website, you’ll be seeing a lot of information about the benefits of free access to scholarly research.  The amount of open-access material grows every day, but much of the research published in scholarly journals through the years is still practically inaccessible to many, due to prohibitive cost or lack of an online copy.

That situation can change, though, sometimes more dramatically than one might expect.  A post I made back in June, “Journal liberation: A Primer”, discussed the various ways in which people can open access to journal content, past and present,  one article or scanned volume at a time.  But things can go much faster if you have a large group of interested liberators working towards a common goal.

Consider the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), for example.  It’s one of the most prominent journals in the world, valued both for its reports on groundbreaking new research, and for its documentation, in its back issues, of nearly 200 years of American medical history.  Many other journals with lesser value still cannot be read without paying for a subscription, or visiting a research library that has paid for a subscription.  But you can find and read most of NEJM’s content freely online, both past and present. Several groups of people made this possible.  Here are some of them.

The journal’s publisher has for a number of years provided open access to all research articles more than 6 months old, from 1993 onward.  (Articles less than 6 months old are also freely available to readers in certain developing countries, and in some cases for readers elsewhere as well.)  A registration requirement was dropped in 2007.

Funders of medical research, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, have encouraged publishers in the medical field to maintain or adopt such open access policies, by requiring their grantees (who publish many of the articles in journals like the NEJM) to make their articles openly accessible within months of publication.  Some of these funders also maintain their own repositories of scholarly articles that have appeared in NEJM and similar journals.

Google Books has digitized most of the back run of the NEJM and its predecessor publications as part of its Google Books database.  Many of these volumes are freely accessible to the public.  This is not the only digital archive of this material; there’s also one on NEJM’s own website, but access there requires either a subscription or a $15 payment per article.   Google’s scans, unlike the ones on the NEJM website, include the advertisements that appeared along with the articles.  These ads document important aspects of medical history that are not as easily seen in the articles, on subjects ranging from the evolving requirements and curricula of 19th-century medical schools to the early 20th-century marketing of heroin for patients as young as 3 years old.

It’s one thing to scan journal volumes, though; it’s another to make them easy to find and use– which is why NEJM’s for-pay archive got a fair bit of publicity when it was released this summer, while Google’s scans went largely unnoticed.  As I’ve noted before, it can be extremely difficult to find all of the volumes of a multi-volume work in Google Books; and it’s even more difficult in the case of NEJM, since issues prior to 1928 were published under different journal titles.  Fortunately, many of the libraries that supplied volumes for Google’s scanners have also organized links to the scanned volumes, making it easier to track down specific volumes.  The Harvard Libraries, for instance, have a chronologically ordered list of links to most of the volumes of the journal from 1828 to 1922, a period when it was known as the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal.

For many digitized journals, open access stops after 1922, because of uncertainty about copyright.  However, most scholarly journals have public domain content after that date, so it’s possible to go further if you research journal copyrights.  Thanks to records provided by the US Copyright Office and volunteers for The Online Books Page, we can determine that issues and articles of the NEJM prior to the 1950s did not have their copyrights renewed.  With this knowledge, Hathi Trust has been able and willing to open access to many volumes from the 1930s and 1940s.

We at The Online Books Page can then pull together these volumes and articles from various sources, and create a cover page that allows people to easily get to free versions of this journal and its predecessors all the way back to 1812.

Most of the content of the New England Journal of Medicine has thus been liberated by the combined efforts of several different organizations (and other interested people).  There’s still more than can be done, both in liberating more of the content, and in making the free content easier to find and use.  But I hope this shows how widespread  journal liberation efforts of various sorts can free lots of scholarly research.  And I hope we’ll hear about many more  free scholarly articles and journals being made available, or more accessible and usable, during Open Access Week and beyond.

I’ve also had another liberation project in the works for a while, related to books, but I’ll wait until Open Access Week itself to announce it.  Watch this blog for more open access-related news, after the weekend.

June 11, 2010

Journal liberation: A primer

Filed under: copyright,libraries,open access,publishing,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 10:07 am

As Dorothea Salo recently noted, the problem of limited access to high-priced scholarly journals may be reaching a crisis point.  Researchers that are not at a university, or are at a not-so-wealthy one, have long been frustrated by journals that are too expensive for them to read (except via slow and cumbersome inter-library loan, or distant library visits).  Now, major universities are feeling the pain as well, as bad economic news has forced budget cuts in many research libraries, even as further price increases are expected for scholarly journals.  This has forced many libraries to consider dropping even the most prestigious journals, when their prices have risen too high to afford.

Recently, for instance, the University of California, which has been subject to significant budget cuts and furloughs,  sent out a letter in protest of Nature Publishing Group’s proposal to raise their subscription fees by 400%.  The letter raised the possibility of cancelling all university subscriptions to NPG, and having scholars boycott the publisher.

Given that Nature is one of the most prestigious academic journals now publishing, one that has both groundbreaking current articles and a rich history of older articles, these are strong words.  But dropping subscriptions to journals like Nature might not be as as much of a hardship for readers as it once might have been.  Increasingly, it’s possible to liberate the research content of academic journals, both new and old, for the world.  And, as I’ll explain below, now may be an especially opportune time to do that.

Liberating new content

While some of the content of journals like Nature is produced by the journal’s editorial staff or other writers for hire, the research papers are typically written by outside researchers, employed by universities and other research institutions.  These researchers hold the original copyright to their articles, and even if they sign an agreement with a journal to hand over rights to them (as they commonly do), they retain whatever rights they don’t sign over.  For many journals, including the ones published by Nature Publishing Group, researchers retain the right to post the accepted version of their paper (known as a “preprint”) in local repositories.  (According to the Romeo database, they can also eventually post the “postprint”– the final draft resulting after peer review, but before actual publication in the journal– under certain conditions.)  These drafts aren’t necessarily identical to the version of record published in the journal itself, but they usually contain the same essential information.

So if you, as a reader, find a reference to a Nature paper that you can’t access, you can search to see if the authors have placed a free copy in an open access repository. If they haven’t, you can contact one of them to encourage them do do so.  To find out more about providing open access to research papers, see this guide.

If a journal’s normal policies don’t allow authors to share their work freely in an open access repository, authors  may still be able to retain their rights with a contract addendum or negotiation.  When that hasn’t worked, some academics have decided to publish in, or review for, other journals, as the California letter suggests.  (When pushed too far, some professors have even resigned en masse from editorial boards to start new journals that are friendlier to authors and readers.

If nothing else, scholarly and copyright conventions generally respect the right of authors to send individual copies of their papers to colleagues that request them.  Some repository software includes features that make such copies extremely easy to request and send out.  So even if you can’t find a free copy of a paper online already, you can often get one if you ask an author for it.

Liberating historic content

Many journals, including Nature, are important not only for their current papers, but for the historic record of past research contained in their back issues.  Those issues may be difficult to get a hold of, especially as many libraries drop print subscriptions, deaccession old journal volumes, or place them in remote storage.  And electronic access to old content, when it’s available at all, can be surprisingly expensive.  For instance, if I want to read this 3-paragraph letter to the editor from 1872 on Nature‘s web site, and I’m not signed in at a subscribing institution, the publisher asks me to pay them $32 to read it in full.

Fortunately, sufficiently old journals are in the public domain, and digitization projects are increasingly making them available for free.  At this point, nearly all volumes of Nature published before 1922 can now be read freely online, thanks to scans made available to the public by the University of Wisconsin, Google, and Hathi Trust.  I can therefore read the letters from that 1872 issue, on this page, without having to pay $32.

Mass digitization projects typically stop providing public access to content published after 1922, because copyright renewals after that year might still be in force.  However, most scholarly journals– including, as it turns out, Nature — did not file copyright renewals.  Because of this, Nature issues are actually in the public domain in the US all the way through 1963 (after which copyright renewal became automatic).  By researching copyrights for journals, we can potentially liberate lots of scholarly content that would otherwise be inaccessible to many. You can read more about journal non-renewal in this presentation, and research copyright renewals via this site.

Those knowledgeable about copyright renewal requirements may worry that the renewal requirement doesn’t apply to Nature, since it originates in the UK, and renewal requirements currently only apply to material that was published in the US before, or around the same time as, it was published abroad.  However, offering to distribute copies in the US counts as US publication for the purposes of copyright law.  Nature did just that when they offered foreign subscriptions to journal issues and sent them to the US; and as one can see from the stamp of receipt on this page, American universities were receiving copies within 30 days of the issue date, which is soon enough to retain the US renewal requirement.  Using similar evidence, one can establish US renewal requirements for many other journals originating in other countries.

Minding the gap

This still leaves a potential gap between the end of the public domain period and the present.  That gap is only going to grow wider over time, as copyright extensions continue to freeze the growth of the public domain in the US.

But the gap is not yet insurmountable, particularly for journals that are public domain into the 1960s.  If a paper published in 1964 included an author who was a graduate student or a young researcher, that author may well be still alive (and maybe even be still working) today, 46 years later.  It’s not too late to try to track authors down (or their immediate heirs), and encourage and help them to liberate their old work.

Moreover, even if those authors signed away all their rights to journal publishers long ago, or don’t remember if they still have any rights over their own work, they (or their heirs) may have an opportunity to reclaim their rights.  For some journal contributions between 1964 and 1977, copyright may have reverted to authors (or their heirs) at the time of copyright renewal, 28 years after initial publication.  In other cases, authors or heirs can reclaim rights assigned to others, using a termination of transfer.  Once authors regain their rights over their articles, they are free to do whatever they like with them, including making them freely available.

The rules for reversion of author’s rights are rather arcane, and I won’t attempt to explain them all here.  Terminations of transfer, though, involve various time windows when authors have the chance to give notice of termination, and reclaim their rights.  Some of the relevant windows are open right now.   In particular, if I’ve done the math correctly, 2010 marks the first year one can give notice to terminate the transfer of a paper copyrighted in 1964, the earliest year in which most journal papers are still under US copyright.  (The actual termination of a 1964 copyright’s transfer won’t take effect for another 10 years, though.)  There’s another window open now for copyright transfers from 1978 to 1985; some of those terminations can take effect as early as 2013.  In the future, additional years will become available for author recovery of copyrights assigned to someone else.  To find out more about taking back rights you, or researchers you know, may have signed away decades ago, see this tool from Creative Commons.

Recognizing opportunity

To sum up, we have opportunities now to liberate scholarly research over the full course of scholarly history, if we act quickly and decisively.  New research can be made freely available through open access repositories and journals.  Older research can be made freely available by establishing its public domain status, and making digitizations freely available.  And much of the research in the not-so-distant past, still subject to copyright, can be made freely available by looking back through publication lists, tracking down researchers and rights information, and where appropriate reclaiming rights previously assigned to journals.

Journal publishing plays an important role in the certification, dissemination, and preservation of scholarly information.  The research content of journals, however, is ultimately the product of scholars themselves, for the benefit of scholars and other knowledge seekers everywhere.   However the current dispute is ultimately resolved between Nature Publishing Group and the University of California, we would do well to remember the opportunities we have to liberate journal content for all.

April 7, 2010

Copyright information is busting out all over

Filed under: copyright,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 3:43 pm

Like the crocuses and daffodils now coming up all over our front garden, new copyright registration information has been popping up all over the net lately.  As I’ve described in various previous posts, this information can be extremely useful for folks who want to revive, disseminate, or reuse works from the past.

Here’s a summary of the some of the recent highlights:

Copyright renewals for maps and commercial prints are now all online, and join what is now a complete set of renewals of active copyrights for still images.  The scanning was done here at the Penn Libraries by me and by the Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, from microfilms and volumes loaned by the Free Library of Philadelphia.  I thank all the folks who helped out with this project.

With this addition of this latest set of records, you can now find copyright renewals online for nearly anything you’d find in a book, if they’re recent enough to still be in force.  The only active copyright renewals of any sort not yet online at this point to my knowledge are renewals for most music prior to 1978, and a few small sets of pre-1978 renewals for film (about 2 years’ worth in all).

Original copyright registrations are also going online at a rapid rate.   The biggest publicly accessible set of original registrations from 1923 onward (the date of the oldest copyrights still in force) is at Hathi Trust, and consists of digitized volumes that have been scanned by Google for Hathi member libraries.  I’ve include them in a list of registration volumes organized by year and type of work on my Catalog of Copyright Entries Page, which has now been reorganized to combine all the original and renewal registrations known to be available online.  I’ve also added direct page links to renewal and other important sections of the volumes, so that researchers looking for those can go to them directly.  In many cases, the renewal sections can be downloaded for offline use.  I’ve also brought out statistics from the volumes, to help give readers a sense of the rate of registrations and renewals.

Google is making enhanced versions of book copyright registration volumes available online. Specifically, they’ve digitized the full set of original and renewal registrations for books from 1922-1977, in a set of scans that are of generally higher quality than the ones at Hathi Trust.  You can search the full text of the entire set at once, or search or browse individual volumes.

These scans were done specially for copyright research purposes, and seem to involve more careful scanning than the normal mass-book-digitization procedures Google used for the Hathi Trust volumes.  They aren’t entirely free of problems– I identify a few trouble spots in my listings– and they also don’t include registrations for other types of work, which has apparently confused some folks who have contacted me.  But they’re quite high quality overall, and could be a very good basis for structured data records of these copyright registrations.  Google has previously made such records available for book copyright renewals; I hope we’ll see a release of records based on these new scans before long as well.

Also in the pipeline: Based on conversations I’ve had with others interested in copyright issues, we may well see a complete set of copyright registrations and renewals online (at least in the form of page images from the Catalog of Copyright Entries) by the end of this year.  And a number of projects are working on making this digitized information more useful for practical copyright clearance.  Today, for instance, I heard about the Durationer project, being presented at the Copyright@300 conference at Berkeley later this week.  The project is developing a tool to help people determine the copyright status of specific works in specific jurisdictions, based on copyright registrations and other relevant information.

Some possible future directions: As I described in more detail in a 2007 paper, a thorough determination of a work’s copyright status depends not just on registration information, but on various other kinds of information, much of which can be found in a work’s bibliographic records.  Copyright registration data can also be used to build new bibliographic data structures.  Therefore, the interests of copyright clearance and the interests of access to bibliographic data tend to converge.  I elaborate on this idea in a guest blog post for the Open Knowledge Foundation, who I’ve started to work with in these areas.  (For folks following the debate over OCLC’s WorldCat, this convergence is also worth keeping in mind when reading the just-released WorldCat Rights and Responsibilities draft, which I hope to comment on in the not-too-distant future.)

I hope you find this new copyright information useful.  And I’m very interested in hearing what you’re doing with it, or would like to do with it.

February 8, 2010

Shedding light on images in the public domain

Filed under: copyright,sharing — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 3:05 pm

For years, I’ve regularly gotten requests from authors and publishers for licenses to reproduce images in books listed on The Online Books Page, or included in the local collection of A Celebration of Women Writers.  Sometimes these requests relate to copyrighted books that I list but don’t control rights for; in those cases, I do my best to refer the request to the book’s copyright holder.  But often, they’re for images in our own collections, from books published over 100 years ago.  In those cases, I respond that the image is in the public domain (and our digitization, which adds no originality, is also in the public domain), so no license is necessary or appropriate.

Usually that response receives a thankful reply, sometimes with signs of surprise that an image can be reused without permission.  But sometimes I’ll get back a more alarmed reply.  “My publisher says I need a license for every image in my book, or I can’t use it,” it might say, followed by a plea for help in tracking down some long-defunct 19th century publisher.

I wish I could say this was an atypical anecdote.   But, if you look around the Web, you’ll find that there are huge numbers of historic images– paintings, photographs, figures, and the like– that are behind access barriers, or closed off altogether from online access, when they don’t have to be.  Artstor has over a million images of thousands of years of art that you can’t look at unless you’re at an institution that has a subscription.  The fine arts image catalog at my own library has over 100,000 digital images, none of which can be seen online by the public outside of Penn, except in thumbnails.  Neither Artstor nor Penn want to keep art away from the public; both are nonprofit educational institutions. But clearing images for free public access on a large scale has to date been impractical for these institutions.

Restrictions on images also create holes in other works.  For instance, under the proposed Google Books settlement, images in books that might be under copyright would be blanked out unless the rightsholder to the book also asserted they held the rights in the images.  These sorts of omissions can cut the heart out of many works.  In a recent New Republic article, “For the Love of Culture“, Lawrence Lessig described how a critical table was omitted in an otherwise free article about his daughter’s possible illness, due to rights-clearance issues.  “I could not believe that we were this far down the path to insanity already,” he wrote of the incident.

Part of the insanity is that many of these images from our cultural heritage are actually in the public domain.  Many people are aware that copyrights prior to 1923 have expired in the US.  But so have many copyrights from later in the 20th century.  Pre-1964 copyrights generally had to be renewed 28 years after the start of their term, or they would expire.   (Exceptions and further details are described here.)  But most copyrights were never renewed; and that’s especially true for images.

In 1923, there were copyright registrations for 3,059 works of art, 1,149 scientific and technical drawings, 7,533 photographs, and 11,289 prints and pictorial illustrations, making a total of  23,030 copyright registrations for these classes of image.  In 1951, 28 years later, there were 198 copyright renewals for all of these image classes combined.  This represents a renewal rate of less than 1%.

We have just completed posting scans that make all active copyright renewals for artwork viewable online.  In fact, once we finish scanning one last batch of renewals for maps and for commercial prints (meaning images created for product packaging and promotion) all active copyright renewals for any type of still image will be viewable online.   In later years, the number of image copyright renewals grows slightly, but not by much. But the number of images published in those years grows substantially.

Images without a copyright registration of their own might still be under copyright if they were first published as part of a copyrighted book, newspaper, magazine, or other larger work.  Fortunately, we have complete online renewal records for those kinds of works too.  It becomes much easier to establish the public domain status of a newspaper photograph, for instance, if you know (as I previously revealed) that no newspaper outside New York renewed copyright for any issue published before the end of World War II.

Having copyright renewals online for artwork is an important step towards freeing the public domain in images.  But there’s more needed to make copyright clearance practical at a large scale.  Putting scanned renewal records into a searchable database (perhaps combined with fair use image thumbnails) will make it easier to find any copyright renewals that might exist for a particular image.  (A similar database for book renewals already exists, and there are more book renewals than image renewals.)  Making original copyright registrations available as well (as we now have for artwork through 1949, and soon will have for later years) lets us determine when the copyright for an image began, and whether it was renewed in time to prevent it from expiring.

Furthermore, establishing the history and provenance of images will let us determine when unregistered artwork enter the public domain.  Registered or not, the copyright to an image created before 1964 began no later than its first US publication, and the copyright for many such images therefore ended after 28 years due to a lack of renewal.  And the mostly-frozen American public domain still includes more work each year that was never published before 2003.  On Public Domain Day last month, all such work by artists who died in 1939 entered the public domain in the US.  (I won’t get now into the rather baroque rules for establishing “publication” of an artwork, but you can determine it if  the history of the image is documented.)

So we have a rich treasure trove of images in the public domain that’s been largely buried under presumptions and uncertainties about copyright.  By finding and sharing information about their copyrights, we can protect and enjoy these images in the commons of the public domain, where they can be viewed freely, included in new works, and reused in any way we can imagine.  If you find this prospect intriguing, I hope you’ll help bring these images to light.

January 1, 2010

Public domain day 2010: Drawing up the lines

Filed under: copyright,online books,open access — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 12:01 am

As we celebrate the beginning of the New Year, we also mark Public Domain Day (a holiday I’ve been regularly celebrating on this blog.)  This is the day when a year’s worth of copyrights expire in many countries around the world, and the works they cover become free for anyone to use and adapt for any purpose.

In many counties, this is a bittersweet time for fans of the public domain.  For instance, this site notes the many authors whose works enter the public domain today in Europe, now that they’ve been dead for at least 70 years.  But for many European countries, this just represents reclaimed ground that had been previously lost.   Europe retroactively extended and revived copyrights from life+50 to life+70 years in 1993, so it’s still three more years before Europe’s public domain is back to what it was then.  Many other countries, including the United States, Australia, Russia, and Mexico, are in the midst of public domain freezes.  For instance, due to a 1998 copyright extension, no copyrights of published works will expire here in the US due to age for another 9 years, at least.

In the past, many people have had only a vague idea of what’s in the public domain and what isn’t.  But thanks to mass book digitization projects, the dividing line is becoming clearer.  Millions of books published before 1923 (the year of the oldest US copyrights) are now digitized, and can be found with a simple Google search and read in full online.  At the same time, millions more digitized books from 1923 and later can also be found with searches, but are not freely readable online.

Many of those works not freely readable online have languished in obscurity for a long time.   Some of them can be shown to be in the public domain after research, and groups like Hathi Trust are starting to clear and rescue many such works.  Some of them are still under copyright, but long out of print, and may have unknown or unreachable rightsholders.  The current debate over Google Books has raised the profile of these  works, so much so that the New York Times cited “orphan books”, a term used to describe such unclearable works, as one of the buzzwords of 2009.

The dividing line between the public domain and the world of copyright could well have been different.   In 1953, for instance, US copyrights ran for a maximum of 56 years, and the last of that year’s copyrights would have expired today, were it not for extensions.  Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a page showing what could have been entering the public domain today– everything up to the close of the Korean War.  In contrast, if the current 95-year US terms had been in effect all of last century, the copyrights of 1914 would have only expired today.  Only now would we be able to start freely digitizing the first set of books from the start of World War I.

With the dividing line better known nowadays, do we have hope of protecting the public domain against more expansions of copyright?  Many countries still stick to the life+50 years term of the Berne Convention, including Canada and New Zealand.  In those countries, works from authors who died in 1959 enter the public domain for the first time.  There’s pressure on some of these countries to increase their terms, so far resisted.  Efforts to extend copyrights on sound recordings continues in Europe, and recently succeeded in Argentina.  And secret ACTA treaty negotiations are also aimed at increasing the power of copyright holders over Internet and computer users.

But resistance to these expansions of copyright is on the rise, and public awareness of copyright extensions and their deleterious effects is quite a bit higher now than when Europe and the US extended their copyrights in the 1990s.  And with concerns expressed by a number of parties over a possible Google monopoly on orphan books, one can envision building up a critical mass of interest in freeing more of these books for all to use.

So today I celebrate the incremental expansion of the public domain, and hope to help increase it further. To that end, I have a few gifts of my own.  As in previous years, I’m freeing all the copyrights I control for publications (including public online postings) that are more than 14 years old today, so any such works published in 1995 and before are now dedicated to the public domain.  Unfortunately, I don’t control the copyright of the 1995 paper that is my most widely cited work, but at least there’s an early version openly accessible online.

I can also announce the completion of a full set of digitized active copyright renewal records for drama and works prepared for oral delivery, available from this page.  This should make it easier for people to verify the public domain status of plays, sermons, lectures, radio programs, and similar works from the mid-20th century that to date have not been clearable using online resources.  We’ve also put online many copyright renewal records for images, and hope to have a complete set of active records not too far into 2010.  Among other things, this will help enable the full digitization of book illustrations, newspaper photographs, and other important parts of the historical record that might be otherwise omitted or skipped by some mass digitization projects.

Happy Public Domain Day!  May we have much to enjoy this day, and on many more Public Domain Days to come.

(Edited later in the day January 1 to fix an inaccurately worded sentence.)

September 17, 2009

Google Book settlement: Alternatives and alterations

Filed under: copyright,online books,open access — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 1:35 pm

In my previous post, I worried that the Google Books settlement might fall apart in the face of opposition from influential parties like the Copyright Office, and that such a collapse might deprive the public of meaningful access to millions of out of print books.

Not everyone sees it that way.  I’ve seen various suggestions of alternatives to the settlement for making these books available.  In this post, I’ll describe some of the suggested alternatives, explain why they don’t seem to me as likely to succeed on their own, and discuss how some of them could still go forward under a settlement.

Compulsory licenses

Both the Open Book Alliance’s court filings and the Copyright Office’s testimony mention the possibility of compulsory licensing, which essentially lets people use a copyrighted work without getting permission, provided that they meet standard conditions determined by the government.  Compulsory licenses already exist in certain areas, such as musical performances and broadcasts.  If I want to cover a Beatles song on my new record, I can, as long as meet some basic conditions, including paying a standard royalty.  The (remaining) Beatles can’t hold out for a higher rate, or say that no one else is allowed to cover the recordings they’ve released.

The Google Books settlement has some similarities to a compulsory license, but with some important differences, including:

  1. Book rightsholders can choose to deny public uses of their work, or hold out for higher compensation, which they generally can’t do under a compulsory license regime. (They have to explicitly request this, though.  So it’s really what one might call a “default” license.)
  2. The license has been negotiated through a court settlement rather than Congressional action. (This was one of the main complaints of the Copyright Office.)
  3. The license given in the settlement is granted only to Google, not to other digitizers. (This has justifiably raised monopoly concerns.)

I do have a problem with the last difference as it stands.  I’d like to see the license widened so that anyone, not just Google, could digitize and make available out of print books under the same terms as Google. But there are various ways we can get to that point from the settlement.  The Book Rights Registry created by the settlement could extend Google-like rights to anyone else under the same terms, as the settlement permits them to do.  The Justice Department could require them to do so as part of an antitrust supervision.  Or Congress could decide to codify the license to apply generally.  (They’ve done this sort of thing before with fair use and the first sale doctrine, both of which originated in the courts.)

If the settlement falls apart, though, negotiation over an appropriate license has to start over from scratch, and has to persuade Congress to loosen copyrights for benefits they might not clearly see. As I suggested in my previous post, Congress’ recent tendencies have heavily favored tightening, rather than loosening, copyright control.   And I haven’t yet seen a strong coalition pushing for laws granting compulsory (or default) licenses that are as broad as would be needed.

For instance, the Open Books Alliance’s amicus brief suggests the possibility of a compulsory license, but only as “but one approach”, and that suggestion seems as much aimed at getting hold of Google’s scans as licensing the book copyrights themselves.  Their front page at present shows no explicit advocacy of compulsory copyright licenses.  Perhaps they will unite behind a workable Google Books-style compulsory license proposal in the future, but I’m not counting on that.  (Update: Just after I posted this, I saw this statement of principles go up on the OBA site.  We’ll see what develops from that.)

The Copyright Office’s congressional brief also mentions but tries to damp down the idea.  It repeatedly characterizes compulsory licensing as something that Congress only does “reluctantly” and “in the face of marketplace failure”. But despite its strong words on other subjects, it does not appear concerned over whether we in fact have a marketplace failure around broad access to out-of-print books.

Orphan works legislation

The Copyright Office filing also suggests passing orphan works legislation (as have various other parties, including Google).  An orphan works limitation on copyrights would be nice, but it’s not going to enable the sort of large, comprehensive historical corpus that the Google Books settlement would allow.

As Denise Troll Covey has pointed out, the orphan works certification requirements recommended in last year’s bill, like many other case-by-case copyright clearance procedures, are labor-intensive and slow, and may be legally risky.  (In particular, the overhead for copyright clearance, not including license payment, can be several times the cost of digitization.)  Hence, these methods are not likely to scale well.  And they would not cover the many out-of-print books that aren’t, strictly speaking, orphans.  I don’t consider it likely that a near-comprehensive library  of millions of out-of-print 20th century books will come about by this route alone any time soon.

Even so, despite its limited reach, last year’s orphan works legislation was stopped in Congress after some creator organizations objected to it.  Some of the objectors, including the  National Writers Union and the American Society of Journalists and Authors, are now members of  the Open Book Alliance, which makes me wonder how effectively that group would act as a united coalition for copyright reform.

Private negotiation

Some critics suggest that Google and other digitizers simply negotiate with each rightsholder, or a mediator designated by each  rightsholder.   It’s possible that this actually might work for many future books, if authors and publishers set up comprehensive clearinghouses (like ASCAP and Harry Fox mediate music licensing).  If new books get registered with agents like these going forward, with simple, streamlined digital rights clearing, private arrangement could work well for future books both in-print and out-of-print.  Indeed, Google’s default settlement license privileges don’t apply to new books from 2009 onward.

But it’s much less likely that this will be a practical solution to build a comprehensive collection of past out of print books from the 20th and early 21st century, because of the sheer difficulty and cost of determining and locating all the current rightsholders of books long out of print.   The friction involved in such negotiation (involving high average cost for low average compensation) is too great.  Without the settlement and/or legal reform, we risk having what James Boyle called a “20th century black hole” for books.

Copyright law reform

As James Boyle points out, it would solve a lot of the problems that keep old books  in obscurity if books didn’t get exceedingly long copyrights purely by default.  It would also help if fair use and public domain determination weren’t as risky as they are now. I’d love to see all that come to pass, but no one I know that’s knowledgeable on copyright issues is holding their breath waiting for it to happen any time soon.

Moving forward

As I’ve previously mentioned, the settlement is imperfect.  It may well need antitrust supervision, and future elaboration and extension.  (And I’ve suggested some ways that libraries and others can work to improve on it.)  It’s still the most promising starting point I’ve seen for making comprehensive, widely usable, historic digital book collections possible.  I hope that we get the chance to build on it, instead of throwing away the opportunity.  In any case, I’d be happy to hear people’s thoughts and comments about the best way to move forward.

September 15, 2009

Google Books, and missing the opportunities you don’t see

Filed under: copyright,online books,open access — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 9:12 pm

The Google Books settlement fairness hearing is still a few weeks away, but in the last few weeks the deal has been talked and shouted about with ever-higher volume.  Still, it wasn’t until the other day, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing where US Copyright Register Marybeth Peters came loaded for bear, that I started thinking there was a significant likelihood that the settlement might fall apart.

There are a number of people in different communities, including libraries, who hope this  happens.   I’m not one of them.  I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t comment with authority on whether the settlement is sound law.  But I’m quite confident that it advances good policy.  In particular, it’s one of the best feasible opportunities to bring a near-comprehensive view of the knowledge and culture of the 20th and early 21st centuries into widespread use.  And I worry that, should the settlement break down, we will not have another opportunity like it any time soon.  The settlement has flaws, like the Google Books Project itself has, but at the same time, like Google Books itself, the deal the settlement offers is incredibly useful to readers, while also giving writers new opportunities to revive, and be paid for, their out of print work.

The potential

Under the status quo, millions of books are greatly under-utilized.  It isn’t just that people don’t have easy access to them; it’s that people don’t know that particular books useful to them exist in the first place.  I work in a library that has collected millions of volumes, many of which are hardly ever checked out. Not only would Google’s expanded books offerings give our users access to millions more books, but it would also make millions of books that we already own easier for our users to find and use effectively.

Want to know what books make mention of a particular event, ancestor, or idea?  With existing libraries, and good search skills, you might be able to find books, if any, that are written primarily about those things. But you’ll probably miss much other information on those same topics, information in works that are primarily about something else.  With expanded search, and the ability to preview old book content, it could be much easier to get a more comprehensive view on a topic, and find out which books are worth obtaining for learning more.

And if that’s a big advance for people in big universities like ours, it’s an even bigger step forward for people who have not had easy access to big research libraries.  Once a search turns up a book of interest, Google Books would offer a searcher various ways of getting that book: buying online access; reading it at their library’s computer (either via a paid subscription, or via a free public access terminal); buying a print copy; or getting an inter-library loan.  These options all involve various trade-offs of cost and convenience, as is the case with libraries today.  While one could wish for better tradeoff terms, the ones proposed still represent big advances from what one can easily do today.

And as with other large online collections like Wikipedia or WorldCat, or the Web as a whole, the advantages to large book corpuses like Google’s aren’t just in the individual items, but in what can be done with the aggregation.  I don’t know exactly what new kinds of things people will find to do with a near-comprehensive collection of  20th century books, but having seen all that people have done with other information aggregated on the Internet, I’m confident that there would be many great uses found, large and small.

The peril

If the Google settlement does fall apart, are we likely to see any collection like the one it envisions any time soon?  I’m not at all confident we will.  The basic problem is that, without some sort of blanket license, it’s impractical (and in the case of true orphan works, currently impossible) to clear all the copyrights that would be required to build such a collection.  This represents a failure in copyright law.  Instead of “promot[ing] the progress of science and useful arts”, as the Constitution requires, current US copyright law effectively keeps millions of out-of-print books in obscurity, not producing significant benefits either to their creators or to their potential users.

The current proposed Google Books settlement is, among other things, an attempt to get around this failure.  If the settlement fails, would the parties make a new agreement that would allow a readable collection of millions of post-1922 online books?  The divergence in the complaints I’ve seen (for instance, on one hand that the collection would cost readers too much, and on another hand that it would pay writers too little) suggest the difficulty of coming to a new consensus that satisfies all the parties, if negotiations have to start again from scratch.  And, if the arguments of the Copyright Office and some of the other parties carry the day, even if such an agreement were reached, the agreement could not be ratified by a court anyway.  Instead, it would require acts of Congress, and maybe even re-negotiations of international treaties.

Based on past history, there are two things that would make the government likely to reform copyright law to permit mass reuse of out-of-print books.  Ether there needs to be a clear example of the benefits of such a reform, or there needs to be a strong coalition pushing for such a reform.  Clear examples have usually come from businesses that are actually in operation; for example, the player piano roll industry that successfully persuaded Congress to streamline music copyright clearance in the previous century (or the Betamax that persuaded a slender majority of the Supreme Court to declare the VCR legal).

If the proposed Google Books library service goes online, even under a flawed initial settlement, it too could provide a compelling example to encourage general copyright reform.  But without such an example, it can be hard to move Congress to act.   It’s easy to undervalue the opportunities you don’t clearly see.

What about a strong coalition pushing for a reform in the law that would let anyone create the comprehensive online collections of out of print books I’d described?  I’d like to see one, but I haven’t yet.  (Yes, there’s the Open Book Alliance, but its members don’t seem to be distinctly allied in anything particular other than objecting to the settlement.)  In my next post, I’ll discuss reforms that might do the job, and the reasons I believe they would be difficult to enact without the settlement.

July 14, 2009

For those wanting more drama in their lives

Filed under: copyright — John Mark Ockerbloom @ 9:15 pm

Thanks to the scanning services of Penn’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI), and a loan of over a dozen volumes from Stanford University Libraries, we have now posted online records of copyright renewals for drama (and works intended for oral delivery) up to 1968.  They can be found in page image form at our Catalog of Copyright Entries information page.

We’ve had copyright renewals for normal books, and periodicals, online for some years now.   But we’ve been missing renewal records for one important type of literary text: the kind primarily meant for performing or proclaiming, rather than reading.  And it turns out that copyright renewal records for works that aren’t books are harder to find than you’d expect: I could find no copies at all in the Philadelphia area for the years 1955-1968. So I’m grateful to Stanford for the loan of their volumes.  There are still a few more years of drama renewals left to digitize, but I’m hoping to find the later volumes in local libraries.

So far, we’ve only posted page images.  But I’m hoping that they’ll help people to make transcriptions and structured data records, as has been done with earlier page images we’ve posted.  I’ve tried to post easily readable but not-too-big copies of the pages online, to support manual searching and OCR.  Folks who need to see the masters, which have higher resolution but are substantially larger, can contact me.

Because Google is also starting to post original copyright registrations, it’s also possible to correlate renewals with original registrations, and look for interesting statistical phenomena and trends.  Already, for instance, one can see both that most copyrights were not renewed, and that the renewal rate can vary a lot by genre. For instance, in 1931, there were 552 “Class C” copyright registrations, covering lectures, sermons, addresses, and other works prepared for oral delivery.  (See page 1659 of this volume.)   There were also 5,993 drama registrations (“Class D”; see page 406 of this volume).  In 1959, around the time these copyrights were up for renewal, there were 780 Class D renewals, a renewal rate of about 13%.  There was only 1 Class C renewal in 1959, a renewal rate of well under 1%.  (A few previous years have slightly higher Class C renewal rates, but not by much.)

After I get through with drama, there’s one more class of renewal I’d like to see online as soon as possible: image renewals.  Only a few years worth of image renewals (from the early 1950s) are online, but what’s there suggests that the renewal rate for most published images was also quite low.  Since a large number of books and periodicals include images of one kind or another, knowing which images are still under copyright will be very important for folks who want to look at complete facsimiles of older works.

The proposed Google Books settlement, for instance, proposes blanking out anything in a book that might be an image (unless rights for that image have been cleared).  This could make many books substantially less useful than they would be if the images were cleared (especially since Google’s processing algorithms have to guess where images are, and may blank out not only images, but also text that can’t be easily auto-recognized.)

In the meantime, the drama renewals just posted will also help me look into some requests I’ve received for mid-20th-century plays and speeches whose status I’ve been unable to determine previously.  I hope it will prove useful for others as well.  Thanks again to SCETI and Stanford for these.

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