Everybody's Libraries

Quite the festive day today! All over the world, people who use the Gregorian calendar are celebrating New Year’s Day. Here in Philadelphia, it’s Mummer’s Parade day. And in my church, it’s a special day dedicated to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and to world peace.

Much of the world gets to celebrate today as Public Domain Day as well, the day when a whole year’s worth of copyrights enter the public domain for anyone to copy or reuse as they like.

In countries that use the “life plus 50 years” minimum standard of the Berne Convention, works by authors who died in 1957 enter the public domain today. That includes writers, artists, and composers like Nikos Kazantzakis, Diego Rivera, Dorothy L. Sayers, Jean Sibelius, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In countries that use the “life plus 70 years” term, works by authors who died in 1937 enter the public domain, including works by J. M. Barrie, Jean de Brunhoff, H. P. Lovecraft, Maurice Ravel, and Edith Wharton. Since many countries with this term recently extended it due to trade agreements, they’re often seeing these works re-enter the public domain after being removed from it, but their return to the public is still appreciated.

In countries like the US and Australia, which are under 20-year freezes of all or most of the public domain, it’s not quite as momentous a day. Here in the US, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, we’re once again waking up to a public domain 1922, as we have since 1998. Our next mass expiration of copyrighted published material is scheduled for New Year’s Day 2019, 11 years from now. That’s assuming that copyright isn’t again extended before then. Recent extensions here and abroad have often been pushed through in the name of “harmonization” (which seems to always lengthen rather than shorten copyrights), and with Mexico now having a life+100 years term, I would not at all be surprised to see that as the pretext for the next round of attempts to further extend copyright.

But this is not a foregone conclusion. Canada, notably, has held the line at life+50 years for its copyright terms, despite many of its trading partners extending their terms further. And a recent attempt to introduce stricter copyright-related technology controls in Canada was turned back due to public protest, much of it organized online. Similar sustained activism in the US and other countries can keep our copyright laws from getting more out of balance.

Let’s not just ask what the public domain can do for us; let’s ask what we can do for the public domain. In particular, as of this year more than 14 years have passed since the Web started to explode into public consciousness, with NCSA’s release of the Mosaic web browser in 1993. Many of us older Net users started creating web sites that year. And 14 years was the original term of copyright specified in the UK’s Statute of Anne, and the US’s first copyright law (with an optional renewal term).

As an advocate of more reasonable copyright terms, like those envisioned by our country’s founders, I am therefore today dedicating the copyrights of all 1993 versions of my web sites into the public domain. These sites include The Online Books Page, which is still in operation, and Catholic Resources on the Net, which I stopped maintaining in 1999.

Admittedly, this dedication is largely symbolic, since I don’t have 1993 copies of these sites close to hand, though they may still exist in backup copies somewhere in my files, or in unauthorized mirrors (which in some cases were created very early in the sites’ histories). And early on, these sites didn’t have much original prose on them, instead being mostly links that are now largely out of date. But I hope to keep dedicating to the public another year’s worth of these sites each Public Domain Day in the future, and eventually they get more interesting and accessible. And perhaps others who also created content online in the early years of the Web will join in as well, and show that they’re happy releasing their material under shorter copyright terms.

In any case, I’m very interested in hearing about things that people are giving to or receiving from the public domain this year. Happy Public Domain Day!

There’s an interesting discussion over in John Scalzi’s blog about a new organization called the Organization for Transformative Works, which essentially aims to legitimize fan fiction as first-class expressions safe from copyright challenges. As I write this, there are over 200 comments in response to the opinion by Scalzi (who is a professional author, and whose take on the issue is similar to my own). The opinions run a fairly wide range, some claiming fan fiction is either inherently wrong or inherently protected, but most taking some sort of middle position.

The discussion made me think back to my childhood, growing up in a small town in Connecticut. We lived in a small, fairly new suburban development with farmland and woods around it. A lot of the houses had kids in them our age, and when we got together, we’d often go exploring or playing in yards. Other than the streets themselves, virtually all the land was privately owned. And while we’d often play in our own yards, sometimes we’d go onto someone else’s land, sometimes when the owners weren’t around. One neighbor had a woody area with some paths and little hills that we liked to ride bikes in. Another had a hill in the backyard that was great for sledding in winter. And sometimes you could play in a leftover sandpile or a fallow field in ways you couldn’t anywhere else.

I don’t remember anyone specifically asking if we could play in these places, but it was generally accepted or at least tolerated by the neighbors. There were certain rules: I knew as early as I can remember that some yards were off limits, because the owners didn’t want kids there. And we knew that we’d have to leave immediately if the owner came out and told us to, but that there would be no further consequences, assuming we hadn’t done any damage or otherwise made trouble for the owner. Some of the norms I had to learn by experience. After a scolding (and, I think, a call to my parents) following an “emergency” bathroom break, I learned that entering someone’s yard without asking was one thing, but entering someone’s house without asking was another thing entirely.

Essentially we had a vibrant neighborhood culture built on casual and tolerated trespassing. It was fundamentally a social compact, rather than a legal one. If we kids went too far in infringing on people’s properties, or the adults went too extreme in clamping down, the whole thing would have fallen apart. A homeowner brandishing a shotgun, or a kid defying a request to leave with a “we have a legitimate right to be here!”, or a parent threatening legal action if their kid was hurt in someone else’s yard, would have disrupted things pretty badly.

So I’m looking at the OTW effort with some interest and trepidation. Although I don’t have much interest in “fan fiction” as such, I recognize its value. (Especially since I met a number of friends, including my wife, in a kind of “fan fiction” venue– but that’s a story for another time,) And there’s a good argument to be made that, as long as fan writers keep their work to themselves or to a small, private circle, that it’s fair use.

But once it’s moved online into the public sphere, it seems to me the equivalent of playing in other people’s yards. You hope most people will be fine with it, and it may well even help maintain the social fabric; fan communities, after all, often end up buying lots of the original author’s books. Getting commercial with fanfic, or interfering with an author’s ability to work and make money, would be the equivalent of entering their house or building a booth on their front lawn– Not Done. And ultimately, it’s the author’s right to tell the kids to get off their lawn if they choose. Hopefully, that’s all they’ll want and need to do, and neither they nor the fans will be motivated to raise the stakes.

If you maintain a library, you might want to watch the sort of interaction going on here, even if you don’t particularly care about fanfic. Collection building and public service functions in the digital age often have to negotiate similar gray areas that aren’t neatly covered in law, but have important social aspects. It can be useful to look and see what sorts of practices build up owner and user communities, and what tears them down.

I regularly get mail about the web pages I have on copyright registrations and renewals and the inventory I did on the first renewals of periodicals. Turns out a lot of folks, both inside and outside of libraries, are interested in reviving and repurposing old creative works, if they could just figure out whether they were still under copyright, and how to reach the copyright holders if they are.

Here’s part of a not atypical query I received recently (posted with permission):

My anticipated enterprise regards short fiction published predominantly in monthly war-era periodicals; the “usual” specificity of interest – ’23-’63 periodicals which might not have been timely renewed.

It appears to me, after an exhaustive study of public domain law & online resources, that your work is the current state of the art: the closest thing – right now – to definitive.

My question, then…is there, so far as you are aware, any “quantum leaps” anticipated to come down the pike in some forseeable future re: a “definitive” means to check ’23 – ’63 renewals? Especially online/searchable?

Again, THANKS beyond measure for your work; it’s the closest-to-perfect tool yet for exasperated publishers seeking to simply ascertain whether the project they’re considering is “doing the right thing” where not violating someone else’s property is concerned!

It’s both gratifying and frustrating to receive email like this: gratifying because it’s always nice to hear your my is benefiting people; frustrating because I know there’s so much more that could be done to share copyright information, especially when there are so many people interested in it.

And in fact, more is being done, and planned. I organized an open discussion at last spring’s Digital Library Federation (DLF) forum called “Sharing Copyright Information: Opportunities for Collaboration”. It was an interesting and wide-ranging conversation, involving people from a number of libraries and other organizations. Here are the notes from the session. For a good overview and background on many of the copyright issues discussed, see Stanford’s Copyright & Fair Use website.

There have been some notable developments since the spring. Carl Malamud and Peter Brantley have “liberated” recent copyright registration and renewal data from the Copyright Office’s database, making them available for analysis and indexing. Mimi Calter at Stanford has been refining and analyzing their database on book copyright renewals. Bill Carney at OCLC is planning a project for registering copyright information with WorldCat entries. You can read more about these and other initiatives in Peter Brantley’s “Checking Copyright” blog post from last month.

We’re still a long way from a one-stop shop for copyright research. But I hope to use the new data Peter and Carl have liberated to complete my inventory of periodical renewals (which now is complete only to about 1950). I’ve also heard from more than one group that would like to digitize all of the pre-1978 copyright registration and renewal records that are not in the Copyright Office’s online database. If we had good machine-readable data for new and old copyrights, we could construct powerful search engines for copyright registration research. I don’t know who’s actually going to supply this data, though, or how long it will be before it’s all available.

Of course, copyright registration searching is just one part of the problem of copyright clearance, which can involve complicated issues of provenance of works, rights, and information. I’ve recently made a presentation giving an overview of some of these questions (slides here) to an interested group of computer scientists, and a paper I wrote with more details on provenance issues in copyright research should be published later this month. (I’ll link to it when it comes out.)

I don’t want to have lots of people exerting redundant, expensive efforts to clear copyright, or to be deterred from reusing older works because clearing copyright is too difficult. It helps for those of us who are working in this area to keep each other informed about what we’re doing and finding out. So feel free to add a comment to this post if you have a question or useful information on copyright clearance. You can also email me (address in the “about” page) to suggest relevant items for future posts on copyright issues.