From: Jerome McDonough <jmcdonou@uiuc.edu>
Subject: Re: [DIGLIB] Copyright Statement--Personal Collections
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:59:30 -0500
To: Digital Libaries List <diglib@infoserv.inist.fr>
Just a few comments:
1. Any questions regarding the legal status of your objects and/or
metadata, and the language
to be used to protect any intellectual property rights involved,
should be
first addressed to your university counsel's office, because they're
the ones who are going to
have to resolve any dispute. It is *always* better to have the
attorney who may end up representing
you in court involved earlier, rather than later.
2. I am with Klaus on the issue of copyright for metadata. Within
the United States,
you cannot copyright a fact. While databases may be copyrighted,
they are copyrighted
only to the extent they provide a unique and original expression; you
cannot copyright
the underlying facts within them. As a matter of professional
responsibility, librarians actually
go out of their way to squash any sign of originality of expression
in our metadata records and
databases; it's why we have cataloging rules in the first place.
While I Am Not A Lawyer, I
think your odds of successfully claiming copyright protection for a
metadata record within this country are
small, and your odds of claiming copyright on a complete database of
bibliographic records aren't much better.
3. I should probably point out that if you intend to claim copyright
on your metadata, engaging
in practices which actively encourage copying of the metadata (such
as making it available for OAI
harvesting) are probably not going to work in your favor if there is
ever a copyright dispute.
You can't expect a court to take an effort to enforce copyright
seriously if you've engaged in practices
that specifically encourage people to copy the information.
4. If you have your students sign a statement to the effect that they
understand that all of
their work in digitization and metadata production is work for hire,
I don't think you need worry
too much about their claiming copyright later on.
5. A professor's personal collection of materials *might* be
interpreted as a compilation and
therefore subject to copyright protection (see
http://www.bitlaw.com/ copyright/obtaining.html#compilation
for a brief discussion of compilations), but then again, it might
not. You really need the assistance
of a competent intellectual property lawyer on that issue, since it
is definitely one of the more subtle
areas of copyright law. The ability to assert copyright over a
compilation depends, as in the case of
databases, as to whether the act of compilation is a sufficiently
unique creative act to warrant the protection
of copyright. Books of quotations, for example, usuallly are
considered unique enough. Telephone directories
usually aren't.
6. You might want to consider whether any of the variants of the
Creative Commons licenses
(http://creativecommons.org) gives you what you want for your digital
objects. If there's one
that appears to match what you want to do, it can make a good
starting place for discussions
with your attorney.
7. Do talk to your university counsel. Any advice we might give you
may not be applicable
to the factors relevant in your situation; a lawyer working on your
behalf may save you an
awful lot of wasted time and effort. There isn't much point in
finding an applicable copyright
statement if your own attorney informs you that you have no hope of
asserting copyright over
the materials.
Good luck!
On Aug 21, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Klaus Graf wrote:
Its absolutely nonsense that metadata of postcards are copyrightable.
I do not share the opinion of the UK study
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00001429/
I quoted at
http://www.ub.uni-dortmund.de/listen/inetbib/msg29811.html
Klaus Graf
Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
jmcdonou@uiuc.edu