Re: Copyright Review Management System - U of Michigan IMLS grant

["Harper, Georgia K" <gharper@austin.utexas.edu>]

One of the things I learned early on in working with the Google 
Book Search project was that all one can really expect when 
seeking to "know" the copyright status of a work is to increase 
degree of certainty. After a point, it's a risk analysis issue, 
as so much of usage of older copyrighted works is. If your use is 
commercial, you probably require a higher level for your degree 
of certainty. If your use is nonprofit and educational and you 
interweave the risk analysis involved with relying on fair use 
into your risk matrix, you might be comfortable with a lower 
level for your degree of certainty. And, as you might suppose, 
the orphan works status of a work, also a matter of degree of 
certainty, figures into the risk analysis for use as well. So, to 
anyone not comfortable taking risks (well, assessing and taking), 
best to back away from trying to free books from analog 
obscurity. The easy cases are mostly already identified.

Georgia Harper
Scholarly Communications Advisor
University of Texas at Austin Libraries
512.495.4653 (w); 512.971.4325 (cell)
gharper@austin.utexas.edu


On 9/16/08 6:43 PM, "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu> wrote:

This is good news, but the problem is sufficiently complex that I
wonder whether any system can be created that will cover all the
complexities involved in determining copyright status. To
appreciate how complex such determinations can get, I recommend
Peter Hirtle's recent analysis of how the restoration of foreign
copyrights under U.S. law in 1994 added another dimension of
difficulty to the analysis:

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hirtle/07hirtle.html

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

>The University of Michigan has received $578,955 from the
>Institute of Museum and Library Services to develop a copyright
>review management system. The brief IMLS announcement reads:
>
>"The University of Michigan Library will create a Copyright
>Review Management System (CRMS) to increase the reliability of
>copyright status determinations of books published in the United
>States from 1923 to 1963, and to help create a point of
>collaboration for other institutions. The system will aid in the
>process of making vast numbers of these books available online to
>the general public. Nearly half a million books were published in
>the United States between 1923 and 1963, and although many of
>these are likely to be in the public domain, individuals must
>manually check their copyright status. If a work is not in the
>public domain, it cannot be made accessible online. The CRMS will
>allow users to verify if the copyright status has been
>determined."
>
>Bernie Sloan
>Sora Associates
>Bloomington, IN