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

[Karl Bridges <kbridges@uvm.edu>]

So, is what we're really doing is measuring the risk that 
particular individuals or companies will sue?  There should be 
some way to statistically analyze that -- drug companies probably 
do that all the time balancing the risk the x percentage of users 
will die and sue vs. the profits from the 99 percent of people 
who benefit. That would be a useful tool -- one where you put in 
the various things you know about a book -publication date, 
subject, whether the author is dead, and it tells you the 
probability that you will have a problem.

Karl Bridges
University of Vermong


Quoting "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