Re: Re. Hathi Orphans?

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Jean-Claude, be careful what you wish for.

A publisher identifies the owner of an orphan work.  If that 
owner is the publisher, does the publisher turn the rights over 
to another entity?  Or does the publisher put the work on a 
server, with a link to POD, monetizing the work if anybody 
happens to come along?

Some publishers (Duke just did this) will be happy to turn over 
works that have no commercial value (at this time) to third 
parties that share the publishers' mission.  Some will do the 
equivalent of what the STM association has recently promulgated: 
issue a statement of no commercial value so that a third party 
can use the material, but control continues to vest with the 
publisher.  And some publishers will seek to monetize the 
property (for that is what it is) themselves.  There are far more 
publishers in the third category.

I happen to believe that publishers should research orphan works 
and that they should have been doing this ever since the 
possibility of low-cost distribution came on the horizon.  But 
the outcome of such a practice may be very different from what 
HathiTrust and other digitization projects envision.

Joe Esposito


On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 3:53 PM, 
<jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca> wrote:

> This is a marvellous point. If publishers honestly collaborated
> on the task of identifying genuinely orphans, and if they also
> made an honest effort to let go what has no obvious economic
> value (in other words, get rid of the "just in case" mentality),
> we could work together far more harmoniously.
>
> Jean-Claude Guedon
>
> PS And bravo to Princeton for the OA policy voted by the faculty
> on itself.
>
>
> -------- Message d'origine--------
> De: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu de la part de Liz Mengel
> Date: mer. 28/09/2011 18:22
> liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Objet : RE: Hathi Orphans
>
> What makes me wonder is, if the Authors Guild can find owners of
> orphan works so fast why they don't try to collaborate with these
> types of ventures instead of suing them?
>
> Liz Mengel
> Associate Director Scholarly Resources and Special Collections
> The Sheridan Libraries
> Johns Hopkins University
>
>