Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars
Posted by Celia Walter | 3 Jun, 2011... A close look at one archive shows why the mass digitization of orphan works is creating such trouble.
The UCLA library is building a Web repository for the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, an archive of rare 78- and 45-rpm records that date as far back as 1905. When many of the recordings became accessible to the public on the collection's Web site, in 2009, UCLA bragged that it was largest online archive of its kind. And the digitizing is only about halfway done. The archive is important to students and scholars who want to learn about the musical heritage of North America and the cultural development of one of the largest minority groups in the United States.
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But the university is sharing only a fraction of that music with the world because it believes most of the collection is made up of orphans, still covered by copyright. Full access is restricted to computers connected to the campus network. Off-campus users can hear only 50-second snippets. UCLA chose that policy based on its reading of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, which may permit reproductions for teaching and research. Going further would introduce "a level of risk that, given the current status of copyright law, was really challenging," says Sharon E. Farb, associate university librarian for collection management and scholarly communication...
... the bibliographic orphanage run by the HathiTrust Digital Library. The 8.7-million-volume library pools digital copies of texts that Google scanned from universities. John P. Wilkin, its executive director, estimates that HathiTrust may contain 2.5 million orphan works. HathiTrust publishes the full text of works in the public domain, but not of those that are orphaned...
Bottom line: Lots of works that don't have any marking on them are very likely under copyright, but we can't say for sure, since there's nowhere to go to look...
From: Chronicle of Higher Education