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Re: copyright questions



At 02:47 PM 8/29/00 -0400, you wrote:
Another item that I feel ought to be in every archivist's administrative
file is"

"Recent Changes to the Copyright Law:  Copyright Term Extension" by Peter
B. Hirtle, in Archival Outlook, Jan/Feb 1999 issue.  This provides an
excellent background summary of what copyright details used to involve,
what it looks like now, after the 1998 extension, the various exemptions
that librarians and archivists whould be aware of, and some of the
concerns that we will have to be dealing with from now on...
This includes a chart with more details than the site cited below,
outlining passage into public domain for a number of situations of
renewal/nonrenewal/publication with notice/publication without notice for
a myriad of combinations for material between 1923 and 19

Thanks, Holly, for the kind words.  For Cornell's week-long digital imaging
workshop I recently put up an online version of the chart.  You can find it
at <http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/copyright/>.

The Archives list is probably one of the worst places to get an
introduction to copyright.  Bill Maher is teaching for the SAA today and
again in the fall a workshop on copyright for archivists that I think will
be very useful to practicing archivists.  The sections in the Peterson's
manual on Law, though dated, are still useful.  Kenny Crews's article in
Rare Books and Manuscripts Librarianship on Fair Use and Manuscripts a few
years back is a very readable introduction.  Perhaps the best single guide
now available is the new AAM publication, "A Museum Guide to Copyright and
Trademark," though it is aimed at museum specialists and not archivists.  I
am at work on a copyright manual for archivists that should be done by the
spring that I hope that will be of use.

The biggest problem is that in the copyright world there are almost no
certain answers.  Even my chart just applies to the US.  Normally that
doesn't matter, but with stuff going up on web sites and being accessible
in foreign countries the possibilities for a suit elsewhere are
increasing.  The good news is that suits over academic use of unpublished
material to date have been exceedingly rare.  There is an interesting one
shaping up in England over unauthorized publication of the unpublished
poems of an author who died in 1864.  See
<http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4042964,00.html>.


---------------------------------------------------------------
Peter B. Hirtle
Co-Director                                pbh6@cornell.edu
Cornell Institute for Digital Collections     607/255-4033 (ph)
2B Kroch Library                                   607/255-9524 (fax)
Cornell University                <http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/>
Ithaca, NY  14853
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