BRAVING THE PRESENT:Experience and Copyright Risk

Assessmentfor Digitizing Recent Historical

Collections

Katie Fortney@kfortney

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We didn’t get sued.Why would you expect anyone to sue

us?How we prepared for launchWhat the reaction has beenNow what? Our Trip by Frisno http://www.flickr.com/photos/frisno/2917037253/ CC BY-NC-ND

Some would consider thisa risky project.

Fair Use x 23,000!

Photographs!Unpublished

Works!

DK publishinggot sued

over rock posters

http://www.flickr.com/photos/floridamemory/3308644581/ No known restrictions

Before diving in, we balanced realistic assessment of risks against the goals we wanted

to reach.

Community

goodwill

Fair use

Project

quality

em marte tem piscina by Srta. Lobo http://www.flickr.com/photos/44896544@N00/126843186 CC BY-NC-SA

We made ourselves available,

and tried to make some friends.

Leveraging existing

relationships

Letter and license

campaign

Easy to find contact

information

Shake by bradjreynolds http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradjreynolds/4222512371/ CC BY-NC-ND

We have taken down a few things.

• 23,000 items as fair use–209 e-mails to archive•37 from creators–15 resulting in takedown»7 of those 15 would have been happy with redaction (the rest didn’t say)• 0 claims of copyright infringement

otto kopriva by batintherain http://www.flickr.com/photos/82995349@N00/398033423 CC BY-NC-SA

People liked finding their stuff!

“sweet jesus…YOU MADE OUR DAY!”

“I can't tell you what a gift this is!!!”

“How incredibly cool to see it again after all this time, I was 17 when I drew it. Just wanted to say THANK YOU for bringing back some awesome memories!”

“Seeing my envelope art was a trip and it brought a big smile to my face.”

nik's fancy crayons by Greencolander http://www.flickr.com/photos/37539977@N00/387073478 CC BY

“Despite extensive research, the Library has been unable to identify all possible rights holders in the materials in this collection.

Thus, some of the materials provided here online are made available under an

assertion of fair use.” – Library of Congress

1999

We were not the first ones to arrive at this party.

… but the party’s still not as big as it should be.

“When they did digitize, as most did, they almost universally chose to digitize public

domain materials first, regardless of scholarly needs, in order to avoid copyright questions in the short (or even medium) run.”

-Fair Use Challenges in Academic and Research Libraries,

2010

When are we going to startasking the right questions

when we select collections for digitization?

Untitled by Ciccio Pizzettaro http://www.flickr.com/photos/70038540@N00/1917885551 CC BY-NC-SA

You can convince your gatekeepers.

You have help.

arl.org/fairuse

publications.arl.org/rli279/

Questions?

iknowiknow by renedepaula http://www.flickr.com/photos/41867887@N00/167679756 CC BY-NC-ND

@kfortneykatie.fortney@ucop.edu

slideshare.net/katiefortney