[open-bibliography] Antw: What bibliographic material is Open by default?

Fri Jun 25 09:39:03 UTC 2010

> * if I go to a  page freely (gratis) visible on the web can I extract
and
> Openly re-use the bibliographic data without permission? 

In Germany similar questions came up with physical books in the context
of catalogue enrichment where libraries scan table of contents (tocs),
indexes or, bibliographies. I talked with some lawyers about this
concerning printed books and they said that at least table of contents
and bibliographies are parts of a copyrighted work which themselves are
public domain. Simply because no creativity goes into making a table of
content or extracting litarature for a bibliography.

In 2007, when libraries wanted to start with digitizing tocs, indexes
and maybe bibliographies (which, unfortunately, they never did) for
incorporating them into their catalogs they asked for permission at the
"Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels" a club representing German
publishers. The Börsenverein sent a letter [1] which said that their
lawyers see now legal concerns with digitizing and publishing:

- title page (not the book cover),
- table of content,
- index of tables,
- index of figures,
- bibliography

and even:
- subject index,
- index of persons,
- index of places.

As I said, in addition to this, I talked with two copyright lawyers
about this who saw no problem in taking tocs and bibliographies from
copyrighted publications. SAll this seems to indicate that copying
reference list from publications is legal unproblematic. I think
Mendeley is already doing this on a large scale.

> * if the page contains a series of References can I re-use those?
> * are bibliographies in Europe potentially covered by the sui
generis
> database directive? If so is this by default?

The situation might be different with bibliographies which aren't part
of another work, I mean simple lists/aggregations of references
concerning a specific topic, person etc. I am not sure, but believe
these bibliographies are certainly copyrighted.

> * What are my rights in re-using the Abstract from a page freely
(gratis)
> visible on the web?

You probably don't have the rights to reuse an abstract without
permission. Like a translation an abstract arguably is a transformation
of an existing text which is creative and results in potential copyright
claims over this transformation.

It would be great if these legal issues could be adressed by a lawyer
within the JISC project so that there is some kind of serious reference
concerning these questions. Actually, I just asked a German copyright
lawyer with whom we create a legal guide for digitizing Public Domain
works to include an overview of parts of an otherwise copyrighted book
that you can copy and publish without seeking permission. In a few weeks
we should get answers to that written down by a lawyer...

Adrian

[1]
http://www.bibliotheksverband.de/fileadmin/user_upload/DBV/vereinbarungen/Boersenverein_110707_Kataloganreicherung.pdf

 >>>Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> schrieb am Donnerstag, 24. Juni
2010 um
16:44:
> As part of the JISCOBIB project we shall be looking at what
Bibliographic
> material can be collected and transformed automatically. Clearly we
need to
> have the right to do this and I'd be grateful for clarificationas to
which
> components of published material are, by default, Open (or in the
Public
> Domain) and can be used without permission.
> 
> In #JISCOBIB (and I will be posting about this shortly) we can
robotically
> extract 10,000 papers from a single Open Access Journal (Acta
> Crystallographica E, http://journals.iucr.org/e/ ). Because all
material in
> all papers is offered as CC-BY then we can make any legal re-use of
this,
> including creating a bibliography.
> 
> In the case of Acta journals each paper has been marked up with
Dublin Core
> and PRISM and we can extract this automatically. This gives the
metadata of
> authors, pages, journal, title, etc (I'll refer to this as
bibliographic
> material)..
> 
> My questions now include to excluding this to non-CC-BY material:
> * if I go to a  page freely (gratis) visible on the web can I extract
and
> Openly re-use the bibliographic data without permission? (I exclude
> Robots.txt from this discussion)
> * if I go to a series of related pages (e.g. journal articles) can I
extract
> and Openly reuse the aggregated biblilographic material? IOW if I
create a
> table of contents can I publish that without permission?
> * What are my rights in re-using the Abstract from a page freely
(gratis)
> visible on the web?
> * if the page contains a series of References can I re-use those?
> * are bibliographies in Europe potentially covered by the sui
generis
> database directive? If so is this by default?
> 
> P.