[pd-discuss] Announcement: outofcopyright.eu launched

[Javier Ruiz]

Dear all

We are starting a new project to promote open access to genealogical
information, mostly in UK although we now have involvement from other
countries as well.

www.opengenalliance.org

The IPR of family history records in UK seems a complete mess and a free for
all for wild claims of copyright. We find divergent opinions at every step,
and added complications of possible secondary copyrights  on scans,
microfiche, and database rights on transcriptions and indexing.

This is fuelled by a huge cash influx in the sector via commercial websites
such as www.ancestry.com that while having some positive impact on enabling
some aspects, also brings a corrupting influence to any sense of public
records and public domain.

Thus organisations that have a supposed duty to promote open access, such as
public archives or educational charities, are creating a new wall of IPR
around digital records that will create problems for years to come.

Another problem is access to materials (particularly Church records of life
events; Births, Deaths and Marriages form before the mid 19th century when
the State took over), and exclusive deals with particular groups that act as
gatekeepers to archives and cash in on digitised materials. Here there are
problematic agreements on loans of materials restricting the reuse of copied
materials, even when the original record seem old enough to be out of
copyright (17th century anyone?).

We would like to use the PDC to simplify some of these aspects, but it seems
that it may need some tweaking or maybe adapted guidance. Some people in the
sector think that it is too complicated for PDCs and we need to go case by
case, but this is unworkable, so I would like to at least demarcate the
lines of clarity with the PDC and focus then on the obscure cases.

We have some very good IP lawyers in our group that could help clarify
aspects of arcane UK IP law, such as apparently copyright on tables.

best, Javier

On 4 May 2011 11:21, Maarten Zeinstra <mz at kl.nl> wrote:

> We are proud to announce that we have now launched www.outofcopyright.eu.
> The site is part of the Europeana project developing Public Domain
> Calculators. Outofcopyright.eu presents research done by the Institute of
> Information Law and Knowledgeland to help consumers of content to determine
> whether a work is still protected by copyright or not. Consumers of content
> in principle have the right to use works which are in the public domain
> without permission and with no copyright restrictions. In practice however
> determining if a work has passed into the public domain can often prove
> difficult. This is especially true when attempting to determine the public
> domain status of content in multiple jurisdictions. The Public Domain
> Calculators available on the site answer the question of whether a certain
> work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights
> (related rights) has fallen into the public domain in a given European
> country.
>
> The Public Domain Calculators are intended to assist Europeana with this
> problem through a simple interface between the user and the often complex
> set of national rules governing the term of protection. The issue is of
> significance for Europeana, as contributing organisations will be expected
> to clearly mark the material in their collection as being in the public
> domain, through the attachment of a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark,
> whenever possible.
>
> On the website you can use the Calculators, explore the research behind the
> Calculators, and embed the Calculators in your own projects. At the moment
> only 13 out of what will be a total of 30 Calculators are operational, but
> we will be adding the rest in the coming weeks as they are completed.
>
> We would like to thank everyone on the list who participated in the effort
> of making this research possible.
>
> Visit outofcopyright.eu, see our flowcharts and calculator software. All
> resources are available under an open content/open source license. Feel free
> to contact us with any questions or remarks.
>
> Best,
>
> Maarten Zeinstra, Kennisland
> Christina Angelopoulos, Institute for Information Law
> *
>
>
>
> *
>
>
>
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