[pd-discuss] Communia condems the privatisation of the public domain by the BnF

[Peter B. Hirtle]

Tom, when we were working on the ARL statement, I initially proposed seven years, which is the term that was commonly used with microfilming contracts.  Other people felt that even the 5 years that the US National Archives was using for its contracts was too long, which is why the document does not specify a time.  Anne Kenney, the Chair of the Working Group that prepared the document, said this in the press release when they were issued:

"I am thrilled that the ARL Board has endorsed these principles, which encourage research libraries and archives to provide digital access to special collections while safeguarding institutional interests and promoting broad public access," said Anne R. Kenney, Chair of the Working Group. "At Cornell, we plan to draw on the framework to improve many terms in our negotiations with vendors, including to shorten embargo periods on all our digitized collections to five years or less."

In practice, we have allowed contracts that were longer than 5 years if we had no plans on digitizing the material ourselves within the contractual period. And as someone who also buys digitized resources, I am willing to concede that 5 years might be too short for the vendor to recoup its expense.  It often takes three years after publication for me to decide that a resource is worth purchasing and to find the money to pay for it.  If I could get it for free in two more years, I might wait.

Thus I don't have a problem with a vendor being able to have a period of exclusive access to the product of its digitization efforts.  I do think, though, that the repository has to be willing to let anyone else digitize the material during the exclusive period; exclusivity should extend only to the digital images and not to access to the original works.  And the repository should be sure to make the scans freely available when the period of exclusivity ends.  I haven't heard, for example, whether the BL is going to make the digitized 19th century newspapers it is currently selling through Gale freely available at some point, but it should.  

The 25 year grant of copyright that the EU gives to the first person to publish a public domain unpublished work seems much more worse to me than most vendor agreements.

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Tom Morris
Sent: Monday, January 21, 2013 12:44 PM
To: Public Domain discuss list
Subject: Re: [pd-discuss] Communia condems the privatisation of the public domain by the BnF

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Peter B. Hirtle <pbh6 at cornell.edu> wrote:

> I assume you know about some US statements on the issue from ARL:
>
> Principles to Guide Vendor/Publisher Relations in Large-Scale 
> Digitization Projects of Special Collections Materials, June 2010
> (http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/principles_large_scale_digitization.pdf)

Those all seem like pretty common sense guidelines, but some of them are open-ended such as "Restrictions on external access to copies of works digitized from a library's holding should be of limited duration."

Do you have a sense what the current norm is for these types of agreements?  Is 10 years longer, shorter, or about average?

Tom

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