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

[Peter B. Hirtle]

On 01/21/13, "Mary Murrell"

wrote:



And what about ProQuest's Early English Books Online? Is that a "forever" license? When those volumes were microfilmed beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, did the English libraries involved put any restrictions on University Microfilms?



Take a look at http://eebo.chadwyck.com/help/faqs.htm (with my comments in brackets)


Must I obtain permission to reproduce images from EEBO? How?



ProQuest LLC has copyright and other intellectual property rights in EEBO. [This is true, but ProQuest probably does not have copyright in the digitization in the US or France (and maybe other countries).  Their copyright would be limited to new creative content they have added.] In addition, ProQuest LLC's agreements with the owners of the materials reproduced in EEBO give us limited rights which do not include the reproduction and/or publication of images outside of EEBO. [Note that this is a license agreement between the owners of the material and ProQuest.  Copyright is not at issue when the rights are based on physical ownership.]  Accordingly, if you wish to publish images from EEBO in print form (in an article or in a book) or electronically (for instance on the open web) you must obtain permission to do so from both ProQuest LLC and the owner of the material.



Note that you do not require permission to include images from EEBO in unpublished works such as dissertations and theses (provided that these are not available on the open web or distributed via an institutional repository or other database).



Again I will repeat: this is purely a matter of contracts: the contract between the libraries and ProQuest, and the contract between ProQuest and you, the user, regarding what you can do with the scanned images.  If you don't like the terms of that contract, you can go to the microfilm copy of EEB and digitize the text yourself.  To the best of my knowledge, libraries purchased rather than licensed the microfilm, which is why the CIC could produce the online Wright American Fiction product.



Peter Hirtle


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