Copyright , the Digital Library, and More

On March 22, 2011, Google’s ambitious plan to create a universal digital library consisting of every book ever published was derailed when Judge Denny Chin of the US Second District Court in Manhattan rejected the Amended Settlement Agreement which had been hammered out with groups representing authors and publishers. This project which is widely supported within Google is integral to their corporate mission that includes a charge to organize all of the world’s information. Judge Chin citing antitrust, copyright, and other concerns ruled that the settlement was too broad and essentially granted Google a monopoly.

On March 23, 2011, Robert Darnton published an opinion article in the New York Times calling for “a Digital Library Better Than Google’s”—a noncommercial digital public library. Subsequently, on April 3, 2011, the New York Times published an article that discusses the ruling, the ruling’s implications for creating a digital public library, and plans achieving that goal. Whether the Google project will eventually succeed or whether it will be superseded by a noncommercial digital public library such as the proposed Digital Public Library of America, or whether another solution will emerge remains to be seen.

This recent development reminds me of the ongoing copyright and ownership issues pertaining to digital images. These thorny issues swirl around the right to publish and to use digital images in untold ways including in education and as the basis for the creation of new works. We are fortunate to have access to many useful and reputable sites to help navigate these concerns. A particularly useful and interesting site which includes historical as well as current links has been newly updated by Christine L. Sundt. You might want to check it out.

Creative Commons 101

Recently I pointed out to a faculty member who wanted to post her digital images where others could have open access to them that there was something called the Creative Commons. Then yesterday I saw this link to an article on ALA TechSource, July 20, by Cindi Trainor. It is a very useful, concise overview of CC licensing. It appears that there is a new type of CC license called CC:Zero (CC:0), which differs from public domain. "Works created and declared to have a CC:Zero license may be used by anyone, in any way, and do not even require attribution of the creator."

This type of licensing, along with CC's other categories of licensing, is an attractive way for those with personal collections of digital images to dissiminate them according to their wants and wims. This site offers a useful way to tell those with whom we are consulting about image licensing in general.

http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2010/07/take-pictures-tell-stories-creative-commons-and-you.html

How to Quantify unauthorized use

There have been some interesting posts on the Museum Computer Network list serve regarding a recent report from the GAO to Congressional Committees entitled

"INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods"
Here is a working URL:  http://tinyurl.com/piracyreport

Jeff Sedlik, photographer, points out that without being able to quantify the amount of content piracy, which the report indicates is not possible, it is hard to estimate the economic effect.  He then goes on to describe how an Image Recognition technology does seem to be able to quantify the use without attribution or permission of still images.

"I can't speak to piracy in other content arenas, but with respect to photography, advances in technology now allow image piracy rates on the internet to be quantified to an extent sufficient to estimate piracy rates with some accuracy. Image recognition technology may be used to locate instances of known images on web sites, and license data may then be used to determine whether or not each instance is authorized. Not all sites can be sampled, nor can all every instance of every image be identified, but it is possible to quantify estimated piracy rates via representative sampling.

In  2003, PicScout http://www.picscout.com/ (an Israeli image recognition company) searched commercial web sites for instances of images of known ownership. Nine out of every ten published images were found to be used without permission or knowledge of the rights holders.

In 2005, PicScout used a new reference group of 20,000 sample images (on this occasion, provided by a group of stock photographers), and found that 1 out of every 17 copies of these images published on commercial web sites was published without the knowledge or permission of the rights holder.  In the USA, the rate of misuse found in this survey was 64%. In Germany, 23%. In the UK, 13%.

PicScout reports that over a seven year period, it found that 85% of images found on commercial websites were published without the knowledge or permission of the rights holders.

In a recent LA Times article (Sept 9, 2009), Gettyimages reported that it identifies approximately 42,000 examples of copyright infringement per year, while Corbis reported the identification of approximately 70,000 infringements each year. Importantly, these figures represent only the infringements that have been detected. It is reasonable to assume that these figures represent a small fraction of actual unauthorized usages.

I am not writing to encourage or suggest heightened enforcement or penalties for piracy, nor am I expressing an opinion on copyright law, website spidering or digital rights management. I am merely pointing out that the report in question does not indicate that piracy rates are lower than estimated by industry, and that in the photography content industry, technology now allows some quantification of piracy rates. Perfect.   I would not disagree with an opinion that the content industry has used piracy statistics in lobbying for support from legislators.  But any attempt to claim that the figures are overstated will be frustrated by the very same issue identified in the report -- such claims cannot be quantified."

Jeff Sedlick
Check out the GAO report for yourself. - http://tinyurl.com/piracyreport

A New Reality

After reading several reviews and seeing an acerbic interview with its author recently on “The Colbert Report,” I have been thinking about the new book “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” by David Shields and its implications for intellectual property rights in our digital society. Shield’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers, which the author has taken out of context (in some cases, even “revised, at least a little”), and for which he only acknowledges the sources in an appendix, added reluctantly at his publisher’s lawyers’ insistence. Shield’s scorns and is “bored by out-and-out-fabrication” and creativity, and interested in “reality-based art” based on “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Shield’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become so prominent in our Internet culture. Even the teaching of visual culture has seen the erosion of the value of intellectual property rights with the ubiquity and ease of finding images of artists’ works with on the Web with the click of a button. With the closure or lack of development of local institutional image collections, many teaching faculty and students are left to forage the Web for images without thought to who produced the art or photographed the object. That digital media are remolding our social landscape, especially arts and entertainment, goes without saying. That they are certainly affecting the methodology of scholarship and research needs is also sadly evident.

It is incumbent on us as part of our consultancy with individuals and institutions over the preservation and digital conversion of image collections not to forget the moral obligation we have to honor intellectual property rights where appropriate. Ignorance is certainly bliss among some faculty I have known, who often ignore basic tenets of copyright (although I suspect that they may be more informed than they let on). Along with technical, preservation, access and metadata issues, we need to educate our clients in the basics of copyright law and tenets of fair use with regard to images. Fortunately, there are very good forums and sites where we can direct faculty and institutions to get the most up-to-date and authoritative information about copyright, especially since major developments and legal decisions affecting academia are occurring with some frequency lately.

The value of artistic imagination and originality, along with the primacy of the individual, is being increasingly questioned in our digital world. So we need to be vigilant where we are able, especially in academic and library settings, as we go about our evangelizing for wider digital access to the fruits of generations of visual artists. Intellectual property rights should also be a “reality” to us, even if the author David Shields would probably disagree. (By the way, I’ve decided that he may be an uncreative minor wacko.)