[Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings

[Javier Ruiz]

Hi Guy

besides the eloquent arguments by Ben, there is another point being missed.

I completely agree with the very valid point you make about costs. All we
are saying is that after costs have been recovered eventually records should
end up in the public domain where they belong.

And it's not about bashing private companies at all, which after all only
have a duty to their shareholders. Both The National Archives and the
British Library are cashing in and restricting access on their online
services, independently of the commercial deals.

These UK cultural institutions see the Internet as a way to generate income,
rather than an extension of their mission. The argument being that their
core mandate only relates to the physical world. As I was told by one of the
managers of the British Library, they are conceptualised as "buildings", and
do not get proper funding for the digital revolution.

This is what we at ORG see as a fundamental UK policy failure: no public
mandate for digital access, no funding and no linking to openness.

France has just prepared a national fund of €4.2 Billion for Information
Society, including a good chunk for cultural digitisation. This is not just
a matter of crisis and cuts, but about public policy, and not necessarily
partisan in UK.

What we are saying is not that radical as you make it sound. It is
fundamentally pretty much what is being recommended for years now in every
European report and study on digitisation, culminating in the Committee of
Sages:

*- Cultural institutions should make public domain material digitised with
public funding as widely available as possible for access and re-use. This
cross-border access should be part of the funding conditions for
digitisation across Europe. The use of intrusive watermarks or other means
that limit the use of the material should be avoided.*
*
*
*- The European Commission should consider ways and means to eliminate the
differences in the rights status of digitised material between the Member
States in a context where cross-border access and use is the norm. In
principle the mere digitisation process should not generate any new rights.*
*
*
*- In order to protect the interests of public institutions entering into a
partnership with a private partner a set of minimum conditions should be
respected:*

   - *The contents of the agreement between a public cultural institution
   and a private partner should be made public.*
   - *The digitised public domain material should be free of charge for the
   general public and available in all EU Member States.*
   - *The private partner should provide cultural institutions with
   digitised files of the same quality as the ones it uses itself.*
   - *The maximum time of preferential use of material digitised in
   public-private partnerships must not exceed 7 years. This period is
   considered adequate to generate, on one hand, incentives for private
   investment in mass-digitisation of cultural assets, and, on the other, to
   allow sufficient control of the public institutions over their digitised
   material.*

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/reflection_group/final-report-cdS3.pdf

Current arrangements fail on most of the above: 10 year deals, no archival
quality copies, paywalls and commercial confidentiality of contracts.

Best, Javier



On 14 May 2011 15:04, Ben Brumfield <benwbrum at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Guy Etchells <guy.etchells at virgin.net>
> wrote:
> > Ben you missed the rest of the point "or as many do these day place
>
> That's fair, but in a discussion of  whether OGA or ORA should be
> involved in targeted copyright reform, the feasibility of a US-style
> system  is worth studying in detail.
>
> >>> conditions of use on their images and database "
> >
> > It is the fact that the companies are allowed to impose licence
> conditions
> > that allows these companies to profit from digitisation.
> > Such licencing works as an extension of copyright and is in fact far more
> > restrictive than copyright.
>
> Again, the conditions an Ancestry.com imposes are not license
> conditions per se, nor are they "an extension of copyright", since
> under US law reproductions of public domain material are not
> copyrightable.
>
> In some ways this contractual arrangement is more restrictive, in
> other ways it's not.  Ancestry.com has the freedom to impose the
> 200-per-year restriction because their restrictions are imposed via
> contract, not copyright.  How would they be able to do this if they
> asserted copyright over those scans and transcriptions?  They would
> have to selectively license each document to the downloading user with
> consideration of whether the user has reached their yearly limits or
> not.   In order to allow their users to do whatever they wanted with
> the documents--including republication--they'd have to attach that
> license to all down-stream uses, even if the license simply said "user
> may re-publish at will".  And if the document were digitized by a
> third party, the company might not even be allowed to grant their
> users that use, as I suspect is the case with the Old Bailey Online.
>
> I'm not saying that a system based on copyright  creation in PD scans
> is impossible--obviously it does work in the UK--but there are
> alternative models that allow a lot more freedom to the public while
> still allowing private digitization companies to thrive.  Whether it's
> worth OGA's effort is another question entirely.
>
> Ben Brumfield
> Austin, Texas
> http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/
>
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