Using Massive Digital Libraries by Andrew Weiss

Author:Andrew Weiss [Weiss, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780838919743
Publisher: American Library Association
Published: 2014-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

Fighting for the Public Domain: Europeana

Aside from litigation, some MDLs have taken up issues within copyright and culture by attempting to change legal frameworks and take on stronger roles in advocacy. Europeana, the MDL that incorporates the cultural materials of hundreds of European cultural institutions, has created a policy for developing a stronger public domain. Europeana appears to have an active respect for and desire to encourage the development of the public domain.

Europeana’s Public Domain Charter (www.publicdomaincharter.eu) states three principles for a healthy public domain. The first principle is “Copyright protection is temporary,” a reminder that the statutes of copyright are meant to be short term. It can be inferred that the MDL’s intent is also to suggest that the shorter the exclusivity in copyright law, the stronger the public domain will become. The second principle states, “What is in the public domain needs to remain in the public domain.” Recent court cases in the United States show a trend of allowing works to be recopyrighted. For example, in Golan v. Holder the Supreme Court held that works can be put back into copyright protection, thus adjusting the law to allow the United States to move into better compliance with the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international agreement on copyright protection first established in Berne, Switzerland, in 1886.25 This precedent does not bode well for ensuring that works that have passed into the public domain remain there. The third principle of the Europeana Foundation is “the lawful user of a digital copy of a public domain work should be free to (re-)use, copy and modify the work.” Essentially, creativity and new knowledge cannot be developed without the free use of old models, which was how cultures progressed for thousands of years.

The Europeana policy also takes other current developments in copyright to task, including the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 and the Google Books project, which pairs corporate interests with cultural ones. As for the DMCA and similar decrees that criminalize what might actually be fair use, the Europeana Foundation in its Public Domain Charter avers that “no other intellectual property rights must be used to reconstitute exclusivity over Public Domain Material.” The DMCA prohibits any users from dismantling data rights management software or devices in any circumstances. While this is useful for the distributors or publishers of content, it prevents users from exercising their fair use rights and could, if a work were actually in the public domain, prevent people from fully using the source material. Indeed, according to the Europeana Foundation, “No technological protection measures backed-up by statute should limit the practical value of works in the public domain.”

In the case of Google Books or similar corporate-cultural hybrid projects, Europeana warns against allowing proprietary interests to lock down content by exploiting exclusive relationships. According to the Europeana Foundation, such commercial content aggregators are “attempting to exercise as much control as possible over . . . public domain works.” It warns

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.