The potential pitfalls of copyright
This week’s reading was very informative and extremely relevant to my semester project which involves digitizing vintage radio broadcasts currently stored on reel-to-reel tapes. Rosenzweig and Cohen state that “multimedia historians will probably spend a great deal more time fretting about legal issues than their text-based counterparts” and this certainly seems true from my perspective. I already have a number of questions for Peter Jaszi. For instance, while American University already has production copyright for many of the tapes in the collection I am working with, it does not own all copyrights nor can it authorize permission to cite from these sources. In addition, I understand that some radio programs have multiple copyrights, such as production, writing, etc. Given this situation, my digital archive will be housed on a test server at first and I plan to research copyrights for the recordings at the Library of Congress this summer in order to share the collection with the general public. However, if the situation does not work out as I hope, I’d like to see what Peter Jaszi thinks of some of our alternatives. For instance, could we include short excerpts of recordings where copyright is uncertain? Or only allow the American University community to access all or part of the recordings? On the bright side, it is possible to successfully create a digital archive with audio. Within the consortium, UDC features a web site with a digital collection of sound recordings of full-length interviews.
The discussion of orphan works also addresses a potential fear of mine involving my planned copyright research this summer. What if I cannot locate the copyright holder or his or her estate? It’s also possible that a syndicate may own copyright to some of the radio programs that I have recordings of. How does that impact the situation? Finally, what if the copyright holder is located, but simply does not respond to requests regarding copyright and permission to use the materials? What happens then?
Completely separately, I was astounded to learn in the readings that Corbis and other companies are selling images that researchers may obtain for free from institutions like the Library of Congress. I guess I should not be surprised at companies trying to take advantage of historians or others who might be unaware that royalty free versions of the same images exist, but it seems so cut throat.
March 28th, 2006 at 2:39 pm
Jodi,
I’m glad you brought up the issues of Crobis selling images/materials that are free through paid subscription services.
It might be part of the overall mentality that its not real unless you pay for it…however, i still think its fairly ridculous and a bit of a manipulation—but also evidentiary of consumerism.