[Mi-local-history] Seeking advice and recommendations related to copyright language

[Whitledge, Bryan R]

Hello Rae,

Copyright can be tricky and you should work with an intellectual property expert for any of your stickier questions. What follows are some thoughts that come from my experience working with some archivists who have thought and written a lot about this over the years. I am not a lawyer and none of what follows should be construed as legal advice.

For the easy stuff (that is, things that are in the Public Domain or things for which the rights have been legally assigned to your institution), those can be handled rather straightforwardly,

For guidance about copyright term and the public domain, one of the most useful resources comes from Cornell University’ Copyright Services -- https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain. On this site, you can see two major groups of materials – unpublished and published. And then there are different dates and characteristics to help you determine whether something falls in the public domain or not.

For the public domain items that the Clarke Historical Library places on Omeka, such as this bird’s-eye view map of Lansing from 1890<https://clarke.omeka.net/items/show/249> (in the public domain as an item published prior to 1929), the rights statement (using the Dublin Core field, “Rights”) is as simple as “this item is in the public domain.” You can modify this statement however you see fit to get at the gist that the image is public domain and can be used freely and no one can assert rights claims over it.

For items that Central Michigan University owns the rights to, like this picture of coach Marcy Weston with her volleyball team<https://clarke.omeka.net/items/show/292>, the statement, in the same Dublin Core field, reads something akin to, “Copyright of this image is owned by Central Michigan University.” You can always add a note such as “please contact us for more information about permissions or reproductions” or something like that. An example of such a statement can be seen on this image from the University of Illinois<https://archon.library.illinois.edu/archives/index.php?p=digitallibrary/digitalcontent&id=1381>.

For those items for which your institution does not own copyright, nor is the image/document in the public domain, the choice to make the image/document available via Omeka should be made in collaboration with an attorney or an intellectual property expert. One source that may help you make decisions about such items are the writings and presentations of Peter Hirtle, who often approaches the sharing of information in archives from a risk assessment angle. If you search for Peter Hirtle and risk assessment, you can find quite a few things, including institutions that have been inspired by his risk assessment approach. You can read the 2009 book he coauthored for free through Cornell University’s institutional repository - https://ecommons.cornell.edu/items/16d5a226-3f9a-4af1-bdd2-3e0d06f588c3.

Finally, when it comes to putting a copyright statement on your site, is that meant for your organization to assert rights over your intellectual property? If so, you would be well-served again to talk to an attorney or IP expert to make sure that.

In a tangential thing, something that archives and cultural heritage institutions should consider is that facts and lists are public domain and are not copyright protected. A common example a former boss of mine used to mention are all of the websites that reprint cookbook recipes (which are essentially lists of ingredients and facts about how to assemble the ingredients in the list together). The sites are usually, “my experience with America’s Test Kitchen’s [insert dish],” or something like that. Those sites can’t show the pictures from the cookbook nor can they reprint the chef’s charming story about discovering some cute market in a back alley in Paris that inspired the recipe. But they can list all the ingredients and the recipe with no problem.

Additionally, no one can assert rights over any underlying public domain items without transforming that item to create a new work. An example is commercial digital newspaper sites attempting to say they owns rights to nineteenth-century newspapers – that would be tough to hold up in court because the nineteenth-century newspapers are in the public domain. We use this public-domain consideration all the time in cultural heritage to scan microfilm of historical documents when the microfilm was created by some for-profit entity in the 1980s or 1990s. Even though the film was created post 1977, and would be protected by copyright if it were a creative work first published after 1977, the underlying information—let’s say nineteenth-century newspapers—is in the public domain and the reformatting from newspaper to microfilm isn’t a substantial transformation to a new creative work. Therefore, we can scan that microfilm as we see fit.

Again, all of this is merely some thoughts based on conversations with mentors who have a lot more knowledge about this than I do. I hope some of it is helpful and doesn’t simply serve to muddy the waters of this already murky backwater of cultural heritage work.

Bryan Whitledge
Public Services Librarian
Clarke Historical Library
Central Michigan University
989-774-2159
whitl1br at cmich.edu

From: Mi-local-history <mi-local-history-bounces at mcls.org> On Behalf Of Rae Manela via Mi-local-history
Sent: Monday, March 11, 2024 12:54 PM
To: mi-local-history at mcls.org
Subject: [External] [Mi-local-history] Seeking advice and recommendations related to copyright language

Hello all,

My name is Rae. I am the Archival Librarian at Novi Public Library. In conjunction with our city's historical commission my local history room has an Omeka site which I am in the very early stages of developing. So far I have 1 collection. Before I launch it publicly I want all my ducks in a row.
I'm writing in search of advice on what I should put in the copyright sections of the website. Both generally and if anyone has citation recommendations. Copyright areas are both inside collections as well as the main page of the site.
If anyone has experience with this, please let me know.

Thank you,

--
Rachel Manela, MLIS, MAPH (She/Her)| Archival Librarian
Novi Public Library |45255 West Ten Mile Road | Novi, MI  48375
Phone 248-869-7243
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