Mr Rogers insisted: “I have read your concerns dealing with the copyright of DPL’s digital images and wanted to address these.

You have by now read our copyright statement: All images from the Denver Public Library collection are copyright © protected and may not be reproduced in any way without permission from the Denver Public Library. Commercial use of images is subject to service fees. We require that all images be credited to the Denver Public Library, Western History Collection.

There are several reasons we have copyright on our images. The library owns the original images and they were either purchased or donated to the library. The images were then digitized. Because the original images were digitized, they are derivatives of the originals and thus they are not in the public domain.

The library charges a service fee for customers to use our images. This fee covers the cost of digitization, preservation and maintenance of our digital images. While the library cares for the images, they are actually owned by the City and County of Denver and its citizens. It is only fair that if you use our images for personal use or to make a profit that you give something back, thus the service fee.

We have communicated with and passed your concerns to the Denver City Attorney and feel we are on solid ground with our policy.”

I explained that, under copyright law, a duplicate copy is not a derivitive and thus not copyrightable. Doing so illegally renews or extends and expired copyright and effectivly takes the image out of the public domain. Denver Public Library not only illegally charges “use fees” and claims copyrights on public domain images but it also sets conditions for use and “grants” license for one-time use.

It looks like a reasonable document within the current legal and political contexts, and the nod to open-access digital non-profit educational repositories is nice (e.g., Wikimedia Commons) but I would rather see something a little more broad-minded.

Scholars are not the only people who want (and ought to have) unrestricted access to digital images related to cultural heritage, and even if contract-based limitations on PD image use is legal (arguably not, in the U.S.), it’s not a practice that should be encouraged or tolerated without complaint.

thanks!

Yes, I discovered Yale’s quite sensible page explaining the difference between owning a physical copy and owning copyright ( http://www.library.yale.edu/special_collections/copyright.html ) a few days after this post, and I’ve since replied again to the last email with the Huntington curator. Seems like a good place to point recidivist archivists and curators. I haven’t heard back yet.

I took the stick approach, telling them off for unethical and probably illegal policies, but I have a friend who is going to try the carrot, contacting them independently to show them the benefits of letting PD material go free: Wikipedia frequently highlights images from the Library of Congress on its Main Page, because the LoC is one of the best places to get really high quality PD scans and we have a number of Wikipedians who do excellent restorations on these images. That can mean millions of views in a single day for something that hardly anyone was aware of before the library released it and a Wikipedian worked on it.

My understanding of the UK situation is based mostly on the Wikipedia article “Sweat of the brow”. It’s hardly an authoritative treatment, but it mentions some court cases where you might find a better answer.

In fact, they do. Beinecke (like many large repositories and unlike Huntington) assert no copyright or licensing rights over their digitised material. Recently I was made aware of the famed Ripley (alchemy) Scroll which had been uploaded in sections by Beinecke and which was reported on their Early Modern blog.

Although I already knew the conditions they operated under (having published a book featuring one of their images) I nevertheless contacted the Beinecke librarian out of courtesy to ask if it was alright for me to d/load all the Ripley image sections and then splice them together and post the final image to my blog and to flickr and, ultimately, to wikimedia.

They were very very very happy for me to do this.

–

I’d be interested in someone pointing me to the UK law that allows de novo copyright over digitised material.

Thanks Sage.

That depends on what the website does. If it can be argued that the service provided by the site is directed mainly to some other country (as is the case with most non-English language wikipedias), it might be possible to sue based on the law of that country. See for example this story.

As I understand it, opinions differ on how much scan-based copyright can be ignored outside the UK. The version I think is most correct is that only the laws of the country where a website is hosted apply (and for other publications, I’m pretty sure that’s the case legally, even if publishers generally play it safe and respect any claim of rights for images, no matter how far-fetched). Wikimedia Commons uses a more conservative version, which is that things have to be free in both the U.S. and the country of origin.