From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Out of Fear, Colleges Lock Books and Images Away From Scholars
By Marc Parry
A library of 8.7 million digital volumes. A trove of 100,000 ocean-science photos. An archive of 57,000 Mexican-music recordings.
A common problem bedevils those different university collections. Wide online access is curtailed, in part because they contain "orphan works," whose copyright owners can't be found. And the institutions that hold the collections—a consortium of major research libraries and the University of California campuses at San Diego and Los Angeles—must deal with legal uncertainty in deciding how to share the works. A university that goes too far could end up facing a copyright-infringement lawsuit.
Many colleges now have the ability to digitize a wide variety of collections for broad use but frequently back away. And that reluctance harms scholarship, because researchers end up not using valuable documents if they can't afford to fly to a distant archive to see them....
One idea being considered is a proposal for Congress to bring about broader digital access to out-of-print books through a system that copyright wonks call "extended collective licensing." Pamela Samuelson, a professor of law [and information] at the University of California at Berkeley, lays out the concept in a new paper called "Legislative Alternatives to the Google Book Settlement." Under such a regime, Congress could authorize a system that would permit granting broad licenses to use in-copyright books "for which it would be unduly expensive to clear rights on a work-by-work basis," she writes. The framework in some ways resembles what Google hoped to do with its settlement—commercialize many in-copyright, out-of-print books without the cost of clearing rights book by book.
The system hinges on a collecting society that would negotiate licenses for works owned by both members and nonmembers. Unclaimed money from out-of-print books could be set aside for "a period of years," Ms. Samuelson suggests. If efforts to find owners during that time were unsuccessful, she writes, "the works should be designated orphans and made available on an open-access basis."...