Copyright Issues

[Kelley Wilder]

Recently, Cornell decided to open up its public domain material fee-free for users. This includes many texts important to the early history of photography, which are now available from within the Internet Archive.

The move follows similar initiatives as far back as 2006 by the V&A and the Met. Rumour has it that the Getty Museum (not to be confused with Getty Images) is heading in the same direction. In January of 2008, at a conference hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, interested parties from many countries came together to address the increasingly difficult issues facing historians using copyrighted material. You can read the report of this meeting here. We decided that the best thing to do, given differing national and institutional rules, would be to begin working on a set of recommendations for all parties concerned. You can read the Recommendations for Best Practice by clicking on the link in the page given above (it is a pdf and can't upload to this blog). It is essentially a code of conduct, but it is also a reasoned argument about why we need to set certain standards in each field for the conduct of researchers, of institutions that hold valuable material, and of publishing entities.

I want to open this debate up to the community of photohistorians because obviously we depend on accessing and using images for our work, but more importantly because the copyright restrictions are determining the focus of research. It is always helpful to know where we can find texts, like those in Cornell's online library, images, like the V&A's, and manuscripts that can be seen and moreover published at a minimal cost to scholarly writers. If anyone else out there is also interested in or working on this subject, perhaps we can open up a more public dialogue, and use what scholars in other fields have already implemented.