This year’s CILIP/Naomi Korn and Data Protection Conference and Copyright Conference take place on 3 and 4 June. Delegates attending both can get a 25 per cent discount.

Karen Porter, Rights and Provenance Officer at the National Library of Scotland (NLS), will be leading one of the sessions at this year’s Copyright Conference and here she talks to us about her work, how she go into it and what delegates can expect from her talk on Copyright and Risk at the NLS.

I completed my PhD on diaries written during the Holocaust in 2022 while working as Collections Researcher at the National Holocaust Museum in Nottinghamshire. While there I undertook provenance research into the collections as well as person tracing. While I loved working with such a special collection, I decided I wanted to work closer to home, and as soon as I spotted the Rights and Provenance Officer role at the NLS I jumped at the chance.

My role is as Rights and Provenance Officer, so I split my time between the two areas. The provenance work is conducted alongside curatorial colleagues. The rights work takes up the majority of my time and means I work with colleagues right across the Library. I work on rights clearance for our longstanding mass digitisation programme, I provide copyright training to various departments, I advise on copyright within our exhibition spaces (which are updated multiple times per year) and deal with enquiries from staff and the public.

NLS Policy and real-world impact

We have a combination of policy, procedures and frameworks to mitigate risk. We have a copyright guide on our website and an internal one for staff, as well as ensuring the copyright and my own email address are visible for specific enquiries. The risk framework applies to the entire Library and copyright sits within this. Generally, the copyright risks we face are that of an infringement case or reputational damage.

The vast majority of works we upload to our Digital Gallery are in the public domain or we have obtained permission to publish. Our curators generally select collections or works which are out of copyright, but occasionally we will have a small number of in copyright works within a larger collection of public domain works. I will conduct a search for rights holders and, depending on the risk level outcome, I will either recommend we do not publish, or I will conduct a risk assessment outlining any known information and risks.

This is where the director (and usually the head of curatorial collection area) will read my risk assessment report and determine whether the due diligence search and risk level are adequate to publish items to the Digital Gallery. The director essentially weighs up the benefit to the public in making the works available online. If approved, they are then published on our Digital Gallery, alongside our takedown policy.

Book you place for CILIP/Naomi Korn Associates Data Protection Conference and Copyright Conference.

The CILIP Copyright Champion Award 2023 has been awarded to Benjamin White, Researcher at the Centre for Intellectual Property and Management, Bournemouth University.

The award, sponsored by Naomi Korn Associates, is a prestigious annual honour that recognises the achievements of a copyright champion in the sector.

Benjamin White was nominated in recognition of his leadership and advocacy for better solutions and regulation on copyright and IP in the field of libraries and information.

White was formerly Head of Intellectual Property at the British Library and has a background in publishing. He is active in the intellectual property field in Europe, having sat on a number of bodies including the BBC's Creative Archive Advisory Board and the UK Government's Creative Economy Programme (Competition and Intellectual Property). He is co-founder of Knowledge Rights 21, an Arcadia funded project to promote copyright reform and open access in Europe for the benefit of research and education.

The award was presented at this year’s CILIP Copyright Conference on 16th May, at which White delivered a presentation on AI and IP.

Dinusha Mendis, Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation Law at Bournemouth University, explores copyright and IP developments caused by the digital revolution. Here she discusses NFTs, AI and 3D printing. Dinusha is the opening keynote speaker at the CILIP and Naomi Korn Associates’ Copyright Conference on 18 May. Book your place at CILIP Copyright Conference.

Explaining what NFT stands for (Non-fungible token) what an NFT is (a digital file recorded on the blockchain) and what they are for (trading rare or limited edition items) still leaves most people perplexed about what an NFT really is, and why anyone would want to own one. But thinking about why NFTs exist might help.

“In the past the reproduction of music and video games was to make them cheaper. That’s what the internet was about,” Dinusha Mendis says, “Lots for cheap, or free. Easy to copy, easy to access. But NFTs and the content which they are linked to, are expensive and unique. It’s the whole opposite of what we have been dealing with all these years. In that sense it has changed the concept of ownership fundamentally.”

If Dinusha is right, NFTs wouldn’t be working if they didn’t cause ownership problems where there had never been ownership problems before.

It’s also a good example of the territory that Dinusha works in, as she explains: “The impact of new and emerging technologies relating to copyright and broadly on intellectual property – that’s always been my research interest. Way back, I was interested in Second Life and then ebooks and so on. And more recently it’s been blockchain, NFTs and 3D Printing, and of course AI – which everyone is currently exploring.”

NFTs

“Everything has become digitised and everything can be reproduced. Whole aspects of rights and ownership have been undermined,” Dinusha says.

The first NFT was sold for $4 at a conference in New York – a digital video file recorded on the blockchain. And generally, that is what they still are, digital files that can be stored anywhere, but linked to the blockchain where all transactions related to it are immutably recorded.

“So, what is different about NFTs?” Dinusha asks: “One of the fundamental things is this aspect of speculative investment. That you can buy an NFT, sometimes for ridiculous amounts of money, with the expectation that you can sell it again for an even more ridiculous sum. But the only thing distinguishing the ‘original’ from identical copies is that the original is recorded on the blockchain which has the potential to authenticate originality and ownership.”

However, there are many variations of NFTs.

Some follow the original token plus file, but with extras. “I like the NFTs created by the band Kings of Leon – the first band to release an album as an NFT. Their terms and conditions say that you can’t copy or play the NFT for commercial reasons, only for personal use. And while the album When you See Yourself will be sold on usual platforms, iTunes, Spotify, the NFT version (called NFT Your Self that sold for $50) comes in three forms that include digital art and added real-world extras like front row seats to future concerts worldwide.”

Kings of Leon – the first band to release an album as an NFT. Photo: CC by 2.0 by Raph_PH

Other NFT content is more abstract and in some cases much more expensive. Dinusha uses the example of CryptoKitties. The game involves players buying, selling and breeding virtual cats – that’s the sole aim of the game. The old and new Kitties are static images, but some have sold for more than $1m, even though with a right click you can get an exact copy. But the original is unique because it has the proof on the blockchain that it is the original.

Cryptokitty

Terms and conditions

In all these cases Dinusha says: “You have to ask yourself how much do you actually own, because ownership in a non-legal sense and a copyright sense are different and you won’t own the copyright unless the owner has assigned it to you. Ownership has many facets to it. It is also worth noting that the company that runs CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs, was valued at $7.6b in September 2021 – so it’s part of a significant commercial operation.

“In the case of CryptoKitties, the NFT is a kitty, and the owners of CryptoKitties meet with other owners to breed new CryptoKitties and sell them. However, the “breeders” of CryptoKitties are bound by terms and conditions which state that they can’t earn more than $100,000 a year from their CryptoKitty. So, as in anything in life, there are terms and conditions. You can’t assume that because you’ve bought an NFT, that you can do whatever you want to do with it.”

Are NFTs relevant to libraries?

“We are usually talking about art works, but papers and books and many other digital assets could be tokenised as NFTs too. One way I think this could be relevant to libraries (other than maybe issues about owning NFTs and lending them out) is that libraries have very rare books, limited editions, that could be tokenised and sold. Why would the library do that? It may be that the library is willing to share ownership, subject to terms and conditions. In practice, the rare book could be digitised and sold as an NFT but the actual book will stay in the library… and the money from the NFT sale could be invested back into development, or into other work in the library space.

“And there are already plenty of interesting developments in digital ownership models that may one day be relevant to libraries and information professionals. For example, the decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), one of which nearly raised enough money to buy one of 13 existing copies of the US constitution, as part of a scheme to prevent one institution holding it. “For libraries though, it might be that those who buy the rare book as an NFT can also claim ownership, subject to the terms and conditions, however, the physical book would stay in the library – because it is impossible for so many people to have access to that one book – whilst on the other hand, it wouldn’t make sense for the library. It would be similar to timesharing.”

No police

For decades rights owners have been trying to hold back the internet tide of free access to content. But NFTs are not part of this traditional defence of ownership. They originated from blockchain which is a decentralised system. “The whole point is that it’s not like Google where there’s a centralised organisation, it’s a whole lot of people being responsible. Everything gets recorded on the blockchain and the blockchain is immutable, so even transactions that are infringements – thefts and frauds taking place – they will always be there. But that’s all.

“If a platform is centralised it can be policed. You can get an injunction to stop people accessing the platform which blocks anything behind the platform. That’s not the case with NFTs. In some cases people have been defrauded – a recent well known example was three valuable Bored Ape NFTs being stolen by hackers. Opensea and Rarible, the platforms where NFTs are traded, stepped in to save the day. But while one group of people said ‘that’s good, well done’ another group was saying ‘what are you doing? We are meant to be decentralised’.”

AI and IP

Dinusha says: “There has been a lot written about it – about who is the owner etc. It’s a very important question. If you think about theories of international property, we’ve always had human creators, so you know who the rights holder is, you know it follows the incentive theory and that the creator should be incentivised to create again. But if the work is created through AI or an algorithm, then do you reward the software creators or the people inputting the data? Or someone else? “It’s very much a live issue. Last month the IPO was seeking views on this and other related questions and whether there should be a change in the law. Their position has been challenged in courts around the world, the most recent was the Dabus case in the UK but there are different legal opinions and different legal outcomes in other jurisdictions – some say you do need a human inventor, others saying the opposite.

“It is important because international law can cope with nuanced differences but not in significant matters like who is an inventor. We need consensus because we have international law which enables application for worldwide patents. “But AI and other technology may well highlight cultural differences. For example, some countries are very much into moral rights while some others are into economic rights. So I think we should expect some differences in how ownership of AI is perceived in different jurisdictions. The difference will be dependent on differences in the foundations of their IP laws. But I think on some level, we should be aiming for consistency.”

3D Printing

“Before 3D-printing people were used to reproducing music and film, but it was all in that creative side where copying was much easier. Copying something like a handbag, that was not for the average consumer. When 3D printing came along it opened the door for people like me – or someone who is not very technical - to be able to create a physical product through software called computer aided design (CAD). In 2009, 3D printing opened up to the average consumer and like in everything in the digital world, platforms popped up with CAD files for 3D-printing. Here you could find someone doing something like a mock-up of a rabbit and quite often, next to it, would be protected content like My Little Pony or Pokémon, available to download and be printed.”

Not illegal?

“But there are grey areas in relation to infringement, when it comes to CAD files. Yes, 3D-printing opened up new types of file sharing and people found new infringing content, but the issue has not been resolved. My first project was for the UK Intellectual Property Office in 2014-2015. They wanted us to explore 3D-printing from a consumer and business perspective and explore its impact for the future.

CryptoKitties.

“When we published our results in 2015, the views from those companies, pretty big companies we spoke to, alongside the consumer trends reflected through the quantitative data, it seemed pretty certain that 3D printing would become common in our life by 2025. But it hasn’t taken off in the way we thought, not in the consumer space anyway. Who knows why? Technology can take a while. I still think it is becoming a bigger thing within industries, but to reach the average consumer it’s not going to happen for a while as the technology still needs developing, similar to the trend we saw in computing.”

Covid highlight

During covid 3D-printing was back in the public eye. Some public libraries in the UK helped print PPE,but the biggest story came from Italy. Dinusha says: “In Lombardy doctors advertised for help to produce valves for breathing machines. Two engineers created a prototype. They had taken the original and scanned it, reverse engineered it and printed it. But they agreed that they wouldn’t share it with the rest of the world.

“I recently led a commissioned project for the European Commission. They wanted clarity on all IP rights relating to 3D-printing. In relation to copyright, we concluded that you can protect the model as an artistic work, but the question we were asked was if the construction graph/tree which held the instructions to how the model was designed could be protected as a literary work.

“We referred to various copyright cases that protected things like diagrams for knitting instructions and circuit diagrams – there are copyright cases in the UK and beyond where these kinds of things are protected. We wanted to understand if someone who creates a digital design can have similar protection and provide clarity for those working in this space.” 3D in libraries

3D-printing is already widespread in libraries but Dinusha says, if they haven’t got it already, libraries need to have 3D-printing policies in place. “The data of a scanned asset, might not be protected by copyright law but the model is. There’s a case from the 1960s when photocopiers had just emerged and the University of New South Wales was held liable for copyright infringement because it hadn’t properly monitored the copying that was going on. In the same manner, do libraries need to think about printing and scanning policies relating to 3D-printing and scanning?

“And it’s not just copyright that libraries need to worry about. The American Library Association’s guidance mentions a legal case that allowed a company to post files for 3D printed plastic guns, but warned that libraries are still bound by another law forbidding the creation or assisting in the creation of guns that are undetectable by x-ray machines.”

Conclusion

Dinusha’s experience in this area has exposed her to an array of different technologies and the different speeds at which they present significant issues to copyright professionals. So 3D Printing might appear to be a sluggard in comparison to the sudden recent interest in NFTs. However, technologies particularly those that involve hardware take time and that is no different in the case of 3D printing.

While Dinusha says it may be impossible to predict what will come first, big challenges are likely to keep coming over the horizon. At the time of writing she’s still pondering over the direction her keynote might take, but it’s not through a lack of burning issues.

Book now

This year’s Copyright Conference takes place online on 18 May, and also features Tanya Aplin, Margaret Haig, Matthew Lambert, Caroline Ball, James Bennett and Dr Adrienne Muir. Book your place.

May sees the return of the CILIP Copyright Conference with Naomi Korn Associates taking charge of the programme to deliver a must-attend event for anyone looking to stay informed about the latest changes, opportunities and developments. Read on to find out more from Naomi about why you should attend, and you can book your place now.

Copyright is an ever-present for information managers and librarians – touching on all aspects of services and delivery. Continuing developments and interpretations of -copyright, particularly in light of Brexit, whose impact is still being felt, means that it is as important as ever to keep on top of changes and the real-world implications they may have on the library and information profession.

CILIP has long been aware of the importance of supporting members through the often complicated area, with its Copyright Conference becoming a regular event for the profession. This year is no different, with CILIP’s Copyright Conference taking place in May.

Keynotes from Professor Dinusha Mendis and Professor Tanya Aplin will open and close the conference, alongside expert presentations and debate. Other speakers include Margaret Haig, Head of Copyright Operations at the Intellectual Property Office; Academic Librarian Caroline Ball, who is also an influential campaigner in the #ebookSOS fight to get fairer licensing deals for ebooks in libraries; and James Bennett, Head of Rights and Licensing, Copyright Licensing Agency. As in previous years, the conference Naomi Korn will chair the conference.

Naomi Korn on this year’s Copyright Conference

This is the twelfth year in which I have proudly set the programme, and will be chairing, the annual CILIP Copyright Conference, which is the UK’s foremost forum for discussions about copyright and licensing developments for the library and information community. The Conference, run in association with Naomi Korn Associates, takes place online on 18 May 2022.

Over the last decade in particular, copyright is the gift that keeps giving. Laws have and are being reinterpreted, whilst new copyright legislation, such as the exceptions to copyright, orphan works solutions and the impact of Brexit require deeper analysis about how these issues affect access to and use of resources by librarians and information professionals.

However, at the same time because any changes to the legislation are often long in the making and slow to transpose into the UK’s legislative framework, copyright laws are frequently out of pace with the rapidly changing digital spaces in which librarians and information professionals operate. Let’s be honest, copyright laws are over 300 years old in the UK, instigated by publishers and many of the key principles upon which they were formed still evident in our legislative framework today. Subsequently, how copyright law operates in practice, the challenges these present to our sector and how we might navigate these challenges, is particularly important to discuss.

Changes in technology, such as those in artificial intelligence, new technologies for recording and processing personal data (such as face recognition technologies, and the use of social media and home assistance devices such as Alexa) are becoming commonplace.

In the field of copyright, there have been developments both in technologies to make it easier to copy and disseminate materials to multiple audiences all over the world, and in TPM software to try to prevent easy infringement being applied.

We now live in a world where everyone can be a content creator, often using multiple media as well as a content disseminator, publisher and a content user. Sometimes we can be all of them, collectively with others. Social media platforms make it easier to share content and often blur these roles.

Over the decades, the resulting role of the library, information or knowledge professional has changed beyond recognition, with arguably an increased role as being an advisor on the legality of things as well as a completely changed intermediary role between the patron and the information they wish to access.

The management of these issues is important because staff members are likely to encounter many types of digital (born digital and digital surrogates) as well as paper-based resources capable of being created, held or used by their institutions under various terms and conditions. How these resources can be used, and possibly re-purposed, by whom, where, when and for how long needs to be properly managed.

Fathoming out what can be done with different types of resources derived from multiple sources, often with layers of associated rights and permissions, can be daunting even for those well versed in copyright. This is in part due to the quantities of resources and their licences encountered by library, information and knowledge workers, but also in part due to the many possibilities of blending different digital resources together, thereby repurposing them in a variety of ways.

Keynote speaker, Professor Tanya Aplin

Staff members also need to understand the role of Creative Commons (CC) licences and how they can use them to achieve open access and embed them within broader organisational -licensing and business strategies, particularly during lock-down as well as home and remote working – the new norm.

The range of topics include:

• IP in AI and Information Management
• Government Copyright Policy following Brexit
• Ebooks and copyright
• Copyright Licensing Agency update
• Controlled digital lending and the UK legislative framework
• The use of the Quotation Exception

The confirmed speakers include:

• Opening Keynote: Professor Dinusha Mendis, Professor of Intellectual Property and Innovation Law, Bournemouth University
• Closing Keynote: Professor Tanya Aplin from The Dickson Poon School of Law.
• Margaret Haig, Head of Copyright Operations, Intellectual Property Office
• Caroline Ball, Academic Librarian and Campaigner #ebookSOS
• James Bennett, Head of Rights and Licensing, Copyright Licensing Agency
• Dr Adrienne Muir, Senior Consultant, Naomi Korn Associates

The CILIP Copyright Conference provides a unique and important platform for us to collectively discuss these issues, through presentations from some of most authoritative copyright specialists and leaders in the sector as well as new voices, offering different perspectives and opinions. Sometimes we invite to speak delegates who asked a pertinent question the year before. Last year we heard from a new professional. This year we are inviting new professionals as well as quick-fire poster slots to extend the breadth of speakers and broaden speaker representation. Thus, the CILIP Copyright Conference can enable mentoring opportunities for the next generation of copyright experts; unheard voices and succession planning in the making.

Attendance at the CILIP Copyright Conference is an ideal and unique opportunity for all librarians, archivists and information professionals to update their knowledge and professional practice in this crucial area. Additionally, it will appeal to those who want to update their general copyright, licensing and publishing knowledge.

Find out more about this year’s CILIP Copyright Conference and book your place.

Copyright has created a digital dark age where the most powerful tools for cultural analysis are blind between 1910 and the rise of social media, says Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Culture at Edinburgh University and keynote speaker at CILIP’s Copyright Conference 2021.

Risk aversion is the issue that Professor Melissa Terras returns to again and again when she talks about copyright. She says that circumstances – financial, political and cultural – mean institutions increasingly resort to a blanket ‘no’ when asked to take any copyright risk.

As a data scientist and information engineer – rather than a professional librarian – is she just impatient with the sector’s tried and tested safety mechanisms? This could be answered by pointing out that she is CILIP chartered (she discovered her own personal attitude to risk on a Naomi Korn copyright course), is a trustee of the National Library of Scotland, has taught library students at UCL, and chairs the Library & Information Systems Committee for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, responsible for spending on library materials and systems across a third of the University of Edinburgh. But even if she didn’t have these credentials, her observations about the bizarre impact of copyright on research should prompt institutions to reassess their attitude to copyright risk.

No blankets

“I think the blanket ‘no’ should be replaced by risk assessment” she says, “because this should be about institutions understanding their capacity for risk. They should ask “what’s the worst thing that can happen?” I’ve read that only seven libraries have been taken to court in the UK. And if they’re more worried about reputational risk than the benefit they might bring to their audience, there is a problem. Because is it really copyright – the right of the author – that you’re worried about?”

“Being on the boards of certain places, I can see that institutions are inherently risk averse. They don’t want any bad press, they don’t want to use institutional resources paying for lawyers, they don’t even want that conversation. So, while the tension should be ‘yes there is copyright, and yes we should be respectful of creators’, that is not where we are now, we are in a state of paralysis.”

However, Melissa acknowledges that, right now, cultural institutions face a perfect storm: “The political and financial threats our institutions face are real. They are not just a perceived threat – it’s a very dangerous time to speak up and rock the boat when you don’t even know if you’re going to have an operational budget next year.”

Bad environment

The problem isn’t just a sector on the backfoot. As chair of a university library committee, she has followed the current ebook pricing controversy and believes it is a symptom of a deeper problem. “They’re fleecing us. I understand there’s a commercial opportunity, but this is during a pandemic. So, I think part of the problem is the way that commercial suppliers view universities as cash cows. Ebook pricing is symptomatic of many things that are wrong with the way the information environment works around universities and research. How, in a world where we are all working from home, can the information environment be so locked down? It is the fear of copyright and the licences which are entered into with the major suppliers. This is not just a research issue. It is a point of social justice. If you go to a rich university, you will have access to information that you can’t get at your local college.”

But it is in her own areas of expertise that she can describe the tangible impact of copyright restrictions and the fear around them. In an era when computers are learning to measure the influence of culture, copyright keeps the 20th and 21st Century off limits.

AI and the Romans

Melissa’s career path started off firmly in the arts. A revelation came when she was asked to present her undergraduate dissertation (on ancient Greek art) in a multimedia project. “That’s when I saw I should be doing computing. Before that I was a bit lost. People were saying it wasn’t an area of academic study – that computing in arts and humanities wasn’t a real thing. But I saw that it was, like a truth of the universe.”

She turned this realisation into a reality, converting to a masters in computing science, followed by a PhD in engineering at Oxford. “At Oxford I was working in a group that did image processing – extracting information from digital images. It’s very common now, with face and handwriting recognition. We were applying techniques used to interpret medical images to ancient documents, using them to read things that were too damaged for the human eye. A computer can take each mark and say ‘this is likely to be a handwriting stroke’ or “this is likely to be wood grain” or “this is likely to be noise because it was buried for 2,000 years”. You pull out all the scratches and then run probability engines over what is left, like a crossword puzzle. The big one we did that the historians were really excited about was a document proving that the Roman Army had road tax in northern Britain.”

The Digital and the Victorians

To read Roman artefacts computers needed a to be trained on a digital library of handwriting to see if a mark was part of a message or noise. Now, among the things that Melissa and her students use computational techniques for, is the investigation of individuals rather than artefacts – to see how they have been influenced by culture. Instead of a library of marks, a conventional library of books – digitised in full – is needed and can provide insights that were impossible in a pre-digital era. “I had a PhD student called Dr Helen O’Neill and she worked with the London Library, looking at their members’ books and registers. We looked at John Stuart Mill, the politician and economist, who was an active member and donated a number of books. Helen compiled a list of all the books he’d borrowed from and donated to the library, and then we used large scale computing to mine that against all the books he’d ever written. It was like a historical Turnitin (a web-based plagiarism checker). It meant you could find the influence of a library on an individual through his books. But to do this you need to have those lists of books and then it’s all contingent on having access to the full text of these books. At the moment you can only do that on pre-copyright years. The guillotine falls about 1910. You can’t study anyone after 1910 using that because we can’t get access to full text resources, unless you digitise them all yourself. The Victorians are the people that you can study because that’s when you first have mass print that’s all out of copyright. You can’t do it on the Edwardians, you can’t do it on the second world war. No way can you touch the 1940s. So, we couldn’t easily do that same study on Virginia Woolf (as some of her works are still under copyright in the UK, and so not available for text mining, unless we digitise them ourselves).

Dark age

One of Melissa’s recent projects used text mining to find mentions of professors and academics in children’s literature. It provides a good illustration of the problem. “I have a nice graph which is about the number of professors in children’s books and from about 1850 it rises and rises because I’m able to do full text searches across Google books and the Internet Archive until you hit about 1910. Then it disappears because you can’t search in the same way.

Your method has to change from doing full text searches across ­massive collections to actually doing a traditional bibliographic search, calling things up from the library and looking through yourself, and that limits scale to human. It picks up again in 2010 because of Waterstone’s catalogue, ebay and ­Amazon. A similar issue would crop up if she attempted her current project in the 20th Century. The book will publish primary sources about women’s rights like speeches. Here the text mining is used to hunt down references.

“You take a speech from a Tuesday in February in 1890 and the speaker is talking about what a politician said last week – no name just ‘the honorable gentleman said...’ and the audience laugh. It’s like someone saying “Barnard Castle” now. “In a hundred years you’ll go ‘what’s that?’ Without these resources, this mass digitised content to mine against, I would be lost. But you can only do this against large-scale digitised content, which is bounded by the copyright frameworks.”

Pay what you owe

Melissa acknowledges the problem is not a simple one to solve. “I’m not saying for a minute we should ride roughshod over creators’ incomes. Similarly I don’t agree with those researchers and academics who think because something is out of copyright they have a right to see it for free.

“They need to be more respectful of libraries for looking after stuff for hundreds of years. I have dug up things where I’m probably the first person to see it for a 100 years. It doesn’t bother me that I have to pay a fee for that to be digitised. The point is that I wouldn’t be able to find it without the stewardship of this library.”

She wonders if institutions might benefit more from opening up and trusting people’s good will. “What you get in libraries, for example in the BL reading room, are signs saying ‘you can take pictures for your own studies but it’s illegal to use them anywhere else’, perhaps they could say ‘if you are taking our out-of-copyright stuff and using it elsewhere you might want to contribute back to this institution…’.”

Internet Archive

She also acknowledges the organisations on the further reaches of the sector and suggests more support for them when they push boundaries that most cannot touch.

“I love the Internet Archive and not just that they are pushing the envelope when it comes to copyright and permission and their cheekiness. They’ve built an incredible infrastructure that is amazing for researchers and I don’t think that they get enough kudos. With their Emergency Library the voice of the publishers against them is very strong and we don’t have that same lobbying for researchers. But they’ve done some really interesting things, and have a completely different attitude. I donate to the Internet Archive and to Wikipedia (and more people that use them should), or if I use an image or content from a library I make sure I make a donation. However, I realise this is a point of privilege, that I have the resources to do so.” This all shows how aspects of copyright intersect with aspects of privilege, and how choices made regarding what is prioritised to be in the digitised environment is dependent on risk appetites, affecting access for all. Melissa is still optimistic, though, about the potential of using digital approaches to study the past. “We’re only just getting started. And there’s so much more we – and the students and researchers coming after us – will be able to do, given the digital cultural information environment is ever growing, as are the tools available to interrogate it.”

Copyright Conference, 10 May (Early Bird discount deadline 31 March) This year’s online Copyright Conference is an ideal and unique opportunity for all librarians, archivists and information professionals to update their knowledge and professional practice in this crucial area. Additionally, it will appeal to those who want to update their general copyright, licensing and publishing knowledge.

Challenges for library, information and knowledge management workers

Staff in library, information management and knowledge management (LIK) services are facing a challenging time, now more than ever. Technology is advancing apace and the impact of Covd-19, has utilised these changes in technology, whilst also presented challenges in terms of how we square home working, remote working and online services, with our legal compliance obligations.

Our new book, Information Law: Compliance for librarians, information professionals and knowledge managers, which I had the pleasure in co-authoring with Charles Oppenheim and Adrienne Muir, provides an overview of important information law issues for LIK workers. Focusing specifically on copyright and other intellectual property rights (IPR), freedom of information (FoI), and data protection, the book is based upon UK law. LIK workers need to know about these areas of law because their organisations must comply with the law and because this knowledge provides them with tools when providing access to resources.

Organisation-wide impact

The ramifications of information law are organisation-wide issues that impact upon the creation, use, access to and reuse of all information resources. Organisation-wide policies and staff who are trained, and confident in, all aspects of information law are necessary to ensure that these issues are properly managed. This book aims to deal with some of these issues by bringing information law in from the cold, recognising that it raises multi-faceted organisational issues that are way beyond the types of matters dealt with by compliance officers. Indeed, the management of information law requires a top-down and bottom-up approach. In other words, what is required is an approach where staff awareness is supported by senior management buy-in and championing. This, in turn, implies a symbiotic environment where staff on the ground are well versed in the organisation’s long-term strategy and policies, are trained to think in strategic ways, and have the confidence to make suggestions and recommendations to senior management and to point out where the organisation is not acting correctly. It also implies that staff have the confidence to understand that often the issues raised involve risk management, and that an appropriate balance between total risk avoidance and high-risk approaches is necessary. The precise balance depends, of course, on the type of organisation involved, its size, reputation, the costs of proposed compliance activities, the structure of the organisation, its governance and core strategic objectives and other factors.

The ‘Compliance methodology’

To do their jobs, LIK workers need not only to understand the law, but also to develop the skills, confidence and organisational policy frameworks to apply the law’s principles to their context of use. They need the knowledge and skills to help them decide what is acceptable and to develop appropriate risk-aware approaches when things, as they often can be, are not clear. As a result, the issue of risk within the context of legal compliance is a central theme of this book and there is therefore a focus on how LIK workers can achieve the appropriate balance between compliance and pragmatism.

Our book is based on the ‘Compliance methodology’ (see figure) that we have developed at Naomi Korn Associates. This is a tried and tested methodology, developed and used by us, to help LIK workers to understand the legal issues that are central to the information they hold or that they wish to access. It then guides them through establishing a framework so that their organisation can both comply with their legal responsibilities and support, where appropriate, a suitably risk-aware environment that optimises access and use.

Naomi Korn is the Managing Director of Naomi Korn Associates, the UK’s leading copyright, data protection and legal compliance management consultancy. She developed the ‘Compliance Methodology’ and as Chair of LACA (Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance) successfully lobbied for changes to UK copyright law. She is a visiting lecturer at University College London, City University and Kingston University and provides training for library and information professionals. Naomi is a CREATe Industry Fellow and a rights specialist on the National Lottery Heritage Fund Advisors Network.

Information Law: Compliance for librarians, information professionals and knowledge managers is available now from Facet Publishing.

 

THERE could be some immediate Brexit effects on intellectual property rights but the slow, painful untangling of ideologies bound together by law is where the real drama will unfold. And as the ideology changes some groups, like authors, will see a change in their rights. “In the UK, the idea has always been that copyright is there to incentivise the creation of works”, says Eleonora Rosati, Associate Professor in Intellectual Property (IP) Law at the University of Southampton and keynote speaker at CILIP’s Copyright Conference on 2 April. “It is a utilitarian view and different from the approach in France where copyright is seen as a natural right enjoyed by authors, giving them the right to control how their work is used.”

Rights deficit

The French and UK approaches have been in competition for decades, ­Eleonora says. “At EU level, when you adopt a piece of legislation there is a lot of lobbying ­going on and according to some critics, the ­continental block, led by France, has ­contributed to strengthening the position of rights holders to the detriment of ­users.” UK and EU ideologies differ, in particular, over the moral rights of authors. “These are a bunch of rights granted by copyright to safeguard the personal connection between an author and their work. For example the right to oppose any derogatory treatment of the work, like making a pornographic version of your novel. The understanding of what moral rights are for is very different between the UK and France.”

Eleonora Rosati

The EU’s intention is to protect authors and this, she says, is evident in a number of other initiatives: “At the contractual level, the EU is considering enhancing transparency in authors’ contracts and it is considering introducing a bestseller clause that will give authors the power to renegotiate their contracts in case their work is indeed a best seller.” There are other initiatives relating to protection online and “these are all measures that might be also beneficial to UK authors but they might be left out of all this with the UK out of EU.”

Harmony danger

After Brexit, divergence between EU and UK copyright law is likely to widen. “This divide between UK and continental approaches has arguably been one of the reasons why, for instance, there has never been a real project of harmonisation of moral rights at the EU level,” Eleonora says. “If the UK leaves it might be a lot easier to come to an agreement over an EU approach to moral rights and a ­greater approximation of national laws in this area. And when you sell your book into countries with less different laws, there will be less room for different ­approaches and uncertainties. Brexit doesn’t mean the UK will be out of this market of 500 million consumers, but UK rightholders might face higher barriers to trade and to enforce rights outside the UK.” And in a soft Brexit, she says the “UK loses its voice if just remains in the Economic area. It will need to comply with this new legislation without having any say on how it is drafted.”

Conference

However, Eleonora’s keynote speech – four days after the UK is due to leave the EU - will focus on the legacy of CJEU case law and how this might make it difficult for the UK to diverge from the EU. “If you look at how extensive the action of the Court of Justice has been, you will see that it has shaped the UK law in a very precise way and it has changed the approaches that existed before at the UK level alone.” Change may not be easy: “There are ­decisions of UK courts that incorporate CJEU-made standards and are binding precedents: this means that if you wanted to depart from the direction taken at the EU level as incorporated into UK law, you would need to follow the process that is required for a court to depart from an existing precedent.”

Immediate crises?

At the moment the UK is aiming to maintain stability but, in some cases, this might not be easy – Exhaustion provides an example. “After the first lawful sale of a protected work or copy in the EU, this item is free to circulate across the ­entire EU”, Eleonora says: “So, if a copyright owner sells a copy of their book in France, this copy can then circulate anywhere in the EU without the owner of the copyright being able to object to this. This is meant to facilitate the free movement of goods. “The UK has so far said that, unilaterally, it will recognise EU exhaustion as applied to the UK, so a book first sold into France can then enter the UK without any problems. But the EU might not do the same. The consequence might be that copies first sold in the EU might enter the UK quite easily but that might not be the case the other way around. What the EU agrees may depend on final deal with UK.”

Stormtrooper protection

In some areas the UK faces bigger ­changes if there is no Brexit. Under UK law there is a closed list of protectable works. It means, for a work to be protected by copyright it must fit a category. “But now,” Eleonora says, “there is case law at the level of the CJEU that suggests that this approach might be incompatible with EU law ­because EU law does not require a work to belong to any specific category: copyright protection is available to any work that is sufficiently original.” There are implications. “In one famous case, replicas were made of the Stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars. ­Lucasfilm litigated this case saying that the defendant was infringing copyright in the helmets. The UK Supreme Court conclusion was that Lucasfilm could not prevent it because the helmet was not a sculpture and did not fit any other existing category so was not a protectable item.” She said: “If this case was litigated ­today, I’m not sure a court in the UK would come to the same decision without also considering whether EU law permits all this but, after Brexit, yes, it might be the case that the approach will remain that of a closed list.” At the other end of the scale, the UK might go back to protecting items that won’t meet EU criteria in future. For a work to warrant protection it must be original. Eleonara says: “In the UK that has ­traditionally meant a work has not been ­copied and its ­creation involved sufficient, skill or labour. But countries in ­continental ­Europe have ­traditionally ­required more: that a work reflects the personality of the author, so it is not just ‘not copied’ but has some sort of ­creativity.” She adds that the EU has made this issue clearer in this area. “The CJEU has said that indeed this modicum of ­creativity is required for copyright protection to arise.” So, if it stays, the UK will need to comply with this higher threshold, meaning “low-originality works that might have been protected under traditional UK law should no longer be protected. An ­example might be digitised images of paintings in museums and galleries.”

No change?

The Berne Convention, which predates the UK’s membership of the EU, should prevent major differences between the copyright regimes of its signatories. But, according to Eleonora many areas face uncertainty: cross-border recognition mechanisms, database rights (less ability to control how the content of databases are extracted and reused by third parties) and also UK libraries will no longer be able to rely on the EU directive’s pan-Euro­pean “orphan work” status. Other areas to watch are broadcasting and the implementation of the Marrakesh treaty. Eleonora will take a closer look at these key areas in her keynote at CILIP Copyright Conference on 2 April.

 

 

 

 

In an era when the making and distribution of, and access to creative materials, from text to photographs and sound recordings to 3D digital images is so easy, it has often been said that copyright is obsolete and will surely die out, being replaced by a system of licences. However, this view is not based on any clear scientific analysis of the issue but, rather, on conjecture and wishful thinking.

Copyright as a concept is very old and can be traced back to the sixth century but it was only in the 18th. century, under Queen Anne, that it was enshrined in law. But concepts are, almost by definition, living organisms in that they can grow and change or wither and die. Their codification in law is no guarantee of either development. Any biologist trying to establish the likely future of any living species will consider its evolutionary history to see what signals can be gained from it to predict the future. Three aspects of such organisms are: habitat, function and predators. I want to explore (briefly) three aspects of copyright: what types of material are protected (habitat); what actions it covers (function) and how it reacts with those who use the organism (predators).

What is protected (habitat)

Copyright is an intangible object so it cannot exist alone: it must have somewhere to exist. It began life as a protection for printers and the dissemination of their works. Gradually it evolved to protect the content of the works, not just their printed versions, so that authors were given rights as well as publishers. Further expansion embraced engravings, paintings and, other works of art such as sculptures and drawings. Along came the camera and eventually photographs and photographers were also protected. By the beginning of the 20th. century most created works and their creators were eligible for copyright protection, films not achieving this until 1957!! This was followed by expansion into performances, adaptations and even some scanned copies. You may say “enough history” but the point is just that: evolution is an historical process and thus far it is clear that the concept of copyright has evolved to embrace many new forms of creative expression. In more recent years this has also included computer programs, databases and even logos for trademarks and many other less obvious items.

What actions are covered by copyright (function)

In order to survive organisms must adapt to their environment by changing their behaviour. The English word “copyright” gives the clue to its original purpose and this continued for nearly a century-and-a-half as there were no technologies to make considering any other actions necessary. Then photography made it possible to reproduce, say, a statue in two-dimension so the idea of changing media as a form of copyright infringement came about. There then followed such events as the performing of a play which was not actually “copying” but using the material instead. Using rather than copying has been an increasing function of copyright and the protection of music from public performance without compensation dates back to 1911. This idea of restricting use has grown as the internet has become a central tool of distribution so that material can only be viewed or downloaded with the owner’s consent and possible remuneration. Copyright has also extended its tentacles to include lending and rental of materials (no copying involved), transforming a work (e.g. “flat” maps into 3D versions), and giving rights to those who perform works so that actors, musicians, singers and dancers all have rights in what they create. There seems no end to the functions that copyright can find a way to protect.

Relationship with users (predators)

It may seem extreme to call users of copyright “predators” but for this exercise users equate to those who want access to copyright material for their own benefit. From its inception copyright provided a mechanism for this in terms of assignments. An author would pass over their rights to a publisher who would exploit them on behalf of the author, usually in return for cash. During the term of the assignment the author would have no further control over their copyright. But, as more diverse members of society wanted access to material then the only recourse for infringement was the law which was slow, expensive and unpredictable. Owners did not really want to stop the use (note not just copying) of their property but they did want compensation. In the early 20th. century the idea of the licence was born. Those who wanted to perform music in public could obtain a licence from a central body without the need to find individual owners and pay them separately. What the performer was paying for was the right to share in the owner’s exclusive right to perform but did not actually own any part of that right. The whole idea of licences has enabled copyright not only to survive, but to thrive. Licences are now available for almost any form of use. When the CLA grants a licence to copy books and journals it does not give the licensee any rights, just a chance to share in those enjoyed by the owner. These licences are infinitely expandable and can cover thousands of different users, all paying fees for the privilege of copying/using material but the owner retains all the rights which can continue to be licensed to more and more people, generating more and more income without any loss of rights to the owner. What better way to deal with your predator than to provide more and more of what they want without losing anything!

Any organism which has no limits put on it will take over its habitat completely so copyright has always had some constraints such as how long it lasts (14 years in 1709; death plus 70 years now); originality of the work (the banal, commonplace and straightforward copies are not protected); and even where produced in the light of international conventions. Also use of the material so long as it does not seriously affect the owner (copying for fair dealing, education, reporting the news, etc.) and provisions for libraries to make copies and preserve material. Some of these have recently been extended from applying only to books and journals to all forms of copyright material and extending this rule to archives, galleries and museums.

From the above it is clear that the organism called copyright has survived for over 200 years; it has mutated in terms of its habitat, expanded the way it functions and has developed new and constructive ways of dealing with predators...Is it heading for extinction? I don’t think so!

Graham P Cornish is a copyright specialist who has worked in the field since 1983 and advised the British Library on copyright matters for 18 years. He has run workshops and seminars in many different sectors of the information industry. He now works as an independent advisor and trainer in all aspects of copyright under the label ©opyright Circle.

He is the author of Facet Publishing’s Copyright Interpreting the law for libraries, archives and information services for which a revised 6th edition will publish in spring 2019.

 

Copyright the Card Game – Instructions

Introduction

Copyright the Card Game is an open educational game resource designed to train educators and information / e-learning professionals in HE and other educational institutions in UK copyright law. The resource reflects the important changes to educational copyright exceptions in 2014.

The game is designed to be played by up to 5 teams of up to 6 people and takes delegates from copyright basics through to real world scenarios which explore the relationship between licences and copyright fair dealing exceptions.

Copyright the Card Game was created by Chris Morrison, Copyright and Licensing Compliance Officer at the University of Kent, in association with Naomi Korn, Copyright Consultant and Dr Jane Secker, Senior Lecturer Educational Development at the City University of London.

The Card Deck and Copyright the Card Game v2.0 PowerPoint Slides are available for free reuse under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how copyright really works in HE
• Encounter existing licences and the new legislative framework
• Practice using the exceptions and licences in specific HE examples
• Discuss the role of risk management in making decisions

The Cards

The playing cards for the game are available in the PDF named “Copyright the Card Game – Full Final Card Deck”. For the best results, these should be printed doublesided on A4 paper of at least 250gsm and cut into fours with a guillotine. There are four ‘suits’ and the cards are numbered to help keep track of them during the game:

• Works
• Usages
• Licences
• Exceptions

The Game

The game is designed to be played using the PowerPoint slides (“Copyright the Card Game – Slides March 2015”) in conjunction with the printed cards to work through scenarios presented. Slide 2 shows a suggested overview of the game timeline with a three hour duration (including tea break).

Introduction - slides 3-11 show a suggested ice-breaker exercise and “pub quiz” exercise.

From slide 12 onwards the gameplay is described via the PowerPoint introducing each of the four rounds, with the remaining information available to delegates on the cards.

Round 1 – the trainer will need to supply a separate item (e.g. a book or a CD) to each team and slide 18 should be amended to list these items.

Round 2 – suggested answers to each scenario are revealed by progressing the PowerPoint. It should be made clear to delegates that more than one interpretation of the answers might be possible, but these differences of interpretation should lead to useful discussions.

Round 3 – again, suggested answers to each scenario are revealed by progressing the PowerPoint.

Exceptions – it should be made clear to delegates that they should always refer to the legislation and case law when making a risk decision, but the slides are designed to focus on the key exceptions for HE.

Round 4 – in this round all the cards are in play including the numbered “risk” cards.

Use and re-use of the resource

The cards, slides and these instructions are available for reuse under Creative Commons, Attribution, Non-Commercial Share-Alike licence. You can use them for training purposes as an employee of an educational institution, but not if you are charging for attendance or undertaking commercial consultancy. Any derivative works you create from the resources must be licensed under an equivalent licence.

The resources are provided ‘as is’ and do not come with any official support. However I would be very interested to hear about any improvements you have made and of course I would like to know if you find any errors or anything that doesn’t make sense so that these can be fixed.

This November marks the 30th anniversary since the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 was introduced. In the years following numerous tools and resources have emerged to help people stay copyright compliant. In this blog post I want to cover some of the most useful ones.

Tracing copyright holders

Copyright is automatic – as soon as an item is generated which is original, fixed, and in a form that is protected by copyright law (literary works, artistic works, musical works, dramatic works, sound recordings, films and broadcasts) it will automatically be protected by copyright. There is no requirement to go through any kind of registration process. The corollary is that there isn’t one comprehensive database of rightsholders for all copyright protected material. This makes copyright compliance difficult at times, because it isn’t always easy to trace rightsowners if you need to go directly to them to ask for permission to use one of their works.

There are a number of databases which can help:

WATCH is a database of copyright contacts for writers, artists, and prominent figures in other creative fields.

FOB is a database with information about vanished publishing concerns, literary agencies, and similar firms.

PLSClear is a resource for getting permission to reuse published content.

DACS artists search

 

Orphan works register managed by the UK Intellectual Property Office

Orphan works database managed by the EU IPO.

In addition, the Intellectual Property Office has produced orphan works guidance for doing a diligent search with specific guidance for each of a number of different types of works. These are useful because they contain checklists of a range of resources to check.

Risk management

Copyright law isn’t always clear-cut. It is best to think of copyright as a question of risk management – to think about the different levels of risk, and what makes something risky. One resource which helps with considering the risks involved is the IPR Risk Calculator.

Public domain calculator

Copyright doesn’t last forever. It has a finite period of protection (which is usually calculated as the life of the author plus 70 years), and it is therefore important to know whether a work is still covered by copyright. One tool to help with this is the Public Domain calculator

The legislation

The main piece of copyright legislation is the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This has been amended many times, and it is therefore crucial that you consult an up to date annotated copy of the CDPA 1988. The IPO does have an unofficial consolidated version of the Act, although even this isn’t completely up to date (it doesn’t, for example, take account of the changes to the disability exceptions which were made in the light of the Marrakesh Treaty).

Posters and declaration forms

Within the last few weeks I was asked what form a copyright declaration form had to take. There are actually two different forms, one for published works and one for unpublished works. The legislation doesn’t give a precise form of words that has to be used for the declaration forms, but the relevant sections of the CDPA (s42A and s43) do specify what information needs to be covered. LACA – the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance – put together sample declaration forms.

There is also a copyright poster and a set of notes to accompany the poster. The notes can be found via the same link, and these were recently updated (April 2018).

Legal cases

The UK has been a member state of the European Union for 45 years and its copyright law incorporates 11 EU directives and 2 EU Regulations. Even though we are in the process of leaving the EU, the legislation which implemented these EU directives and regulations won’t suddenly be taken off the statute book in their entirety. One resource which is extremely useful for interpreting EU legislation is IPCuria.eu which is a freely accessible database of all decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Union relating to intellectual property.

Paul Pedley has been a Facet Publishing author for many years, starting off with Essential law for information professionals (for which a 4th edition is currently underway), and then writing about copyright with titles including Copyright Compliance, The E-Copyright Handbook and Practical copyright for library and information professionals. He is also a CILIP trainer, and has been a member of LACA: the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance for twenty years.

Get your free guide to Copyright when you join CILIP

If you join CILIP today you will receive your own free copy of Practical Copyright for Library and Information Professionals worth £59.95

The book provides an indispensable guide for library and information professionals, bringing clarity to a complex topic along with sensible and realistic advice.

The UK’s copyright legislation has been referred to as the longest, most confusing and hardest to navigate in the world and this book is essential reading for anyone wishing to use copyright material legitimately.

When you apply for membership, enter the promotional code COPY30 to claim your free book.

This offer is available until the end of November 2018.

 

 

THIS book is a passionate call to arms for open licensing. The introduction reminds us of the free at-the-point-of-use ethos that cultural heritage institutions have adopted. The editors argue that this should be no different when collection items move from the analogue world to the digital. The additional opportunities for widening engagement and creative re-use that open licensing afford are also held up as reasons to adopt such policies. Given the recent flurry of press coverage about UK museums charging fees for images of out-of-copy- right works, the title is timely.

Key to understanding why the open licensing movement is necessary is an appreciation of copyright and licensing more generally. The editors provide an easy-to-read overview of these topics with a nice glossary of licencing terminology and an explanation of the various Creative Commons licences. A welcome inclusion is an interesting chapter on the history of the open movement. Nearly all the case studies in the second half of the book are UK-based and most deal with digitisation projects; the two exceptions are the accounts from the British Library (open metadata) and the University of Edinburgh (open educational resources). Interestingly, many of the case studies reported similar challenges, for example concerns about the impact on commercial opportunities or the difficulties in selecting the most suitable CC licence.

However, all unanimously concluded that the benefits of open licensing far outweigh the risks. The book finishes by providing practical advice on how to implement open licensing in your own institution. This book is both accessible and comprehensive. It is highly recommended as essential reading for anybody working in the Glam sector who is new to these issues or whose institutions are considering releasing and sharing their content more openly.

Louise Ashton
British Library

Open Licensing for Cultural Heritage, Hamilton, G., & Saunderson, F. (eds). Open Licensing for Cultural Heritage. London: Facet Publishing, 2017. 210 pp. ISBN: 978 1 7833 0185 0. £64.95, £55.95 to CILIP members.

 

 

Jane Secker and Chris Morrison talk about the Publishing Trap, a board game they created to help research students and early career researchers understand their copying and licensing choices as they progress through their academic career.

The Publishing Trap could be -likened to the academic Game of Life¹ -although it takes the inspiration for its name from the classic board game Mouse Trap.

Following the career of four fictional academic characters, players learn about the relationship between knowledge, impact and -money. They come to see how the choices they make about their own and other people’s intellectual property are in fact central to their academic success. The game was launched last October to celebrate Open Access week and since then there have been over 2,500 visits to the website copyrightliteracy.org, and it has been downloaded and played by people from around the world.

Why did we create the Publishing Trap?

As copyright specialists, we were increasingly being asked to provide guidance and support to researchers about issues related to open access, publishing and the evolving scholarly communications environment.

PhD students are now typically expected to deposit their theses in open access repositories. They may be expected to make decisions about the licences they apply to their work, consider open licences such as Creative Commons and understand how all these decisions they make impact on their careers.

For example, do they try to publish in high impact journals to boost their REF scores or do they publish on principle in open access journals to ensure their research has the maximum benefit to the wider world? What should academics do when asked to clear the copyright in other peoples’ images they want to use in a published monograph? And what happens when researchers want to ­re-use data from an open data set? These are real issues that academics and early career researchers face, and it’s a complex picture with no right and wrong answers.

The copyright problem in HE

We’ve had many discussions about how to embed copyright literacy across higher education institutions. Our work started in 2014 when we carried out research into levels of knowledge about copyright across the library and cultural heritage sector.² In 2015, we developed Copyright the Card Game,³ which is an open educational resource used for teaching librarians and academic support staff.

However, we were becoming increasingly aware that the academic community find it hard to engage with copyright and view it as a problem, ­often after they have published or shared their own or others’ work. For people who produce intellectual and creative outputs every day and make their living sharing their knowledge, it is a problem if they don’t have access to engaging information and resources to help them understand issues related to copyright and other aspects of intellectual property rights.

Similarly, PhD students now need to consider copyright issues, as many of their theses are made available via institutional repositories. In our experience, PhD students typically have low levels of understanding about copyright and the ownership of the data and knowledge they are using and creating. We really want to try to address this issue and find a way of engaging them in copyright education.

The aim of game

Chris initially came up with the idea for the game, inspired by attending a games-based learning event in Leeds organised by Andy Walsh from the University of Huddersfield (@playbrarian) in November 2015. His idea was to create a model that might explain how knowledge and money flowed between research institutions, publishers and academics, and the impact this had on the wider world.

We started talking more seriously about a game and decided to try to bring this idea to life by entering Lagadothon⁴, the games competition held at the Lilac conference.4 We devised a prototype game exploring the decisions a PhD student might make, such as whether to embargo their thesis and whether to apply a creative commons licence to it.

Even though the idea had yet to be properly developed (at that stage it was a large board, a lot of arrows fixed with Velcro and a stash of chocolate owls to bribe the judges), we received the runners up prize. Jane then came up with the idea of following the lifecycle of an academic, who completes their PhD and progresses to the pinnacle of their career as a Professor or eminent scholar in their field.

Games for learning

It was a long process to create a board game and we have both learnt a lot about the game design. We were delighted to get input from playful learning experts Professor Nicola Whitton at Manchester Metropolitan University and Alex Moseley at the University of Leicester. They tested an earlier version of the game, giving us a framework for approaching game design, encouraging us to focus on the learning. We went back to basics, creating learning outcomes for the game and considering how to structure the decisions people make at key points.

A crucial decision was to agree that players should be in a team and take on a persona or character to play the game. Creating our four academics: Mary, the astrophysicist; Simon, the Jane Austen scholar; Misha, the criminologist; and Brian, the microbiologist was a lot of fun. Any resemblance to any individuals living or dead is entirely unintentional! Spurred on by the considerable interest in our game, we enlisted a graphic designer, Lisa Johnstone to turn our hand-drawn board and clip art icons and characters into original creations.

How to play the game

The game is divided into rounds which correspond to the academic lifecycle. You start out as a newly completed PhD student, play a round as a post-doctoral researcher, then a junior lecturer, senior lecturer and finally become a professor.

Along the way you can improve your skills and have to draw wildcards between certain rounds that add an element of chance into the game, and contain all sorts of controversial scenarios, from being accused of plagiarism to having a mid-life crisis. The ultimate aim of the game is to reach the pearly gates and be judged on your academic legacy – are you heralded and celebrated in your field through a building named in your honour, or do you die in academic obscurity?

Despite the scoring mechanism, there is no one way to win the game and players need to think hard about balancing the need to generate income and secure funding with measuring impact and creating and disseminating new knowledge.

Through playing the game, we hope to help new researchers make choices that are aligned to their values.

Playtesting and feedback

We’ve had input from research support librarians, which is really helpful given their knowledge of the issues that ­academics and PhD students face. We have had feedback from colleagues who’ve played the game in the USA, ­Australia and parts of Europe. Last August, we were able to show off a prototype version of the game at the World Library and ­Information Congress (IFLA) in ­Wrocław, Poland. We also recently played the game with colleagues at the University Library at Cambridge and the British Library.

It has been really important to play-test the game with academics and researchers who are not experts in copyright, as they are the main audience. We would recommend anyone looking to create a game to spend some time playing games too, as we considered elements of existing games such as Monopoly, Guess Who and Risk along the way.

What next?

We’ve been invited to present at several upcoming conferences, including the Discover Academic Research Training and Support (Darts6) conference in May, the Eblida Conference in Strasbourg in May, the German Library Congress in Berlin in June and the ReConEvent in Edinburgh in June. Several Australian universities supported also by Creative Commons New Zealand are looking to adapt the game for their use as part of open access training, and a group of German librarians have asked to translate the game.

We showcased the game at our one-day copyright education conference, Icepops (International Copyright Education with Playful Opportunities for Practitioners and Scholars), held on 3 April at the University of Liverpool and also ran a master class at Lilac 2018.

References and links

1 The Game of Life

2 Morrison, C & Secker, J. “Copyright Literacy in the UK: a survey of librarians and other culturalheritage sector professionals.” Library and -Information Research, vol 39, 121, 2015.

3 Copyright the card game

4 Lagadothon at Lilac 2017.

 

Wikimedia UK: at the coalface of open knowledge

THE desire to share information is ancient. The earliest surviving dated, printed, book – the Diamond Sutra in the British Library – has a dedication saying: “for universal free distribution”. This fabulous snippet of general knowledge was not tailor-made for this article. It comes off-the-peg, direct from Wikipedia, or, more precisely, a page which cites the article making the claim – an article that also says the urge to share knowledge is probably as old as the urge to hide it.

Resolving the tension between our instincts to share and hide knowledge is one of the jobs of Wikimedia UK and its Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid. For centuries the trend in our culture has been to lock down information. It means that the task of freeing it up again will be a cultural one, more face-to-face than modem-to-modem. As such, Lucy does not need to be a technologist. Her task is communication and she said her career, which has included roles at the House of Lords and the Refugee Council, “has not featured technology at all, other than the fact that in all of those organisations I’ve been working in we have been grappling with how to use technology to increase access for more people to what we are doing, whether that’s arts or political engagement”. Instead it requires an understanding of the open knowledge movement and the organisations and people who aren’t yet engaging with it.

The Coronation of Alexander (434,480 views), one of the most visited images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the National Library of Wales.

Barriers

The open knowledge movement is ideological and, in some quarters, purist in its approach. The idealism sometimes has to be tempered. “I’m idealistic but pragmatic,” Lucy says. “I’ve worked in the cultural sector for 20 years and I understand what a struggle it is to keep going financially. When I’m talking to people from the museums and gallery sectors about keeping information behind paywalls I am sympathetic, as sometimes a paywall might genuinely represent a vital income stream. So, from my point of view, coming from the cultural sector, I can see where some of the reluctance to engage might come from. To overcome this, I might ask them to look at whether they are keeping information behind a paywall by default. Often it’s actually costing them more money to market and administrate than the paywall is generating. We’re trying to work with people to find ways to increase public engagement with their collections and their content, which means addressing and working through concerns about financial implications as well as cultural and technical barriers, it is about partnership and collaboration.”

Medium or message

The work of Wikimedia is not for the sake of growing Wikipedia. “One of the misunderstandings is the conflation of Wikipedia the website and Wikimedia, which is working to increase open knowledge,” Lucy says. “Wikipedia is a website and Wikimedia is a global movement of organisations and people, the biggest organisation in that context is the Wikimedia Foundation in the US. Wikimedia UK is a separate registered charity. Obviously, we work with Wikipedia, so it’s technology driven in terms of the platforms, but it’s about working primarily with the cultural and educational sectors, as well as other organisations and content holders. “It really straddles those different sectors which is a great thing in terms of the opportunities it affords us but quite hard when you’re trying to describe neatly what it is.” For now, Wikipedia is the best advocate and route into the movement. “Wikipedia is the most well-known and it’s usually the route into a relationship with an institution. Generally, people will know Wikipedia but often the most interesting project for them might not be Wikipedia, it might be Wikidata for example.”

Champions

There are many ways to help individuals and institutions to see the benefits of open knowledge. One is to identify a champion within an institution: “You need people who are passionate and recognise the potential, who are either senior themselves or who are influential enough to get senior level buy-in.” But there is no fixed formula for attracting new collaborators, she says: “We’re starting a project with the University of Exeter that has come about because they were at a Discovering Collections, Discovering Communities (DCDC) conference. I gave a talk there in November and now we’re developing a programme off the back of that. It’s about catching people’s imagination and changing their levels of perception of what Wikipedia is and how their institution can genuinely benefit from open knowledge, and work with us to create change.”

What’s in it for me?

Time and other resources are tight for most information professionals. Any distraction from the day job might prompt the question, “what’s in it for me and my employer?” There are lots of answers but some effort will be required and some ¬engagement with the community. The obvious starting point is getting an institution’s details and some of its content on Wikipedia to see if this boosts online visibility. “However well visited your library or website may be”, Lucy says, “it doesn’t have the sort of visitors that Wikipedia has.” The analytics for page visits are easily accessible and can help build a case for a library’s value. The National Library of Wales put 15,000 images on Wikimedia Commons between 2015 and 2017 which now get around 15 million page views per month between them.

Siege and destruction of Jerusalem, one of the most visited images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by the National Library of Wales: (267,184 views)

From the start the process requires learning about how Wikipedia works and involving the local community in projects – more work, but it will build computer literacy, digital skills, critical thinking and increase access to knowledge. Larger institutions might choose to appoint a Wikimedian in Residence – the first was in 2010 at the British Museum. These often create more opportunities at a local level. For example Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment service uploaded content on Wikidata (working with Wikimedia UK’s Wales programme manager). It’s now possible to find monuments in Wales, within a ten-mile radius of your location, that don’t already have a Wikipedia page. Cue projects to fill that gap.

Another Welsh project in the offing is a list of the coordinates of as many libraries in as many sectors as possible across Wales. CILIP Cymru Wales, with the help of members of SCL Wales, Whelf, Awhiles and Further Education Librarians have been building a data set (collecting information already available online) to map library branch locations in Wales. It’s part of a joint advocacy project in response to the Welsh Government’s Prosperity for All strategy. By sharing the data collected with ¬Wikipedia it will become open wiki data and available for anyone to use for their own purposes – if they search for libraries in Wales – and update or add to. One sector that has not been added yet is school library provision, which would be a valuable resource. Trickle down can also trickle up. Following a collaboration with Wikimedia, improving Wikipedia is now part of the ¬Catalan Public Library Network’s overarching strategy for ¬preserving local heritage and knowledge.

Librarians

The 1Lib1Ref campaign is an annual campaign which first took place in ¬January 2016, to celebrate Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, and now takes place every year. Under the tag line of “Imagine a world where every librarian added one more reference to Wikipedia” – the page also says “Libraries are fundamental allies to the mission of Wikipedia”. To information professionals, Lucy says: “Active involvement in Wikipedia or Wikimedia should be important on a personal level, just to recognise their own roles in contributing to what is the most influential source of information in the world.” As well as the stated aim of 1Lib1Ref – to get librarians to add references and improve the reliability of sources – Lucy said: “As a movement and as an organisation we are trying to diversify the editor base, and one of the issues is around gender. There’s a big gender gap – it’s a heavily-female dominated workforce, so it’s bringing in that gender perspective.

“We probably won’t get perfect data on how many people have participated and how many references were added but that’s secondary to the fact that we are engaging people. Even if they don’t edit or add a reference this year they might go on to do so next year or to hold an event within their library and get in touch to see if we can get a volunteer trainer for them. It’s fairly slow burn but it’s about year-on-year trying to build on engagement with this specific target audience of librarians, which is ongoing.”

Profession at risk?

Wikimedia and Wikipedia are shining examples of where volunteerism has worked. For information professionals, this could spark fears that their paid roles are at risk. “I understand the fear but I don’t think it’s justified,” Lucy says. “I think the more information people have access to, the more they need information professionals who can help them to navigate and understand that and improve information literacy. Essentially the remit of Wikimedia UK and Wikipedia is very similar to a library in terms of increasing access to knowledge, but Wikipedia can’t exist without libraries, can’t exist without references, can’t exist without sources. That’s why a lot of our events and editathons are held within libraries, because then you have access to that rich information that exists in books. “It’s not like Uber and Black Cabs where people only take a finite number of taxi rides, people’s appetite for knowledge is arguably infinite. And therefore I think they can only be complimentary. But I do understand that it can look like there’s this sort of free service that is of course free at the point of use, but it has overheads and costs.” She said: “The solution, I think, is finding ways for us as a charity to work with the sector effectively. The best way forward to ensure that we are increasing audience engagement and we’re increasing information and digital literacy, by working together and that by working together we can be greater than the sum of our parts.

“That’s easy for me to say, not being a librarian, but for example I don’t think that the current issues with public libraries has anything to do with the fact that there’s all this digital information. It’s about ideologically-driven austerity measures, so I think we need to work together to make the case that having access to information and being able to understand it and navigate it and properly interpret it is increasingly important.”

Putting the UK into Wikimedia

Different nations have different attitudes to information. Lucy says: “We are the national chapter for the global movement, but we are an independent charity in the UK. We have the freedom and autonomy to follow the strategy we want, and therefore it is localised. We can work with an institution here – a university, a small archive, in a way that it wouldn’t be logistically possible for the Foundation to do from San ¬Francisco.” With people on the ground, Lucy says, “you get the cultural shorthand from working and being in a place. For example, we have a member of staff in Wales and we’re just recruiting one in Scotland because it benefits us to have a person who understands the difference between the Scottish cultural scene and barriers and legislation. Whilst it’s really important that we’re part of a global movement, it’s also essential that we operate on a regional, national and local basis.” Another friendly feature of Wikimedia UK is that it does not have its head in the clouds when talking to small organisations. It has a nine-strong team that faces the same problems as any other cultural charity. It receives an annual grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, the rest it raises itself. The fact that it is associated with Wikimedia does not make it immune to digital pressures: “We have the Wikimedia UK website which is not Wikipedia. It can be an effort to keep that up to date, which is probably much the same for lots of your readers’ websites. So I understand how we’re all trying to integrate our ¬communications and our digital communications with social media. As a charity we face exactly the same challenges.”

Diversity

Lucy said: “As more people have come in from more diverse backgrounds, it has broadened the range of views within the movement. One of the big issues currently there is androcentrism – that it’s a white male western perspective – and there are a lot of stories that are absent from Wikipedia and the other projects and therefore a lot of knowledge that isn’t being shared or being accessed. As an example, the Arabic Wikipedia has around 0.5 million articles, many of which are ‘stubs’ [short introductory articles] while the English language Wikipedia has over 5.5 million; so there’s a massive discrepancy there. There are not 10 times as many English speakers as there are Arabic speakers.

She said: “We do know there is systemic bias and that the editor body does not represent our diverse society. We need to, and we are, trying to increase representation and diversity in terms of editors. “However, I think it would be almost impossible for a special interest group to create structural bias at scale on Wikipedia, they just wouldn’t be able to do it given the way Wikipedia works, with its large community of volunteer editors.” As the volume of content and the number of editors increase, so the likelihood of bias diminishes. Once derided as an unreliable source, the increased size and vigilance of the Wikipedia community has seen this reverse, with established institutions including the British Museum, British Library, Wellcome Library and the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh now engaging in Wikimedia projects.

 

 

 

Gavin Carville talks about Divided Society, a project to digitise materials such as posters, journals and newsletters from the times of the troubles in Northern Ireland which together offer a vital, ­multi-layered insight into the atmosphere at the time.

THE Linen Hall Library in Belfast has been collecting material relating to the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process since the late 1960s.

The Northern Ireland Political Collection began in 1968 when Jimmy Vitty, then ­Librarian, was handed a civil rights leaflet. He kept the leaflet and brought it to the Linen Hall, sensing material of this kind should be preserved for the future, given the political unrest at the time. 

Over the decades that followed, the collection grew as library staff collected material and took donations from political groups and the wider general public. The library became a repository where often sensitive or controversial material could be deposited and preserved. The collection comprises books, posters, pamphlets, objects, rare primary material, and thousands of journal titles. Researchers and students from around the world come to the library to consult the collection in a safe, neutral space. 

Funding for digitisation

In 2016, the Linen Hall was awarded a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to digitise a part of the collection. The focus would be 1990 to 1998, a period which saw a series of ceasefires, visits from President Clinton, and ended with the Good Friday Agreement. Journal titles and posters would be digitised and made available from a new website freely available in the UK and Ireland and through subscription to the rest of the world.

Taking stock

To define the scope of the project, a stock-take was conducted to determine the amount of material to be scanned. This was vital in costing the scanning budget and also determined the number of cataloguers required. A list of the journal titles was ­created with details on their publisher, number of issues, average page number, and whether the content was authored or not. Technical details around a file-name structure for each journal and its subsequent digital surrogate were also required.
The journals were published from a wide variety of sources including political parties, community groups, voluntary groups, pressure groups, local and national government, and paramilitaries. 

Key themes

Browsing the articles, issues began to emerge and these have been distilled into 24 key themes. Each of these themes have related categories nested inside, so users studying, for example, prisons can find categories on the hunger strike, the Maze prison, and issues around prisoner status. This content can be full-text articles, but also posters along with audio and video material.   

Searching the material in this way could only be possible with clear, ­dependable metadata. As the ­digitised images began to arrive, three ­cataloguers started adding Dublin Core metadata so that every image could be easily retrieved and its contents fully searched. Good metadata is a key part of the process, ­enriching the archive and providing users with a variety of ways to find and retrieve material. 

Permissions

A critical part of the project was ­obtaining permission from the ­materials’ copyright holders. With over 500 ­journal titles and 800 posters, this was a painstaking process, but the ­Intellectual ­Property Office’s ‘Due Diligence’ ­guidelines were a great help. Many of the publishers had ceased to exist, but with detailed research we were able to contact and gain permission from hundreds of publishers and organisations. Many were delighted to have their work preserved and made accessible to a global ­audience and the project was thrilled at the ­goodwill and support it received.

All of the political parties in Northern ­Ireland granted permission for their ­material to be used. These journals and newsletters have never been digitised before and provide users with a broad understanding of how each party was responding to and commenting on political developments.    

If no copyright holder was found, we went about acquiring Orphan Work Licences. Again the Intellectual ­Property ­Office was vital in helping with this, requesting a detailed record of the due ­diligence process before granting the ­seven-year licence. These items now ­appear on the Orphan Works Register.

Understanding of the time

For researchers and students, much of this material will be vital in understanding the atmosphere in Northern Ireland at the time, the desire for peace, the ongoing violence, and the issues that prevented a settlement. They also provide a fascinating look at the social history of the country, as many of the community journals reflect the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. The political posters also demonstrate how visual material was used to convey political messages. This material is supplemented with an audio and video gallery and ten exclusive essays. Each essay focuses on one of they key themes, continuing the curated approach to the content.

The Divided Society project began in ­August 2016 and launched in January 2018. We hope the resource will be an invaluable tool for anyone interested in the history of the UK and Ireland, along with subjects like terrorism, post-conflict studies, and peace and reconciliation studies. 

 

 

 

The Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (LACA) is urging the UK Government to fully and clearly legitimise the principle that the right to read should mean the right to mine in UK law; this is essential to maintain the UK’s competitive edge and keep it at the forefront of global research, and to further develop the UK economy. This principle was already enshrined in the London Manifesto for Fair Copyright Reform for Libraries and Archives in Europe, which has signatures from over 125 institutions and organisations in the UK and beyond, and has been amplified by a recent report commissioned by the UK Government on Growing the artificial intelligence industry in the UK.

Today LACA have written to Jo Johnson MP, Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation, and Matt Hancock MP, Minister of State for Digital, to urge the Government to take seriously the text and data mining recommendation of the AI report and the principle that the right to read should be the right to mine.

Why should the right to read mean the right to mine?

The move would not be a radical change in the principles of UK copyright law, but rather a recognition of the fact that computers can now do what human minds have done for thousands of years: read text quickly and extract a trends and facts.. However, this recognition is important because in regulating this essential work, we must be careful not to reduce the public domain and hamper the new thinking and innovation which is essential to the successful development and growth of the UK economy. There is widespread recognition, including by the Government, that the UK’s future prosperity will be driven by effective and successful partnership between business world, academia and civil society. Therefore, the effective use of data mining, which can be facilitated and expedited by AI, must be encouraged. 

Core Principles

•    In order to have the right to mine one must have the right to read;
•    TPM’s (Technical Protection Measures) and contract terms must not be permitted to override the right to read and the right to mine. This should be enshrined in UK copyright law. We are talking about enhancing access which is already permitted for the benefit of innovation, enterprise and civil society.

Necessary action for the Government

1.    Make the right to mine automatically apply whenever there is the legal right to read; and
2.    Ensure that the law enshrines the principle that TPMs and contracts can never inhibit or prevent the exercise of the right to mine.

You can read the full text of LACA’s letter to the Government here.

 

New legislation being implemented across the European Union should help to end the ‘book famine’ of accessible versions of printed works, unless enactment is encumbered by the optional introduction in the UK of unnecessary and restrictive compensation requirements.

What is the Marrakesh Treaty?

Only around 7% of published books are globally available in accessible formats (such as Braille or audio), due in part to copyright restrictions. Member states of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) adopted the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled in 2013 to help tackle this shortcoming.

The Marrakesh Treaty is a big step forwards in terms of making accessible copies of printed works available.

First, the Treaty requires ratifying states to provide legislative copyright exceptions to permit people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled, as well as certain organisations such as libraries, to make accessible format copies without having to ask permission from the copyright holder.

Second, the Treaty requires that states make it legal to transfer accessible copies between Treaty states, ensuring that national borders do not act as barriers to the otherwise lawful use of accessible copies.

When and how will the Treaty come into force in the EU / UK?

The EU is a signatory to the Treaty, which means it is being implemented in EU Member States through EU legislation.

In transposing the EU legislation, the UK and other Member States have no option in terms of the requirements of the Treaty. In other words, Member States will need to have legislation in place to comply with the Treaty’s requirements set out above by October 2018.

Potential issues

However, the EU legislation allows for an optional provision, which, if implemented in the UK, could significantly weaken the aims of the Treaty and impose undue costs on libraries and other ‘authorised entities’ that make legitimate accessible copies for people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled.

Article 3(6) of the EU implementing Directive (Marrakesh Directive (EU) 2017/1564) allows Member States like the UK to elect to require libraries, charities, and other ‘authorised entities’ to pay compensation to rights holders when making accessible copies under the Treaty terms.

The need for the Treaty arose due to the limitations of copyright rules and the failure of the market to produce accessible copies. This market failure has disadvantaged people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled and is underlined by the current ‘book famine’. If enacted, the Article 3(6) provisions would significantly hamper the ability of organisations like libraries to create and make available accessible copies as the Treaty intends. Compensation requirements would force ‘authorised entities’ to ‘double pay’ for works (once for the original copy and again for the accessible copy), on top of bearing the costs associated with producing the accessible copy.

What does the library community need to do?

Because this provision is optional, we have the opportunity to argue strongly against its introduction in the UK.

To do so, clear evidence is required. We need your data to help underline and demonstrate the lack of a viable market in accessible copies.

To help, we need a relevant person from your organisation to complete this short survey about accessible copies made for your users. If you want to look through the survey questions before you complete the survey online, you can download them from the bottom of this page.

The data required is mostly numerical, but there is plenty of scope for expanding on answers and providing examples. Please provide stories wherever possible – these bring yours and your users’ experiences to life. For the purpose of this survey, ‘accessible copy’ is the same as the definition for ‘accessible format copy’ in Article 2(3) of the Marrakesh Directive (EU) 2017/1564 and ‘print-disabled’ is the same as the definition for ‘beneficiary person’ in Article 2(2) of that Directive.

Please share this request with colleagues from other libraries, universities, and charities. The more data that we can gather, the stronger the case can be made against a compensation scheme and in favour of implementation of the Treaty in a manner that helps users and reduces the ‘book famine’.

More information about the Treaty: IFLA and EBLIDA have prepared a short guide on the Treaty and how its implementation in the EU will affect libraries.

 

HER Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) does what it says on the tin: it is an Executive Agency of the Ministry of Justice that runs Prisons and Probation. This is perhaps a simplistic summary of our public task. A more detailed description is offered by our official web page on the Gov.uk site: “We carry out sentences given by the courts, in custody and the community, and rehabilitate people in our care through education and employment."

Complex and sensitive

HMPPS’ management of knowledge and information is, similarly to other Government bodies, complex, multifaceted and bound by legal requirements. Think of the sensitivity of offenders and ex-offenders’ data; or the sensitive development of Ministerial thinking in advance of issuing policies.

On the other hand, think also of the wealth of information generated by HMPPS civil servants as we support the rehabilitation of people in our care: training and development manuals for our professionals; accredited programmes and interventions backed up by years of research into what works; assessment tools that will guide further action and interaction with our prison and probation population, and so on.

Wider relevance

One may expect such information to be of relevance only within the tight walls of our prisons or to the supervision and rehabilitation efforts of our Probation colleagues (both Probation and the Community Rehabilitation Companies). And yet interest in our information is ripe. There is appetite domestically and internationally to learn about it and ­ re-use it.

Re-use

I have chosen the word ‘re-use’ intentionally, because the focus of this article is how we set up systems and processes to allow re-use of our information and material covered by Crown copyright whilst protecting the integrity of such information and material, designed for prisons and probation. Allowing re-use is a form of knowledge and information management, and one which has been mandatory since 2015 for all public bodies (exceptions apply). For the Re-use of Public Sector Information Regulations 2015 see http://bit.ly/2fEdaAL

On our terms

How do we navigate the new mandatory regime whilst addressing issues of sensitivity of information and integrity of material? The answer is in our licensing systems and processes: we allow re-use of information covered by Crown copyright on licence, in so doing restricting (where necessary) re-use by imposing our own terms and condition for re-use.
An organisation is only able to restrict re-use on licence if successfully holding a ‘delegation of authority’ agreement.

Delegations of Authority are granted by the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office to enable government departments or agencies to licence the re-use of Crown copyright material they produce outside the terms of the Open Government Licence. Sounds straightforward? Yes and no. Departments with a Delegation of Authority are regulated by The National Archives under the Information Fair Trader Scheme (IFTS); it follows, therefore, that we are and have been for a few years, IFTS accredited! I am not apologetic for the use of an exclamation mark. Our accreditation to IFTS is a source of pride… as well as a necessary element of our re-use regime. (You can read about IFTS at http://bit.ly/2ge8GSb).

IFTS accreditation

What does the IFTS accreditation entail and how does it help us manage our knowledge and information? To join the scheme, a chief executive makes a personal commitment to information fair trading, after which The National Archives assessors carry out a verification to satisfy themselves that the administrative processes to support the commitment are in place and being followed, and that the IFTS principles are met. These principles are: Maximisation; Simplicity; Innovation; Transparency; Fairness and Challenge.

A clear framework

I will not pretend that meeting these principles is easy. It has taken hard work over a few years to build the necessary processes and systems and meet IFTS principles, and there is still scope for improvement. It is taking consistent effort to maintain engagement at the corporate level and throughout the organisation as well. With limited resources to service this area of work, my (very small) team has tackled the challenge from the perspective of building best practice in knowledge and information management. I can go as far as admitting that, in fact, the IFTS principles have offered a clear framework for applying knowledge and information management to a complex area of work. The National Archives Assessors are, as all assessors, looking for weaknesses to redress but have also proved exceptionally helpful at providing advice when faced with more complex requests for re-use of our information and at discussing ways to improve.

Support from CILIP

As for the skills and abilities necessary to drive the agenda, I took a frank look around for an affordable but valuable source of professional support and development and found it in CILIP. I joined CILIP in November 2015 and have not looked back. As a member of CILIP I was able to share my experience with like-minded professionals from a diverse array of knowledge and information management fields. In turn, I hope that our own experience as a large IFTS-accredited public body is also of interest to other CILIP members.

 

 

In a recent survey, carried out by the Libraries Archives and Copyright Alliance (LACA), 65% of respondents were aware of the many positive changes to UK copyright law that took place in 2014. As I blogged about at the time, many of these were aimed at making the lives of students, researchers and librarians easier. For example, widening copyright exceptions to allow copying of anything by anyone for people with disabilities, through to the “Big Data” exception that allows data mining for non-commercial purposes.  Many of these changes have supported the education and learning that takes place in an archive, library or other educational institution.

Protection of copyright exceptions from override by contract 

One of the most important structural changes to the law in 2014 was to protect copyright exceptions from override by contract. Given that the freedom of contract in UK law is a very important legal principle, before 2014 libraries were faced with a situation where contracts were removing most copyright exceptions. According to a study commissioned by the government’s Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property, whether contracts could vary copyright exceptions was decided on a case by case basis by the courts, thus providing essentially little if no clarity for libraries or educational establishments. However, as a result of the 2014 changes, many UK copyright exceptions can no longer be “trumped” by provisions in a contract. This means that no matter what your licence, subscription agreement or contract with a publisher says, for most UK educational and library exceptions (see the list below), you can ignore what the contract says. This is because the law now states for these exceptions, that they cannot be overridden by contracts or licence agreements:

To the extent that a term of a contract purports to prevent or restrict the doing of any act which, by virtue of this section, would not infringe copyright, that term is unenforceable.1

Whereas exceptions have traditionally not been seen as a right as such, as many of the UK education and research exceptions can no longer be removed by contract,  they are now to all intents and purposes new rights that learners, libraries and researchers have been granted in the law.

Are people aware of these important new rights?

Of the 117 people who responded to the LACA survey on contracts, 65% were aware of the 2014 changes to copyright law, 26.5 % were not aware, and  8.5% answered “don’t know” (one person skipped this question). Crucially in response to the question “Are you aware that most library, research and education copyright exceptions in the UK cannot be overridden by terms and conditions in a signed contract?” only 52% said yes, with 38.5% saying no, and 9.5% responding don’t know.

Assuming that most people who answered are fairly engaged with copyright, as the questionnaire was promoted through LACA’s twitter feed @UKLACA, it is clear that greater awareness and training on copyright law and where it can support the works of librarians and archivists, is needed. Something that LACA will certainly consider further. 

Contracts in the digital age

This important change to the law is all the more vital in the digital age, given that purchased electronic materials will usually come with a licence or a contract. Before 2014 this meant effectively that whether people could copy for educational and other purposes was no longer the decision of parliament in the public interest, but the decision of the individual or publisher licensing the library. 

Organisations like the British Library, the Wellcome Trust, LACA and Universities UK worked for many years highlighting to government the importance of this issue for research and education. By protecting exceptions that relate to education, research and libraries the government has now sought to protect many of the activities important to learning in the digital age.

How will these new rights help me?

Here are just a few areas where contracts can no longer remove the exceptions in copyright law that UK based institutions can enjoy:

Document Supply:  Whereas paper journals, books etc don’t come with a licence (unless distributors like Swets impose them on the library), electronic journals and other e content does. The licences for use of electronic materials also vary from publisher to publisher, making understanding and compliance at any scale extremely time consuming and problematic. The good news now however is that for document supply purposes, it doesn’t matter what the contract for the e subscription or licence says, you can under UK law (s.42A) supply an article or a book chapter to a student for the purposes of their own study and (non-commercial) research.

Copying for the Disabled:  Until 2014 the UK used to have some of the most unfriendly copyright laws in Europe for disabled people. However now, not only can libraries supply a whole copy of something to them, it does not matter whether any  contract with the provider allows or disallows this activity. What is important is that copyright law allows this.

Text and Data Mining:  One of the major new exceptions we saw in 2014 relates to data analytics of big data. Although, because of the Copyright Directive this was limited to non-commercial use, someone who has legal access to an in copyright work can now use a computer to analyse it. This is vitally important as most e journals and websites come with some form of terms and conditions. However now these terms and conditions can be ignored, if you have legal access to the work. 

Illustration for Instruction:  This exception allows someone who is “giving or receiving instruction” for a non-commercial purpose to use a fair proportion of an in-copyright work. As with all the other exceptions that prevent contract override, teachers and others giving or receiving instruction can irrespective of the contract governing use of the work, use a fair proportion of the work (as long as where practical the copyright holder is acknowledged).

Rebalancing copyright

The UK government was not the first country to protect copyright law from freedom of contract, but is certainly one of the front runners. We already see in the proposed Digital Single Market Directive some but not all of the exceptions introduced being protected from contract override. To me this important move to protect copyright law from private contracts represents another stage in the digital maturity of copyright law. For example since 1996 in the rush to protect publishers publishing online we have seen exceptions in Europe being trumped not only by contract law, but by technical protection measures, or more colloquially (and misleadingly) DRMs also. It feels perhaps that this tide is changing, and governments are starting to rebalance copyright in the digital age by ensuring that exceptions are protected at the very least from contractual override.

If any librarians would like further clarification of anything written about in this article (as inevitably with copyright law the article has been simplified somewhat!) please contact LACA @UKLACA or email policy@cilip.org.uk and we will happily respond.

CC BY SA

UK Exceptions That Cannot be Overridden by a Contract / Terms and Conditions

s.29            Research and Private Study  (Fair Dealing)
s.29A         Copies for text and data analysis for non-commercial research 
s.30           Quotation
s.30A         Caricature, Parody or Pastiche
s.31A         Disabled Persons: copies of works for personal use     
s.31B         Making and supply of accessible copies by authorised bodies     
s.31BA      Making and supply of intermediate copies by authorised bodies 
s.32           Illustration for Instruction
s.41           Copying by librarians: supply of single copies to other libraries 
s.42           Copying by librarians or archivists etc: replacement copies of works 
s.42A        Copying by librarians: single copies of published works 
s.50A        Back up copies (of computer programs)
s.50B        Decompilation (of a computer program)
s.50BA     Observing, studying and testing of computer programs 
s.50C        Other acts permitted to lawful users (relating to computer programs)
s.75           Recording of broadcast for archival purposes 
s.296B       Avoidance of certain terms relating 

Benjamin White is one of a range of speakers at the upcoming CILIP Copyright Conference on the 7th of April in London. The event provides a great opportunity to learn more about current developments in copyright law and practice and how it will impact you, your organisation and the users of the services you provide.

Banner image: Creative Commons share by Heath Alseike published by opensource.com on Flickr Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic

On 28th July this year the repeal of Section 52 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) came into force. The transition period will end on 28 January 2017. This blog post sets out what library and information professionals need to know about this recent change to a complex area of UK copyright law.

What is Section 52?

Section 52 of the CDPA contains an exception limiting copyright protection for certain artistic works when they have been industrially manufactured. This means that when more than 50 copies of these artistic works are made, the current period of protection is limited to 25 years, compared to other artistic works which are protected by copyright for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years.  This exception has now been repealed, bringing industrially manufactured items into line with other artistic works:  

“Works in which copyright has expired under s.52 will assume the new term of life of the creator plus 70 years. For example, if an industrially manufactured work was created in 2000, copyright protection would have expired in 2025 under s.52. Now, copyright protection will expire 70 years after the death of the creator. If the creator died in 2010, copyright will expire in 2080” (IPKat blog post, 29th April 2016)

Which artistic works are affected?

The works most likely to be affected are “works of artistic craftsmanship”, a category of artistic works which first appeared in the Copyright Act of 1911.  Prior to this copyright protection was only given to fine art, reflecting the general understanding of the nature of art until the Arts and Crafts Movement, led by William Morris, began making items of applied and decorative art [Colston, C., 1999. Principles of Intellectual Property Law. London: Cavendish Publishing, p183]

There is no statutory definition of a “work of artistic craftsmanship” so it will ultimately be up to the UK courts to decide what would be classified as such.  However, precedents set in case law have established a set of criteria that must be satisfied for an item to be categorised as a “work of artistic craftsmanship”. Guidance from DACS says that, in general terms, these criteria are:

1. A conscious intention to produce a work of art
2. A real artistic or aesthetic quality
3. A sufficient degree of craftsmanship and artistry (existing simultaneously)

Examples may include the Faberge Egg and the textile works of William Morris.

2D images of works of artistic craftmanship are found in, for example, books, magazines and journals, and some library and archival collections include 3D artistic works.

What does this mean for libraries and archives?

This is a complex area of law, made even more so by the lack of a statutory definition of a work of artistic craftsmanship.  Despite this, our advice to library and information professionals is quite simple – Just remember these three things:

1. Copyright lasts for lifetime plus 70 years for most works now 
2. Unless you are clear that an exception applies or you already have permission, make sure that rights are cleared.
3. There can be more than one layer of copyright and other rights in any one item – so you need to consider all of them.

Here are some examples of what will and will not change as a result of the repeal of S.52:
1. Digitising and supplying embedded images from published text based works for use to support teaching and learning under the terms of the Copyright Licensing Agency licence – no change.  

• There is, however, a possibility that CLA might need to remove publications with now infringing images from circulation from Jan 2017, the end of the transition period, but we think the risk here is very low 

2. Using non CLA licensed images in teaching and learning activities and other uses outlined within the terms of a Creative Commons Licences or other licence – no change.

3. Using images of works of artistic craftsmanship under the copyright exceptions within the context of teaching and learning activities and other uses outlined within the exceptions to copyright – deem duration of copyright to be lifetime plus 70 years, instead of 25 years. If the image is still in copyright, there is no change to what the copyright exceptions enable. 

• For example, the education exceptions allowing general fair dealing for teaching apply to all types of works and any form of copying as long as it is not for a commercial purpose and it is illustrating a point. 

4. Including images of works of artistic craftsmanship in publications, MOOCs etc and other uses not covered by 1-3 above – deem duration of copyright to be lifetime plus 70 years, instead of 25 years.

5. Making a copy of a work of artistic craftsmanship for a user, or user self-copying under the research and private study exceptions – deem duration of copyright to be lifetime plus 70 years, instead of 25 years.  If the image is still in copyright, there is no change to what the research and private study exceptions allow.

• For further information about what copyright exceptions allow, refer to LACA’s Copying Guidance (PDF) which accompanies our posters.

6. Displaying a work of artistic craftmanship - if the work being displayed is the original and not a copy, then there will not be any copyright or design rights issues.

• More detailed guidance for individuals, organisations and businesses affected by these changes has been published by the IPO.

It is not every day that we see major changes to UK copyright law. The suite of proposed statutory instruments (hopefully to become law on 1 June) unveiled yesterday by the Intellectual Property Office (part of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) represent an extremely significant update to UK copyright law, for the educational sector, for consumers, as well as for libraries and their many users.  In fact arguably they are some of the most significant and enabling changes for these groups for a century

What impact could these copyright law changes have?

Well in short, I suspect the devil will be in the detail. It will take a while for LACA (the Libraries & Archives Copyright Alliance) to sift through and formulate its own views on these important changes (watch this blog!), but in the meantime the Intellectual Property Office has produced this helpful guide to the proposed changes for libraries, archives and museums.

However, for those of you who can't wait, here are some headlines (opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer etc etc etc):

The proposed drafts go a significant way towards making UK copyright law “format neutral”, meaning that the law will now recognise for example that those doing research and personal study are just as likely to copy an excerpt from a sound recording or a film as they are from a book. The same goes for libraries who want to preserve their collections of sound recordings and films just as much as their paper collections. Teachers and lecturers will also be able to include any type of content in their presentations, which was not the case until now.

Vitally importantly, those in research and education will in many instances now be able to apply the existing flexibilities that exist in UK copyright law (the so-called limitations and exceptions or permitted acts like “fair dealing”) irrespective of contractual terms to the contrary.

This is particularly important in a library context of course, given that most students and researchers never see the contract negotiated between a university library and a publisher. It will also give universities protection and legal certainty in regards to contracts they are given that are based in foreign laws – I cannot imagine many university staff are particularly familiar with the intricacies of §108 of the US Copyright Act, for example, or even “fair use” for that matter.

It certainly feels right to me that UK citizens (and educational organisations for example) will now have the ability to rely on the permitted acts in UK copyright law as legislated upon by the Houses of Parliament, rather than have to interpret the copyright laws of other countries.

Very interestingly, the drafts also contain a proposal for what is called “text and data mining”, “content mining” or sometimes “data analytics.” The government has recognised that in an era of big data, much value can and is being derived from computers “reading” and “analysing” data that exists in text, images and other types of copyright works. Data-driven innovation in part depends on computers being able to interrogate the zetabytes of data now at our disposal.

This proposal (although limited to non-commercial use because of the EU Copyright Directive) will go some way to close the digital innovation gap with countries like Japan, Singapore, the US and South Korea, who have been able to mine any in-copyright material to which they have lawful access (including UK in-copyright content of course!), while we haven't been able to under our own intellectual property laws. In this thought-provoking Guardian article from 2012, this situation was compared to a dystopian world where meteorologists and astronomers were denied computer access to weather and astronomical data.

The Wellcome Trust, probably the largest private investor in medical research in the 20th century, has highlighted for years that, while scientists and their computers have had access to the minutes of science in electronic journal form for nearly 20 years, they have been unable to legally use computers to “read” and analyse the material they subscribe to, or have access to on the internet. Subject to these drafts coming into law on 1 June, this situation will now change for those who perform non-commercial research.

Exceptions for disabled people have been widened too, so any British citizen irrespective of the type of disability they have will be able to access in-copyright works in a format of their choosing. Before the exceptions, this only related to people with visual impairments. Hoorah!

Although not an education or library-related issue, the changes will also allow individuals to lawfully make private copies of CDs etc that they have bought. The UK has long been an anomaly on this front, with most countries having what is known as a “private copying exception” in their copyright laws. Good news I am sure for many.

How did these changes come about?

It has taken a while to get here, of course. Those of you who follow policy developments in this area will remember that many of the proposed updates formed part of the 2005 Gowers Review of Intellectual Property under the previous Labour government. The current proposed changes to the law come as a direct result of David Cameron announcing, at a technology sector meeting in Shoreditch in November 2010, that his Government would review IP laws “to see if we can make them fit for the internet age. I want to encourage the sort of creative innovation that exists in America.” 

Ian Hargreaves CBE was appointed to run the review. Though now a professor of digital economy at Cardiff University, he had a strong background in the media industry as the ex-editor of the New Statesman and The Independent – an industry which, like many other creative industries (and universities, schools, researchers and citizens), has had to adapt to the advent of digital.

For our sector, the major difference between Professor Hargreaves' findings (the final report being aptly named Digital Opportunity) and the Gowers Review was its unrelenting focus on the importance of research and education in a modern knowledge economy. Probably for the first time, we saw an insistence that copyright laws which promote research and education also promote the needs of a healthy digital economy. Not only that, but we also saw a broad range of proposed measures designed to nurture all aspects of our increasingly knowledge-intensive economy. As the conclusion to the Digital Opportunity report states:

“The Review’s specific recommendations are designed to support our increasingly intangibles- intensive economy. 

This requires:

• an efficient digital copyright licensing system, where nothing is unusable because the rights owner cannot be found ( this of course resulted in the Digital Copyright Exchange / Copyright Hub);
• an approach to exceptions in copyright which encourages successful new digital technology businesses both within and beyond the creative industries;
• a patent system capable of preventing booming demand for patents causing serious barriers to market entry in critical technologies;
• reliable and affordable advice for smaller companies, to enable them to thrive in the IP- intensive parts of the UK economy;
• refreshed institutional governance of the UK’s intellectual property system which enables it to adapt organically to change.”

Four years later, the second point has resulted in the following statutory instruments being issued yesterday:

• The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Quotation and Parody) Regulations 2014
• The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Personal Copies for Private Use) Regulations 2014
• The Copyright (Public Administration) Regulations 2014
• The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Research, Education, Libraries and Archives) Regulations 2014
• The Copyright and Rights in Performances (Disability) Regulations 2014

Copyright law and the UK digital economy

As someone whose first job was in the educational publishing industry and now works in a research library, I realise we need a robust information industry, just as we need a healthy R&D environment. 

My view is that these measures have been carefully and sensitively implemented, and over time will show that changes to copyright law are not a “zero sum game”, with winners by definition resulting in losers. Access to knowledge results in innovation and creativity, and many of us are creators as well as consumers – the two are symbiotically intertwined.

The aim of these modernisations to copyright law – many of which do no more than put us on an even footing with the rest of Europe – is to try and foster a legal and fully functional digital environment that supports an innovative UK digital economy, and treats citizens as digital citizens. It certainly seems to me this is a significant step in the right direction.

What do you think about the proposed changes to copyright law?

Let us know in the comments.

About the author

Benjamin White is the Head of Intellectual Property at the British Library and currently chairs the legal working group of the Conference of European National Librarians.