Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand discussion

[Wayne Mackintosh <wayne AT oerfoundation.org>]

Hi Richard,

This is a great example to explore the ethics and business practices associated with openness. 

It's not unusual for publishers to assign copyright to works in the public domain, for example, purchasing a hard copy edition of the The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (a work which is in the public domain) from Amazon. Alternatively, users could also access a digital version at no cost through initiatives like Project Gutenberg.   

Speaking personally, in the case of printed works, I'm not opposed to the freedoms afforded by the public domain to reproduce copyrighted works which widens distribution and together with the assumption that the "new" copyright holder does not claim authorship of the original work in the public domain. Similarly, I'm not opposed to value added services associated with CC-BY works where the derivative is licensed under all rights reserved. I am opposed to the practice of digitising works of art which are in the public domain in a manner which restricts access to the general public, for example museums which do not permit photography of works in the public domain but sell digital photographs in excess of the costs of digital reproduction.

W   

On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Richard White <richard.white AT otago.ac.nz> wrote:

Hi all,

 

Many of you will have read Matt’s blog post released this morning about Jem Yoshioka and her lovely work with CC and Public Domain materials fused with her own works.

 

I clicked on the link to go to the original Katherine Mansfield poem here, partly because I was curious about how the repository in question would indicate what rights were associated with the work.  This is related to questions we’ve been asking internally about some of our archival repositories at the University of Otago with quite old material.

 

The work in question – The Opal Dream Cave – was written in 1911 and Mansfield died in 1923, meaning it is now out of copyright, the author having died more than 50 years ago.  Therefore, is it appropriate for the repository in question to apply a CC BY-SA licence to the work when it is actually in the public domain?  In other words the licence applied is actually more restrictive in that it requires attribution and re-use under the same licence.

 

(It can be argued that a digital reproduction of something that is out-of-copyright attracts new copyright, even if this is merely a faithful reproduction of the original, because in NZ for a work to attract copyright it need not necessarily be original in any way, merely requiring effort and skill.  So the scan of the original on the same page could be said to be in copyright but on the page I linked to it’s just the text of the poem itself typed out).

 

I would welcome people’s thoughts on this.

 

Regards

Richard

 

 

Richard White | Subject Matter Expert, Student Management System Project & University Copyright Officer

Darwin House | 61 Clyde Street | University of Otago | Dunedin | New Zealand

Te Whare o Darwin | 61 Clyde Street | Te Whare Wānanga o Otago | Ōtepoti | Aotearoa

(03) (470) 3405 richard.white AT otago.ac.nz | rkawhite on Twitter | Copyright info for staff & students | Open Otago blog | LinkedIn

 

 

 

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Wayne Mackintosh, Ph.D.
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