Current copyright law impedes digitization projects and means that manuscripts, books, drawings, correspondence, and other tangible works will not be made publically available to researchers. In some cases, the works are much too fragile to let people handle them on location, so the works are lost information. Peter Hirtle highlights the loss of information through the current copyright protection laws in “Adopting ‘Orphan Works’,” a FAQ column article in RLG DigiNews April 15, 2005, Volume 9, Number 2. “‘Orphan works’ are works whose current copyright owner cannot be located.”

Hirtle explains that the 1989 copyright law removes “formalities associated with copyright protection” and establishes original copyright of an expression “as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium.” There are significant problems in tracking copyright holders if they are no longer required to register their copyright. Furthermore, identifying who the copyright passed to after death can be impossible. The problem is made worse because “the duration of copyright has increased by an order of magnitude from the time of the Founding Fathers. …has expanded to become a term equivalent to the life of the author plus seventy years. Longer copyright terms greatly increase the likelihood that the identity of the current copyright owners will be lost.” In a footnote, Hirtle mentions that copyright infringement can cost up to $150,000 plus legal fees per infringement.

The article has many good links, including a link to a letter [PDF] from University Librarian Brian Schottlaender of UCSD to the US Copyright Office, in which he states, “The uncertain copyright status of orphan works imposes significant limitations on the UCSD Libraries’ ability to provide access to patrons in the digital world.” Schottlaender uses the Scripps Institute of Oceanogprahy Archives as an example, and he explains that Scripps Archives has made about 4000 images and 100,000 photographs available over the internet, but “this represents only a small subset of our photographic holdings.”

[Via Current Cites, April 2005]