February 25, 2005
"Sea of children lost in the supermarket" works
I actually got a glimpse of the orphan works problem from the other side just a few days ago, when I was contacted by the MIT OpenCourseWare program and asked if I would be willing to grant permission for them to use some of my material in a course they were posting online. In this case, the material was a single PowerPoint slide from a single lecture in the course. I hadn't made the slide, but it quoted a single sentence from one of my papers and included a photo of me a friend had taken while I was still in grad school. I happily printed out the two-page license giving them the right to use the material, put it in a stamped envelope and mailed it back to them. The license file was slightly over ten times as long as the material I was licensing.
I suppose I can't call this an orphan-works problem per say, since the slide had my name on it and it's pretty easy to track me down online — perhaps this was just a child-lost-in-the-supermarket problem. Or in MIT's case, a whole sea of children lost in the supermarket, each needing individual attention. (As Downward Battle points out, this is the same problem that has kept works like Eyes on the Prize out of the public eye for the past 10 years.) My heart goes out for two (and soon three) intellectual-property coordinators who are trying to dot all the i's that make up even a single course.
And yet, though I didn't think of it until after I sent back the forms, even I can't be quite sure that I owned the rights to that material. It was a friend who took my photo, and we certainly didn't talk about copyright issues at the time. More significantly, I can't recall off the top of my head which of my papers the slide quoted from, and whether that was one of the journals or conferences that required me to sign over total ownership of the copyright to them before they'd publish. Should I have consulted my lawyer before giving MIT permission to talk about my work? I don't have time for that kind of shenanigans, and besides, I'm a researcher — the whole point of my writing papers is so that what I've learned can be passed on to others.
Posted by bug to Intellectual Property at February 25, 2005 11:15 PM | TrackBackEven if it was from a journal, it shouldn't be a problem, since it:
a. is a simple descriptive statement with no "flourishes" and as you know facts can't be copyrighted, and
b. would be an insignificant portion of an article and thus acceptably used under fair use.
WIth respect to the photo, it is owned by the person who takes it. But given that it's a friend, I don't see the problem.
My new theory is that whenever you put something together, you should get permanent licenses for everything in it. A big part of the problem is that most of these documents are assembled ad hoc and without actually discussing the content with the various copyright holders. If the coordinators had done their work when you were at MIT, they wouldn't have to track you down now.
Unfortunately, I don't know a good way to solve this problem going backwards. Going forward, I think we really should have a symbol for the creative commons license, or for whatever level of permissions we wish to give & it should be attached (automatically) to any documents we create.
Posted by: at February 28, 2005 5:15 AMFlourishes or no, it's a word-for-word copy of the expression, so copyright comes into play. Now in this case it's almost certainly short enough that it'd be fair use, especially for educational use, and I'm sure even if I did sign over the copyright on this one paragraph to IEEE or ACM they'd neither know nor care, but it still points out the stickiness.
Agreed on the CC licenses — I wonder if I can put that into my copyright agreement on my next journal article?
Posted by: Bug at February 28, 2005 9:49 PM