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 | “FUD” Buster: Public Knowledge’s Gigi Sohn Makes Case for Orphan Works Law
With opposition mounting to competing orphan works legislation in Congress, one of the legislation’s key supporters, Gigi Sohn, president and co-founder of Public Knowledge addressed the Center for Intellectual Property’s 8th Annual Intellectual Property Symposium at the University of Maryland last week, urging librarians to support bills. She said that even such imperfect, modest orphan works reforms “build the foundation for bigger changes” in the future. “To those who say that shortening copyright terms or somehow requiring registration are better reforms, I say, you’re absolutely right,” Sohn noted. “Good luck with getting a law passed anytime in the next decade.”
Sohn’s address comes a matter of days after Stanford University’s Lawrence Lessig, a prominent voice in copyright matters, wrote a stinging New York Times editorial opposing the bills and amid mounting, if at times misguided criticism from illustrators and photographers. In her prepared remarks, Sohn confronted roughly a half-dozen of what she called “FUD myths” FUD standing for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”
Among the “FUD myths” Sohn addressed: -
The legislation “would eliminate automatic copyright protection.” It does not.
- That the laws would “give bad actors free license to rip off copyright holders.” In fact, copyright holders remain entitled to the full range of damages available under copyright law.
- Copyright holders will not be compensated. Under both bills, when “a copyright holder finds a user, then the copyright holder is entitled to a licensing fee equal to what she would have asked for in the marketplace, or what a willing buyer and a willing seller would have agreed to.”
- The bills would “mandate registration in expensive, private registries, and not registering a work would automatically orphan it.” There is no requirement to register in these databases, nor would failure to place a work in a registry automatically orphan a work.
- The bills will force copyright holders to constantly look for people using their works without their permission. This situation is no different than the current system, Sohn explained, except under the orphan works laws, the user is compelled to do “everything he can to find the copyright holder; and if the user and the copyright holder find each other somehow, the user will pay the copyright holder a reasonable license fee.”
- Huge corporations are driving this legislation. On the contrary, while supported by Google, and publishers, the original Copyright Office proceeding was encouraged by libraries, museums, small independent filmmakers, and copyright reform advocacy groups. Also, the vast majority of comments filed at the Copyright Office in support of orphan works relief were from these groups and individuals.
Sohn urged librarians to support the bills, saying that if “a couple of kinks in the legislation” can be ironed out the law could help salvage millions of works now “relegated to the dustbin of our culture.” She conceded, however, there are concerns and differences in the bills: such as a flexible standard for “best practices” in conducting a diligent search, supported by libraries and independent artists, vs. enacting a defined government standard, which is supported by large movie studios and content companies. “We’re working to find a middle ground that may include some very basic minimum practices but keeps the Copyright Office out of the business of setting a precise definition of a diligent search,” Sohn noted.
In addition, she said, Public Knowledge is concerned with keeping the cost of navigating any so-called “Notice of Use” archive from being “so burdensome and costly as to prevent users from taking advantage of the legislation.” She also said she supports a “safe harbor” provision to protect nonprofits like libraries and museums from damages. While she concedes an orphan works law would be just a modest step in the overall mission of meaningful copyright reform, when it comes to “the uphill battle of copyright reform, even baby steps should be encouraged.”
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UNM’s Zimmerman Library Back at Full Strength Following Devastating Fire
Some very welcome good news from the University of New Mexico (UNM): the Zimmerman Library has at last completely reopened two years after a serious fire on April 30, 2006, ripped through the library. Further, as if recovering from the fire wasn’t difficult enough, the comeback was further set back on Halloween, 2007 when a test of a new fire suppression system in the library basement blew a ten inch water pipe. “The entire basement was flooded to a depth of six inches within minutes,” recalled library spokesperson Karen Wentworth. “It was a major setback to the basement restoration,” where 63,000 feet of new carpet that had just been laid and brand new compact shelving had been installed.
On April 30, 2008, two years after the initial fire, the Zimmerman library basement reopened, and staff moved back into new offices. “Things at UNM are back to normal,” Wentworth reported to the LJ Academic Newswire. It was a trying period for library staff, Wentworth said, noting that the 2006 fire occurred at the worst possible time, on a Sunday night the week before finals. “It consumed several thousand bound journals in the basement and closed the library entirely for several weeks,” she said. “Librarians had to scramble to deal with student requests at the branch libraries around campus and to set up a system to receive the 25,000 books that were due to be returned that week. 140 staff members were displaced, some of them have only just returned to Zimmerman.”
Meanwhile, Wentworth said, librarians and staff have “channeled their frustrations” in creative ways, including through poems and books about the experience, as well as a quilt, the squares of which include images from the devastation, including one patch picturing the air horns librarians had to carry with them for months as they patrolled the remote reaches of the library. “They were a human fire alarm system until the new alarm system was installed,” Wentworth recalled.
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| Outgoing ARL Executive Director Duane Webster Given Honorary Title
At the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) recent membership meeting, held May 21-23 in Coral Gables, FL, ARL presented outgoing Executive Director Duane Webster with a Distinguished Service Award, and also honored him with the honorary title of Executive Director Emeritus, a first in the Association’s history. “Under Duane’s creative leadership,” said ARL president Marianne Gaunt, university librarian, Rutgers University, “ARL emerged as a significant agent for innovative change in the world of research libraries and in scholarly communication.” She added that Webster’s “ardent and devoted leadership has made ARL an organization characterized by credibility, influence, voice, and integrity in the world of higher education.” Webster officially steps down on June 30, with the University of Maryland’s Charles Lowry stepping in the following day, July 1, to begin a limited three-year term as ARL executive director.
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| University of Pittsburgh Library System Acquires Five Millionth Volume
The Pittsburgh (Pitt) University Library System (ULS) this week announced that it has acquired its five millionth book, Making the Impossible Possible: One Man’s Crusade To Inspire Others To Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary (Doubleday Business, 2007) by William Strickland, a Pitt alumnus, trustee, and ULS Board of Visitors chair. Strickland’s book tells the story of his “inner-city childhood,” and how his mother and an art teacher inspired him to achieve.
University librarian Rush Miller said it was fitting that Pitt’s five millionth volume was written by an “alumnus, friend, and supporter of the University of Pittsburgh and the University Library System.” Pitt reached its the one million volume mark in the early 1960s and the three million mark in 1991. In 1999, the Pitt celebrated its four millionth volume with the acquisition of a copy of the New Ellesmere Chaucer Facsimile Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Huntington Library Press, 1995), one of only 250 facsimile copies in the world.
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