Cornell says no to restrictions on public domain materials

A reader writes, "Cornell University Library just announced that it will now allow free reuse of public domain works copied from its collection without the permission and license fees it formerly required."

"The threat of legal action, however," noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, "does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates. We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."

The immediate impetus for the new policy is Cornell's donation of more than 70,000 digitized public domain books to the Internet Archive (details at www.archive.org/details/cornell).

"Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles," said Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "It seemed better just to acknowledge their public domain status and make them freely usable for any purpose. And since it doesn't make sense to have different rules for material that is reproduced at the request of patrons, we have removed permission obligations from public domain works."

Cornell University Library Removes All Restrictions on Use of Public Domain Reproductions

• [Anonymous]

  Could someone explain why you would need permission on public domain works?!No I can’t explain it.

  I’m a lawyer, and have been working on copyright matters for 35 years.

• [pearl jewelry]

  I think this is the start of a larger wave. It is nearly impossible to maintain copyrighted material in a global economy. Americans are unique in our feeling that intelligence should be horded rather than shared. I sincerely hope Colleges around the US take their lead.

  Regards,
  Pearl Jewelry

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Pearl Jewelry,

    Please don’t include your URL in your comments. Thanks.

• [Marchhare]

  Maybe they paid for them in digital form, or paid for them long ago before they were PD?

• [Daemon]

  So, they used to require permissions and fees for PD works? I’m glad they have become less stupid.

• [Anonymous]

  “…we have removed permission obligations from public domain works.”
  Could someone explain why you would need permission on public domain works?!
  And how would they expect to retain control over such works?
  My limited understanding of the idea of public domain does not correspond with these idea.

• [davejenk1ns]

  Pearl Jewelry,

  I am wondering on what basis you use for your assertion that “Americans are unique in our feeling that intelligence should be hoarded rather than shared.” Do you mean American institutions, American individuals, or the US government?

  - American Institutions publish more textbooks than the universities of other countries. Witness the open textbook programs of Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Stanford, etc.

  - American Individuals invented the Copyleft principal, the GPL, the LGPL, and the Berkeley licenses. Michael Tiemann is an American, as is Richard Stallman. The English Wikipedia is far and above the largest of the wikipedias (I know, I track them on my site). This English wikipedia is, by volume, mostly the result of American contributors.

  - the US intelligence community (CIA, FBI, and to a lesser extent NSA) shares its intel with the Canadians, Brits, and Australians. Intel is further shared on a limited basis with NATO, Interpol, the Japanese SP, and the Mossad. Note that many of these relationships are NOT reciprocal.

  Please share some evidence of your snipe at the US, or otherwise, I am left to take it as another bit of America-bashing tripe so common on many of these boards.

• [Fe Boogie]

  Huzzah! My alma matter fighting the good fight! :-)

• [Anonymous]

  It is fairly common for libraries, archives, and museums to try to retain control of digital copies of public domain works that they have scanned. Arguably, in the wake of Bridgeman v. Corel (36 F. supp. 2d 191) they have had no COPYRIGHT in those scans, but this hasn’t stopped many of them from attaching contractural conditions in exchange for granting people access to those digital scans. It’s as if there was a public park, and in exchange for letting people take the digital shortcut across their driveway, they made people sign an agreement limiting what they would do while in the park.

  They really don’t deserve great kudos for deciding to NOT be buttheads. They don’t HAVE to scan this material and provide digital access; for that we ARE thankful. But attempting to get all pissy about what somebody does with those files erases most of that goodwill. Especially when in most cases they never owned the copyright in the material in the first place. So this is an example to others of how Public Domain material SHOULD be treated.

• [bowerbird]

  > They really don’t deserve great kudos
  > for deciding to NOT be buttheads.

  well put. (and who would expect that
  from a sentence with “buttheads” in it?)

  now, does anyone know how to actually
  _get_ to the 70,000 scan-sets mentioned?

  archive.org reports less than 1500 there.

  -bowerbird

• [liquis]

  What this move is mainly referring to are the limits that Google imposes on the libraries/books that it offers to copy for “free”. These contracts limit the scope of availability of these scanned books, mainly to exclusive use within the universities, for the students/faculty. This gives Google sole rights for the public availability of the books. The move Cornell made to allow archive.org free access to the books is in contrast to Google’s limits, as archive.org does not impose any of these kind of exclusive contracts.

  Amy Goodman from Democracy Now interviews Brewster Kahle from archive.org about it here:
  http://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/30/google_faces_antitrust_investigation_for_agreement

• [Anonymous]

  “Americans are unique in our feeling that intelligence should be horded rather than shared.”

  Really? How many countries can you name where government-produced works immeditely enter the public domain?

• [Wingo]

  This is truly awesome, and I applaud the effort. But I’m with #3 and #4 – do ‘public domain’ works normally require permission? Isn’t this contrary to the term itself?

  But I do applaud this eloquent and forward-thinking language –

  “Imposing legally binding restrictions on these digital files would have been very difficult and in a way contrary to our broad support of open access principles,”

  …now that is how a ‘University Librarian for Information Technologies’ is supposed to sound!

• [dculberson]

  I think what they mean is that, in order to receive the public domain materials, a party had to agree not to disseminate it further. That party would then be liable if the material was found to have been “leaked,” not for copyright violations but for breach of contract.

• [Kieran O’Neill]

  w00t. Way to go Cornell University Library!

• [jackie31337]

  “The threat of legal action, however,” noted Anne R. Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian, “does little to stop bad actors….”

  I knew it! Not even the law can stop bad actors.