We've talked in the past about the fact that creative works of the federal government are in the public domain and cannot be covered by copyright. This is pretty explicit in the law. Back in 2009 we had called out the fact that the Obama White House was (usefully!) posting images taken by the White…

In late June, a minor brouhaha erupted when the library at the University of Arkansas suspended reporters from the Washington Free Beacon, an online newspaper, from using its special collections. The reason given by library administrators was that on multiple occasions the newspaper's reporters had published content from those collections without asking permission, as library policy requires. Much has been made in the right-wing press about the politics supposedly surrounding this conflict. I want to focus on a different issue: the practice of making patrons request library permission before republishing content drawn from documents in our special collections.

(By Peter Hirtle) By now most archivists and many librarians will have heard something about the controversy concerning the use of material found in Special Collections at the University of Arkansas. Researchers from the Washington Free Beacon (WFB) web site...

Following up on Jackie’s post on the RBMS 2014 Preconference, and Michelle Light’s #bestplenaryever* I asked Michelle to give me a list of the various reproduction, permissions, and copyright policies …

In Enclosing the public domain: The restriction of public domain books in a digital environment, a paper in First Monday, researchers from the Victoria University of Wellington document the widespr…

Digitization with private partners should not remove digital surrogates of public-domain materials from the public domain.

Version of Record

Museums face steady demand for images of artworks from their collections, and they typically provide a service of making and delivering high-resolution images o

Robbo sez, “The Cambridge Digital Library has posted Sir Issac Newton’s notebook which he used as an undergraduate at Trinity College in the 1660’s. It can be viewed, page by page…