There is more ‘stuff’ available to us as content users than ever before. Alongside this, everyone is a content creator and publisher as well as a content user.
So, its never been easier to access and reuse content, but IPR and licensing are central to the creation, shareing a delivery of content – and this is ever present. The growth of the individual as creator and publisher democratises IPR and licensing issues, as they become relevant to everyone.
IPR law sees content divided into:
- Sound
- Music
- Broadcasts
- Film
- Photographs
- Other artistic works
- Text
- Typographical arrangements
All of these types of content have different laws or parts of the law that apply, and many pieces of content will have layers of rights that apply. It is incredibly difficult to understand what rights apply.
The law tries to strike a balance between use and protecting creators rights. But, it does not address the issue of ‘orphan works’ and doesn’t keep up with the latest technoloy developments – e.g. Web 2.0. Ultimately, the law restricts the flow of content.
Not only does the law restrict usage, but also there are different policies in different organisations, institutions and even different policies applied by individuals in specific organisations or institutions. Different terminology is used or the same terminology to mean different things.
Guidance can be complicated or inappropriate, staff often don’t understand copyright issues, and see it as something for ‘lawyers’ – but we all need to engage – for example academic staff signing away rights to publishers.
We are now seeing some common solutions, with International developments and standards appearing:
- Open Access Licensing initiatives
- Protocols on access to research data: Science Commons
- Orphan works: EU work e.g. Digital Libraries i2010
- and more…
The SCA is a starting point rather than anything else.
I wish there was more time for the bits of this presentation – there were clearly areas Naomi could have spoken about in more detail usefully.