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Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - kevin wooldridge - 9th April 2011
Unitof1 Wrote:Y Can we all agree that all archaeological products, graphics context sheets photographs could be copyright to a digger?No, because that is not what the UK copyright law says. The law says if you are employed that the copyright with any piece of work you produce during that employment belongs to the company who employs you. I fail to see, despite your numerous posts on this subject, what is difficult to grasp about a very simple piece of law.
And that really should be the end of the subject...unless anyone would like to discuss the European Digital Data Directive, which is much more pertinent to our everyday lives than what I suspect are the deliberately obtuse musings of Uo1....
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Unitof1 - 9th April 2011
kevin I am sorry but that is not what the law says. I do find this insistence by one hell of a lot of the archaeological flock that the employer has the copyright, because it is the law and that is the end of the matter, very peculiar. It might be the default common law interpretation in the situation of a photographer working for a company unless otherwise stated in a contract. As for my point of view, I see the law as saying that there is such a thing as copyright, the law tries to give a description of what copyright might be of, that copyright gives the holder certain prerogatives and that if the copyright is transgressed that there is legal recourse.
First point of interest about copyright is in the description of an archaeologist, there is a thread currently asking that perennial question.
Quote:[SIZE=3]Shadowjack has highlighted thatI would like to discuss the situation where the freelance digger is allowed to retain the copyright. I think that it might define what a digger is., project officer, director a little more clearly. In many academic situations data generated in the field is taken off in many different directions and callabarations, commercial archaeology as interpretated by curators has invented something called a report around which all main copyright is drapped.
If they are self employed - yes. I would strongly suggest anyone setting themselves up as a freelance worker investigates their options on copyright/intellectual property rights.
If they are staff of the company - no. Why cloud the issue? Why raise something they have no say in or control over? You can make staff aware of copyright concerns in general - such as what you can or can't do with that really useful plan/map/photograph someone else has published.
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Second point that I am interested in is responsibilities of the copyright holder for their product after they are produced like making sure that it is not used in a manner that you might find distasteful. I have given the example of York University. I got a relatively free graduate and post graduate education. I might be somebody who does not like the storage of my hard won data by an institution which might charge ?9000 a year tuition to over produce archaeology graduates. I personaly don?t mind working another ten years before claiming a pension to pay for graduate education but then I am more right wing than Thatcher. What little influence I have might come down to removing my data from their fine establishment. I dont know what happened in Nazi Germany but there is also the situation of working for a unit that you come to detest and they have got your name signed on numerous registers contexts presumably used to vouchsafe their wonderful universe. I would like to work in a situation where I might legitimately withhold my copyright. Not sure what that situation might be but I would like who ever it was who was selecting me to clean the site hut to take into consideration their treatment of me.
That the landowner is in the mix I think could also be in certain circumstance interesting. In my short career I have lost count of how many treaties, directives, acts of parliament, policy guidance and local interpretations there have been that have attempted to define archaeology and affect my work. Virtually none of them have been seriously tested. I can think of the example of CPO access to landowners land in order to make an assessment for an environmental statement. I see this in terms of copyright and I would advise any victims to ask that their copyright be stated from the outset. The National trust does.
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Martin Locock - 9th April 2011
If you are an employee, then the employer owns the copyright: they may pass it on to the commissioning body.
If you are self-employed, then the copyright is yours unless the commissioning body requires you to transfer it to them.
You appear to think that employee archaeologists are being cheated of their copyright that is , or ought to be, theirs. This is not true.
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Digger - 9th April 2011
I you really want to confuse the issue how about : Intellectual property rights!:face-approve:
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Dinosaur - 9th April 2011
Martin Locock Wrote:the grey literature reports are in the public domain in the sense that they are accessible to the public: this does not mean that they are free of copyright restrictions so can be copied at will. Therefore a HER can show you a report, but they are correct to say that you, and they, cannot copy it without permission of the rights holder.
There are some exceptions which allow copying for specific purposes, but archaeologists in the course of their business do not qualify.
In your example you could trace the plan and then redraw it on your own base map for your report.
Interesting that most HERs don't take this view, more commonly they are happy to let you photocopy bits, most of the ones I regularly use are happy with 10%. The copyright posters they tend to have stuck on the wall by the photocopier in public libraries seem to imply that you can copy what you want from books as long as it's not for commercial reproduction, and a publisher I work with quite a lot says you can pretty much copy what you want as long as you dont try to sell it or reproduce it for sale or re-publish it (and of course plagiarism seems to go down badly).
...err, if you're going out to dig the other half of the same field it's often handy to have the whole of the previous report, so an awful lot of tracing paper would be involved....
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Archaeogit - 9th April 2011
Godwin's law's been invoked - a sure sign of a thread going downhill
If Unitof1 has a real issue with copyright and intellectual property rights then all he/she needs to do is hire a copyright lawyer and get some advice. That would surely make more sense than discussing it here with the BAJR community, none of whom (I think) claim to be experts on copyright law.
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Martin Locock - 10th April 2011
Libraries (and only libraries, not other bodies) can copy or allow copying under certain restrictions about the amount and purpose of copying. The old wording of fair dealing allowing copying for 'private research' has now been changed to explicitly say non-commercial research - if you are copying as part of your work then you are not allowed to copy it.
HERs (unless they are libraries) cannot copy reports for you - the best idea is to ask the body that produced the report. They may charge a fee - if you have the same client they can probably be persuaded not to.
Of course many reports can be read in their entirety on the ADS Grey literature library.
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Dinosaur - 10th April 2011
Most archaeological organisations of the 20th century which produced grey literature sadly no longer exist (including most of the ones on my CV - hope there isn't a connection!) with a few more going in the 21st, so getting copyright permissions is just a little tricky, I've got one old site (from the 1970s) we can actually manage to publish properly as part of something else but no one around here now has heard of the original author, which is a touch awkward - D. Greenhalf, anyone?
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Martin Locock - 10th April 2011
If the organisation held the copyright, no longer exists, and has no successor in title, then it is extremely unlikely that anyone will come forward to complain. At the moment the legal position for such orphaned works is that without permission you can be sued by the rights holder if they do emerge, although a new system has been floated (it was dropped at a late stage in the passing of the Digital Economy Act). In practice the risk is low, since archaeological publications don't make anybody any money. The courts in any case consider a world of difference between the lazy copying of material with no care about rights, and the attempt to locate a rights holder which proves fruitless. Therefore if you want to protect yourself you should document the searches you have made to attempt to locate the rights holder (due diligence searches). There is some guidance on this produced by the Europoean Digital Libraries http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/hleg/orphan/guidelines.pdf
The most important things in dealing with copyright are: acknowledge rights holders, and contact them if possible.
I have noticed that organisations that are most protective about the copyright of their material are often those most cavalier about the copyright of others.
Copyright, Diggers and archaeology - Unitof1 - 11th April 2011
archaeologicalgits
One of the problems of talking outside the “industry” is that they ask how does it work now. If you say nobody makes any money from it and nobody takes any notice of copyright and you will get comments like “if you have a real issue go elsewhere” or “This is not true” ….you won’t get much back. I think we should care first within the profession (commercial).
Why is it that commercial archaeology does not see what it produces in terms of copyright?
I don’t think that commercial archaeology has ever had a proper discussion about copyright mostly because commercial archaeology was conceived to provide grey data within the civil service and then through the establishment of educational trusts-the charity units and the university units. In council monopolies the reports belong to the units who produced them. To over come their rights to tax exemptions or if you like to satisfy the criteria of charitable status, the free for everybody based on the creators being vague about copyrights, has come about as the norm. You don’t find anybody saying outright what the rights should be or why. The ifa mentions copyright once in the codes as a short notice.
Currently a planning applicant has to pay for the cost of the authority processing the application, that presumably will included the cost of the curators “advice”. It did used to be relatively free but there have been charging issues over the years and I would expect the costs to increase. Are any planning authority process, EIAs, public inquires etc free?, somebody must pay. To process the applications the authority wants information to be processed and significanted. I don’t ever see that stopping, even by big society. If I ask the local HER for info to be collected they will charge me, although its still free if I travel to the HER, which costs me and I then charge the client. Either way it still shows that this information has a cost and a value. These costs might be miniscule but it’s a principle. Currently we do not try to find out what the market value of our information might be. Part of the problem could be that we have not set up a mechanism through which to collect any royalties or give anybody the opportunity to pay any. In the past access to a report was most likely to be through a smr if it existed. They might have had one paper copy and the HER was treated as a lending liberay who had a free copy of your report. People did not have digi cameras or photocopiers. The process of collecting and returning royalties would probably be pointless, how much would the liberay have to charge? Now we have nationally based databases which can easily be accessed from around the world. I dont know what take up oasis expects but why shouldent I expect a bit of the longtail maybe 10/20/500 pence every ten years for one report?
The poor copyright holder from the 1970s (and the diggers) should obviously feel very grateful that nice Dino is going “to manage to publish properly as part of something else but no one around here now has heard of the original author, which is a touch awkward”. We could just take it that in the 1970s they did not make any effort to preserve their copyright, so who cares, obviously not the profession. How will Dino resolve the situation? Why shouldn’t a royalty be paid to someone, possibly just to show that you did undertake due diligence or to cover the extent of your due diligence. That could sound a bit like a form of insurance. Maybe we should look at royalty gathering web based sites. The music industry has a few evolving examples.