Kahle-Prelinger v. Gonzales gets its day

We've looked forward to this day for a long time: Attorney Lawrence Lessig argued this morning to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that the relatively new problem posed by orphan works deserves a first amendment hearing. Before copyright was switched in the 1970s from an "opt in" system to an "opt out" system, there were not legions of books and films floating in copyright limbo as they do today. Books and films become orphan works when they are subject to automatic copyright registration and renewal while lacking an owner or claimant to benefit from that copyright. This relatively new problem means that thousands of books and films must be withheld from joining the digital libraries of the world solely because of a legal misfortune that guards absent and nonexistent copyright holders from any injury that would result from their work finding a new life, a new readership, and a new meaning in the culture.

I have felt very strongly about this problem ever since I worked in education research years and years ago. Part of my job was preparing anthologies of research materials for educators, and time and again found that important material was lost to contemporary audiences because I couldn't obtain permission to reproduce it...only because no person or publisher existed any longer to ask, while the copyright protection persisted. I thought of it then as an electronic fence that continues to stand long after the garden it encircles has become overgrown because no one could enter to tend it. For Rick, the problem of orphaned works constrained his initiative to put films from the film archive online for free download, a problem that formed a basis of the case.

This problem has become only more pressing to both of us in the past two years since we opened the library. As described in the post below, we've long wished to create a digital corollary to our analog shelves. Coincidentally, Kahle-Prelinger v. Gonzales finally (after a couple of years) got its hearing date just as we're in the middle of a digitization project that has pulled this problem out of the realm of the theoretical, vis-a-vis our book collection. We're now pulling a new crop of books from our shelves every week for digitization, and running copyright checks on each of them. It's disappointing to exclude works of merit from digitization because they are copyright-protected orphans.

Our thanks to Mr. Lessig and Mr. Sprigman of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society for preparing the argument. Good luck! Above, we are pictured in court this morning after the hearing with Mr. Lessig and with our co-plaintiff, Brewster Kahle. Thanks to Raj Kumar for the picture. --Megan

Big digitization project keeping us busy

This autumn the library has hummed with the swish of books being pulled off shelves by the hundreds. At the end of September the Internet Archive (archive.org) found that their paying clients couldn't supply them with books fast enough for their massive book digitization project. We are only too happy to oblige to fill the intermittent gaps. We've always looked forward to creating a digital corollary to our shelves. We see our library as, among other things, an experiment in the creative tension between digital and analog ways of accessing information. Having a partial digital library as a complement to its analog source is part of that plan. We're grateful to the IA for donating its resources to us. They've just become our biggest donor. Choosing the books for digitization has brought both of us back to one of our earliest common hobbies: musing and investigating which books and periodicals published between 1924 and 1964 had their copyrights renewed, and which had not. The digital books that the IA is creating this fall from our library will be in the production phase for another couple of months, so they're not yet available online. We will post in this space as soon as they are.

This fall we've also been proverbially "too busy to blog" for other reasons as well: lots of classes visiting the library on field trips from CCA and from the San Francisco Art Institute; creating bookplates and bookmarks to track the volumes that were submitted to, and withheld from, the Internet Archive scanning project. And of course regular work. We greatly appreciate the help of dedicated volunteer Pamela Jackson this fall who has provided invaluable assistance with all aspects of library operations. --Megan