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Allison Nowicki Estell's CC-BY-NC-ND licensed chapter in the ACRL book Copyright Conversations is available here:  Copyright Self-Study: How to Know What You Know, What You Don’t Know, and How to Discover What You Need to Know Next.

Sara:                    Hello and welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today I am visiting with Allison Estell, the associate director for access and organization from Wentworth Institute of Technology. Allison, welcome to the show.

Allison:               Hi Sara. Thank you so much for having me.

Sara:                    So I wanted to have you on the show because I am so interested in some of your research and I noticed that through your title you don't necessarily have a copyright related title or job description. How did you get interested in copyright?

Allison:               Well, that's true. It's not in my title. It hasn't really been in any of my titles, but it kind of creeps into my job descriptions because I have a law degree. Now that said, I did not actually study any intellectual property or copyright while I was in law school. But I think once I've gotten to my first library job, the credential itself was enough for people to say, "Okay, let's send these questions and projects Allison's way."

Allison:               So, and it's really interesting so that was a good thing then when I was tasked with it, I found it to be also interesting. So yeah, I found myself just thrown into a role that I didn't really have a background in or education in specifically, and I just took what I knew from law school and learning how to learn and I dug in and I did have some resources along the way. In my first library job, I was actually a library student as well in a library assistant role. And so I was able to take a copyright course from, actually not, I graduated from Simmons, but I took a course through our wise consortium was from San Jose State and it gave me some of the basics to get me started. But then a lot of the projects and questions that ensued, I had to kind of supplement on my own.

Sara:                    And you talk about supplementing on your own. And I know in the recent book that was edited by myself, Copyright Conversations, you wrote about kind of self learning copyright. And I found that chapter one of the most, I think useful chapters in the book because so many people are in that boat, right? They're just asked what's the answer to this question? And they have no background. So can you talk a little bit about developing that chapter?

Allison:               Oh absolutely. So as I mentioned, I'd been kind of thrown into doing some copyright here and there and I even had found that people in my other world, I'm also a musician and I would play in some orchestras and people would know, oh, this person is a librarian and also she has a law degree. I bet she can help me find legal information. And so in addition to questions I was getting in the course of my job, people outside of work were also asking me to help them with copyright questions, which again, I always phrase everything with this is not legal advice. I'm just providing legal information.

Allison:               But especially because I don't work in the music library and I'm not really up on either sound recording issues or a lot of the other things that are specific to music, I found myself not having a ton of time but wanting to help and really talking people through, okay, I would have to learn about this myself anyway right now. Let's learn it together or let me point you to the right resources where you can learn about this and where and give you some of the critical thinking and kind of mindset skills that you would need to make a decision. Because ultimately the copyright questions that people bring to us as librarians are ultimately going to be the decision is ultimately our patrons decision to make. We're just giving the information for other people to make their own

Sara: Copyright Chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host Sara Benson, the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant their daily lives. Sara: Welcome to a remotely recorded episode of Copyright Chat. Today I am speaking […]

  Sara: Welcome to an episode of copyright chat today we have a guest with us remotely—Kyra Folk-Farber. Kyra Folk-Farber is the head of the music library and chair of the library’s copyright advisory committee at the University of California Santa Barbara and she also serves as the chair of the Music Library Associations’ legislation committee. […]

Benson: Copyright chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host, Sara Benson, the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant their daily lives. Laura Burtle is an associate dean of library administration at Georgia State University. She […]

Jonathan Band is an intellectual property law attorney for the Library Copyright Alliance.  His website is www.policybandwidth.com. Copyright chat is a pod cast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host Sara Benson, the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant […]

The open review of Planned Obsolescence: http://mcpress.media-commons.org/plannedobsolescence/ The open review of Generous Thinking: https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/ Sara: Copyright chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host, the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant to their daily lives. Kathleen Fitzpatrick is […]

  Copyright First Responders Website Hello, and welcome to a very special ALA edition of copyright chat, recorded directly from the ALA annual conference in New Orleans Louisiana. Kyle Courtney is our guest today, and he is the copyright advisor for Harvard University, working out of the Office for Scholarly Communication. He works closely with […]

Referenced in this episode:

The Copyright Advisory Network Question Forum:  http://www.librarycopyright.net/

The Kraemer Copyright Conference:  https://www.uccs.edu/copyright/

The Miami University Copyright Conference:  https://copyrightconference.lib.miamioh.edu/

 

Copyright chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host Sara Benson, the copyright librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant their daily lives.

Sara:  Welcome to another episode of copyright chat.  Today I have with me Carla Meyers. She is the assistant librarian and coordinator of scholarly communications at Miami University Libraries.  Welcome Carla.

Carla:  Thanks Sara. I’m so excited to be here.

Sara:  Carla –I really wanted to have you on the show because I know that you are the mastermind behind some wonderful conferences on copyright including the Kraemer copyright conference and I know you also have developed another conference at your home institution of Miami University Libraries.  We’re talking about Miami Ohio not Miami Florida for those of you who are wanting to get to the sun.  There are some sunny days in Ohio, too. And I know that you are planning a music copyright conference which I’m really excited about so I wanted you to talk about the reason you developed these interesting conference opportunities.

Carla:  Sure, so I think the primary reason is to help get good quality copyright information out to the library and educational community. When I first started working with copyright about fifteen years ago I was told go and learn about this—to make sure the library practices are in compliance with copyright law. So, I started looking around online and I started looking in books and it took me a while to realize how much bad copyright information is out there. And one of the places where I first found myself engaging with really great copyright information and really great presenters was the Ball State copyright conference that Dr. Fritz Dolak coordinated for Ball State University for about twelve years I think.

So when I went to Colorado to take a librarian job there realizing that it was hard to get back to Indiana to attend that conference or that other people in the West might not be likely to travel there I asked my dean at the time Terry Switzer if we could create something similar for people in the West and she supported that idea and it took off. So it was a combination of wanting to make sure people could get connected with good copyright information, but that we could also connect them with the presenters who are putting out this good information or with other people who are struggling with those frontline issues and dealing with copyright.

Sara: That is really a wonderful idea because copyright literacy is so key to information literacy especially in the digital age and I really appreciate that myself teaching and iSchool course to young enthusiastic librarians and information professionals So, what do you see as what are the challenges with providing this information at these conferences.

Carla:  So I think one of the challenges can be people getting there. We all know that librarians tend to have very limited travel budgets. Kraemer is established in the West it’s off and running I hope it continues to go on for a long time. Coming back to Ohio, unfortunately Fritz Bolak retired, which I’m very happy for him, but unfortunately that meant that they discontinued the conference there for the time being. So that’s why we looked to resurrect a conference or to start a conference here at Miami University to help fill that void for people on this side of the Mississippi. So hopefully they could afford to travel here. But I think also something too is just connecting with the information the valuable opportunity to hear directly from the presenters and to ask questions of them.

Benson: Copyright Chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host, Sara Benson, the Copyright Librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant to their daily lives.

Welcome to Copyright Chat. Today we have Peter Murray-Rust, a researcher from Cambridge University. He’s visiting me live today in my office. Welcome, Peter.

Murray-Rust: Hi there. Thanks very much, Sara.

Benson: Thank you for coming. So you’ve done some really interesting work with open access. You’re kind of, I would designate you an open access champion.

And I think one of your most interesting projects, at least to me, has been your content mining project, and I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about that, what the impetus for it was, and what kinds of projects people can do with it.

Murray-Rust: Right. So more general than open access. I’m an open advocate on many fronts: open source for code, open data for experiments and other types of data that’s collected, open access for access to the literature, and always of reducing the friction from going from one place to another when we’re transmitting knowledge and creating value as people receive knowledge and aggregate it and filter it and so on.

Benson: And you are very passionate about this. I saw you speak at IFLA, and I remember distinctly you saying to folks, you know, who’s a student in the room, you’re the future of open access, and I thought that was really inspirational. So your content mining software, it’s an open source software, is that right?

Murray-Rust: That’s right, yes.

Benson: And what can people use it for, and what what led you to develop it?

Murray-Rust: Ok, so the software is developed for a technical purpose, and it’s developed for a political purpose. So the political purpose is that all published scientific knowledge should be available to everybody on the planet. So I call it liberation software, software whose job is to liberate knowledge, and make it to widely available, and the technical purpose is to be able to read any paper in the literature, and turn it into what we call semantic form. Semantic means that machines can understand it. That means that the words in the paper, they know how to process. If you put in something like Anopheles, it translates it into a tropical mosquito, for example.

Benson: Oh, ok. So what kinds of projects have your software been used for to date, and what do you see the future of your software use being, I guess?

Murray-Rust: Well, our vision is we want to give every reader in the world software which can help them read the scientific literature. There’s about probably five papers published each minute in science, so no way can humans keep up with it without using machines. So the first job of the machines is to find this, the papers that people want to read. So it searches repositories. It usually comes back with far more papers than people want to read. So the next part of that is to filter it so that they find the papers which are most interesting to them for whatever reason, and each reader is different, so that each reader will have a different set of filters that they apply so they find the papers of interest to them. So shall I give an example?

Benson: Sure.

Murray-Rust: Ok. Well, our current example is malarial mosquitoes, right? People are interested in this for many reasons. They want to find out where the mosquitoes are, what they feed on, how they spread disease, how people can control them, how successful it is, what the politics of malaria are, and so forth. So every reader will have a different view on this, and one person would want to look at the mating of mosquitoes, another would want to look at insecticide resistance, another would want to look at the eradication programs and how successful they had been and so forth. So we’re trying to create an environme

 

Durationator: https://www.durationator.com

“Just Wanna Quilt”: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1341376118

 

Benson: Copyright Chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host, Sara Benson, the Copyright Librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues relevant to their daily life.

Welcome to another episode of Copyright Chat. Today, we have with us Elizabeth Townsend Gard, who’s a faculty member at Tulane University Law School. She specializes in copyright law and is co-inventor of the Durationator Copyright Experiment, a software program that aims to determine the worldwide copyright status of every kind of cultural work. She also co-owns the Tulane spinout company, Limited Times, which is commercializing the Durationator software and services. She co-directs and co-founds the Law/Culture/Innovation Initiative, housed at the Social Innovation Social Entrepreneurship program and is director of the Copyright Research Lab at Tulane Law School. Welcome, Elizabeth.

Townsend Gard: Thanks, thanks for having me here, Sara. It’s fun to be here.

Benson: And you are here remotely from your hometown where I hear Mardi Gras is heating up.

Townsend Gard: We’re in deep at the moment. It’s the Friday before Mardi Gras, so yeah we’re either, you’re either at the parades or you’re staying home because it’s crazy out there.

Benson: I would recommend avoiding them altogether but I’m a little bit of a curmudgeon myself.

Townsend Gard: Yeah, me too. I think it’s like four days of staying home days.

Benson: So I’m very interested in this concept of the Durationator, and I wonder if you can explain it a little bit. I understand that it is difficult to research the copyright status of certain works due to the transfer of ownership and copyright information not being readily available online through the copyright office, but maybe you can explain a little bit more how you came up with this concept.

Townsend Gard: Sure. So the project’s ten years old. It’s hard to believe we’ve been working on it that long. It came out of my doctoral work. I was a grad student in European history, and I wanted to use a ton of resources from what we now know is sort of the key orphan work period which is, you know, nineteen twenties thirties forties. Nobody could tell me how to do this, and so I came from a family of lawyers, and I went to law school, and then after that, at law school I still didn’t get the answers, so I started working on trying to figure out how to figure out the answer, and then be able to help others as well. So it’s a system. It’s thinking through sort of what’s the status of a work, and it does it for every country in the world.  And we’re trying to now think through the next step. So we’ve done a lot of the research, and now we’re on the kind of entrepreneurial side of getting it out to, we really think libraries are a key component to it. It was the librarian that I asked if I could use, or the archivist, that I could ask if I could use a particular work, but so we see like archivists and librarians as sort of on the front line, and so thinking of ways to get this tool into their hands and also providing support. So that’s another thing we saw. It’s not a software tool. It’s really a support system for determining the copyright status of a work.

Benson: So is there some backend research that goes on? I noticed on the website describing it, that you have law students who work with you behind the scenes, but, you know, so the Durationator itself seems like a software-type program, but is there some backend work that goes into this as well?

Townsend Gard: A huge amount. So we’ve had eighty students on the project. I spent pretty much a full decade, just every single second of my life working on it.  There w