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