Copyright Revisited

I've been reading a lot about copyright lately, more than my non-lawer brain can fathom really, here's what I have found out as copyright pertains to digital history:

On a basic level, copyright is good.  Copyright protects the ideas and works of historians.  However on a practical level something is wrong with copyright.  After reading Helprin in the New York Times I got a striking approval of the copyright.  Helprin argues that ideas don't become less important or unique, so why should somebody's work lose its copyright simply because a certain amount of years has expired.  Reading Cohen and Rosenzweig their view on copyright is that it is far too confusing, especially for the digital historian.  Cohen and Rosenzweig's chapter Owning the Past? goes into the ins and out of copyright in each type of medium.  This examination is enough to make your head spin since each medium (text, audio, video and more) has their own unique copyright protocols and loopholes.  However C & R do present a great chart which can be useful as a reference.

The idea of the Creative Commons is raised as perhaps the solution to all of this copyright head (and heart) ache.  The Creative Commons suggests that people should be allowed to use your work so long as they do not use the work commercially.  Creative Commons believes that copyright is owning all of the rights to reproduction of your work while a CC (Creative Commons) Liscense is owning some of the rights to your work.  This seems pretty nirvana and groovy until you read Toth's article regarding these liscences.  Toth argues about the validity of CC and points out that in principle it seems like a great ideallistic thing to do, but in reality the CC is unenforceable.  Toth believes that essentially once you publish something under CC, an action which is irreversable by the code of the CC, you cannot enforce your copyright.  Toth believes that once an item is widely available for free it becomes part of the de facto public domain which allows open use by all.

One last viewpoint on Copyright was on Orphan Records.  The article set forth by Seidenberg explains the perils of trying to retroactively go back through to find copyright owners for works that were published over 50 years ago.  Seidenberg is describing a treasure trove of audio recordings found by a museum.  The museum is now trying to find the copyright owner for the records.  This process has locked these 'orphan records' in ligigious battles denying the public many forms of access to these records.  Seidenberg explains the varrious roles of the legal partners in this battle, essentially scaring digital historians from posting known copyrighted works.

From reading all of these articles I was essentially scared into believing in the value of the copyright.  My fresh perspective and intuition tells me to believe everything is copyrighted unless specifically expressed otherwise.  Unfortunately for digital historians this attitude produces a lot of barriers, however until things change (and hopefully they do) I'll just have to deal with it.