It has come to our notice that an individual has published images of a number of manuscripts photographed by DIAMM and several of our partner libraries on IMSLP. I appreciate that this person probably felt they were providing a service to his fellow researchers and musicians, but in fact he may have single-handedly damaged or even destroyed the future of manuscript image delivery online.
Not only is this a breach of the copyright licence signed when creating an account with DIAMM, it is also a very serious breach of trust that will affect every member of the academic community. Web publication is governed by the same publication copyright as print publication: the only thing that you may reproduce from a web page without infringing copyright is the URL of the page.
Many people appreciate the extraordinary access that DIAMM provides to a wealth of music manuscripts that for most people would be impossibly costly to visit or to buy images for themselves. DIAMM is free, and many libraries also provide their images free. This is an extraordinary service, and one that perhaps we take for granted without realising how much it would matter to us if suddenly it was no longer available. We tend to think of access to manuscript images as our right, yet it is given to us as a courtesy by the owners of the documents.
It has taken decades to build relationships with libraries and archives and to persuade them to digitize their materials, usually at enormous cost. The cost to DIAMM alone to digitize the manuscripts we have photographed is well over a million GBP, yet we make them available to users without charge, a service that costs us a significant amount of money every year, all provided by government or private grants, or with money raised through publications. DIAMM in particular has only been able to survive and grow because of the trust that depositors place in us by allowing us to deliver images of their manuscripts. Our long record of respect for, and protection of, copyright is our great strenght, yet that is now in jeopardy. The upload of copies of our images - and those of other libraries - without permission has brought into doubt the future of DIAMM, since depositors will remove their images if we cannot ensure that users respect the rights of the document owners. In many cases it has taken years (in one case over 7 years) of careful negotiation to persuade libraries to allow us to digitize their documents and put them online. Outside DIAMM many libraries did not put their own images online, and some still do not, because they were/are concerned about rights infringement of this sort - it seems with good justification. Only recently are libraries beginning to put their manuscripts online, and this may stop if users abuse that trust.
Already two libraries have asked us to withdraw their images from online use; carefully negotiated licences with some libraries are likely to be withdrawn, and the images that are lost will not appear anywhere else on the web since the owners believe that the user community cannot be trusted not to redistribute them without permission. We are in the process of negotiating the rights to put over 25,000 new images online, and these negotiations have now stopped until this matter can be resolved: the manuscripts may not be digitized at all, and if they are they may never appear online anywhere. The actions of one individual may therefore mean that many manuscripts that would have otherwise been made available to our community will never appear in a public space.
It is deeply upsetting that the thoughtless behaviour of a single individual should have such far-reaching and damaging consequences for the global research community.
I hope you will join me in censuring the behaviour of this individual and persuading him that, far from helping researchers, he is going to hinder future manuscript access for every potential user - amateur, professional, academic - worldwide.
Replies
Thank you. I am not a regular user of that site. The subversive in me is thinking of some sabotage of IMSLP - a scholarly protest or signed petition on Academia.edu or Avaaz that might short cut the legal mess that could erupt..
Olivier Berten a dit :
Jason Stoessel a dit :
A transparent organisation discloses the identity and credentials of those responsible for making decisions. People who hide their identities behind pseudonyms and user names lack credibility. Administrators have also acted prejudicially in blocking my user account when I disclosed that I was registering for copyright compliance. Importantly I had not registered a single complaint. This is not an organisation acting in the public interest.
I also note that the link to IMSLP's copyright test is broken.
Jason Stoessel a dit :
What sort of transparency do you miss? DIAMM's work recognition? It's always been there as well as all sources of all images uploaded on IMSLP.
Juste une précision: le copyright aux États-Unis n'appartient pas systématiquement à l'auteur. Il est même généralement la propriété de l'éditeur pour un ouvrage, qui paye l'auteur. c'est l'aspect commercial. Qui n'altère pas le droit intellectuel de l'auteur sur l'oeuvre dans certains cas, mais moins strictement qu'en France.
I won't be drawn on speculating what a court of law might decide, but I would rather point to the legislative status of any work that asserts copyright. The position of Doubting Thomas is a tiresome one that is pragmatically fruitless given that only a small number of copyright infringements are ever tested in court.
IMSLP's lack of transparency and track record is less than best practice. Adieu!
Nicolas Sansarlat a dit :
Jason Stoessel a dit :
Merci beaucoup Jason pour ces précisions !
Jason Stoessel a dit :
Concerning copyright on photographic images from manuscripts, the advice that I have received from a highly reputed expert on international copyright (who practises in the UK and EU) can be summarised thus:
1. Where a manuscript is photographed, the replica is in a form different from the photographed object and the photographer is able to make creative choices at the moment of fixation and post-fixation which might give him/her copyright.
2. Where the photograph is an original work it is protected under the Berne Convention.
3. In Germany and Austria non-original photographs are granted related rights protection of 50 years, but only if the photo is taken by an EU national or it is simultaneously published in Germany/Austria.
Again, I shall state that this indicates that DIAMM's claims in this respect, whether for its own images or on behalf of the libraries who have produced images, are valid in terms of projecting the rights of the author (photographer) or the library/corporation to whom the author has ceded his/her rights.
JS
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