Copyright, Revisited

At the start of the semester, it seemed so simple: we would send permission request letters to all the record companies, they would give up permission to post selections from the records on the internet, and we would post the music.

Of course, it was never that simple, because many of the record companies no longer exist.

And I was worried about rights to the compositions... did we need to get permission from the composers / publishers / copyright holders of the selections that were performed on the records, as well as from the record companies themselves? I brought it up. The answer (as I understood it) was "you're welcome to look into that, but we don't think it's a problem." I looked, but didn't find anything.

We sent letters out to as many of the record companies as I could find, and most of them replied giving us permission! Yes!

But now everybody's rethinking this. Perhaps we shouldn't put all the music out on the internet where anyone can hear it -- maybe that's not legal. Maybe we should limit access in some way -- allow only U of Iowa personnel to use the collection, perhaps, or allow it to be accessed only from workstations that are physically in the music library.

Or perhaps we should limit the amount of information that can be heard -- play only 30 seconds of a selection, perhaps. Or maybe putting disclaimers in the "Rights" field would be enough.

I'm thinking that we should treat different selections in different ways -- recordings for which we own the copyright, and maybe recordings that we have permission to post, can go on the internet with no restrictions, but everything else can have some sort of access restriction. And everything would get the disclaimer in the Rights field.

I don't know yet if that's physically possible -- whether ContentDM (the software that organizes the collection) will allow parts of it to be public, and parts to be private. We might need to make two different collections, like "Iowa Sounds - Public" and "Iowa Sounds - Limited Access", or something.

I've been researching these and related issues. My tentative conclusion is that we really need legal advice.

I also think that the Fair Use provisions of copyright law really ought to be expanded. But the session I went to on copyright issues at the ILA convention was given by a lawyer who says he expects the music industry lobbyists to keep hammering at Congress until fair use is eliminated.

I'm afraid he's right. And I really, really hope he's not.

Meanwhile, I think the idea of having all these Iowa-related recordings available on the library web site is very cool, and I hope the legal issues can get worked out so that it's allowed.