Re: copyright in the digitized object?

On Mon, Feb 28, 2000, Julia Crawford <juliac[_at_]okstate.edu> wrote:
>
> Recently, our university library made available a public domain item
> (government document published in 1904) on the web in digital format.
> Specifically, we OCR'd an historical text, which is not rare, but it
> is a primary source document valuable to researchers in particular
> fields.
>
> A publisher contacted us and asked permission to capture the text from
> our web site and reprint in book format which they in turn plan to
> sell. Since the book is not rare, the publisher could certainly make
> photocopies of the original document to reprint, but prefers our text,
> for whatever reason.
>
> Of course many commercial publishers take public domain government
> documents and charge high prices for value-added services such as
> additional indexing, etc. We have put value in the document, by
> digitizing it. But other than that, the value lies in the ability
> to keyword search it, and follow the links we've provided, which
> doesn't help the publisher who will just print it. Is the value to
> the publisher that the text is digitized and can be presented in
> any manner (font, appearance, etc.), and they're not tied to a
> photocopy of the original document?
>
> Did the publisher have to ask permission or were they just being
> courteous?

We at SPI do thousands of pages of OCR on public domain documents. We know all the careful and sometimes very creative work that goes into choosing how to OCR, what to OCR, how to represent in text what was a picture, etc. I have no question that you have a copyright in the electronic version as a derivative work. Of course they could get the words from someone else, but your protection stems from the selection, arrangement, and presentation of those words. The counter-argument is a Feist style one -- that no matter how hard you worked, your selection and arrangement was as trivial as pure alphabetical order. I know in our cases that we consider we have done far more than that, and I assume you have as well.

Yes, I think the publisher should have asked, and perhaps offered some payment for your efforts in producing something that will save him countless hours and dollars.

Roland J. Cole, Executive Director
Software Patent Institute
9225 Indian Creek Parkway, #1100
OVERLAND PARK KS 64210-2009
913-451-3355; fax 913-451-3361
cole@spi.org; http://www.spi.org/ Received on Tue Feb 29 2000 - 18:21:42 GMT