IMSLP Forums

Yale University last week announced a new policy on “open access to digital representations of works in the public domain” from Yale’s museum, library, and archive collections. http://www.odai.yale.edu/

The policy is based on several considerations. These were addressed in a memorandum by a University committee that had studied the matter. http://www.odai.yale.edu/sites/default/ ... SFinal.pdf

The issues are familiar and important to IMSLP administrators, as well as to many contributors and users. They include, in summary,

(1) The institution’s mission: “The preservation, transmission, and advancement of knowledge … are promoted by the unencumbered use and reuse of digitized content for research, teaching, learning, and creative activities…. [Yale] University has made deep investments in the acquisition and stewardship of its collections in support of its mission. Without professional interpretation and description, without continuing scholarly inquiry, and without easy and direct access, the collections would become static artifacts. Likewise diminishing access … would serve only to circumscribe the quality of research, education, and creative endeavors that are the core of the University’s mission.”

(2) A desire to provide “thought leadership to the cultural heritage community at large.”

(3) Financial considerations: “Studies show that the cost of managing intellectual property and maintaining payment structures in cultural heritage collections almost always outweighs actual revenue…. Copyright enforcement and monetization may be justified, however, where analysis, interpretation or other editorial content or enhancements have been added.… Moreover, departments may continue to charge users for transaction costs. “

(4) Legal considerations: “… [E]nforcing license restrictions is often infeasible given the costs and resources such enforcement likely require. Moreover, as the legal designation ‘public domain’ is supported by the rationale that eventually all creators and/or owners of content must relinquish their monopolies over such content making such content available for unmitigated access and use, attempts to restrict access through licensing provisions may be neither legally enforceable nor ethically prudent.“


There has been much discussion in these Forums, and in the Imslp Talk pages, of the so-called secret super-copyright that some librarians try to impose to “protect” “their” collections from digital distribution. The memorandum of Yale University’s study group is a fascinating contribution to this discussion.

That's very interesting indeed. It would appear that they have pretty much come to their senses about this, IMO, and are to be applauded. It helps no one to lock up public domain material under various rubrics which function as a type of copyright restriction, least of all students and other interested scholars. In the USA, the two court cases Bridgeman vs. Corel and Feist vs. Rural have basically demolished the argument that an image, photograph or scan of a two-dimensional public domain original - even those which have been cleaned and manipulated to result in a type of digital 'restoration' - is subject to claims of new copyright as a derivative work or adaptation. Good for them. Other countries - particularly in the EU - have different standards wish respect to the legal status of such scanned images.