Intellectual Property Law

Digital Public Library of America, Session IV

By palfrey

These are my live-blog notes for the fourth and final full session at the DPLA content and scope working session:

1) The messy issue of rights and permissions for in-copyright works is the biggest issue that the DPLA will face.  (We have a workstream set up for legal issues on the wiki.)  A variant of this issue: the DPLA could play a role in ensuring that usage rights for end-users are not as untenable (silly?) as the recently-announced HarperCollins’ 26 lends rule.   As another related point: We should have a legislative solution to tricky copyright restrictions in mind, as a proposal (or a package of proposals), but we need also to make progress absent, or at least prior to, legal change.  In addition to orphan works issues, there are copyright issues laden in scholarship associated with computation and massive data sets, as an example.

2) Don’t undercut public libraries as you build a Digital Public Library of America.  There’s a risk that the success of a #dpla might result in politicians and other funders seeing less utility in local public libraries.

3) The world is going mobile on such a massive scale.  We need to build that in from the start.  There are over 5 billion active mobile users.  Mobile broadband is growing in penetration, and nearly a third of users globally have a smart-phone.  In 2013 – 2014, more people will access information on the web via a mobile device than on a laptop or desktop.  We have to bring the DPLA to the people.

(Side-note: Dan Cohen has posted his #dpla comments to his blog.)

Full post as published by John Palfrey on March 01, 2011 (boomark / email).