The Scholar’s Space

Making your work openly and freely available is such a good start, and no small accomplishment when you consider all a scholar has to go through to assure the simple advantage of free availability. But it’s still just a start.

We tend to think of orphan works as those books, images, recordings and films made long ago, still protected by copyrights, but whose creators or copyright owners are *now* dead or unable to be determined or located. What about the billions and billions of works being created every day and placed online right now that are destined to be the orphans of tomorrow? Does your own online, freely available scholarship fit that description? Have you made it available, but failed to limit the damage from a copyright term and an extensive set of exclusive rights that will ensure your work’s uselessness in the future? Pity.

It’s so easy to limit the damage by incorporating into whatever you put online a Creative Commons license. A CC license would mean that those who want to use your work in the future will not run into the problem of not being able to find you or your heirs, or your heirs’ heirs, or their heirs (copyrights being destined to become all but perpetual if the content industries have their way). Think about it. Your work is online. You are long gone. Your copyright is not. The same kinds of questions we face daily now as we dig down into our massive physical literary, image, sound and film archives (who owns this? can we find him/her/it? how likely is he/she/it to care? what are the risks of going forward without permission? what is the cost to the public of not going forward? can we manage the risk?) are going to crop up several orders of magnitude more often for those in the future who have to deal with our billions of digital creations, the works spun out by scholars in the early 21st century before everyone finally got it that interminable terms have interminable costs.

Lessig’s commentary about YouTube and Creative Commons got me thinking about this. How many videos are there on YouTube? Give up? I have no idea, but there are way too many to have to figure out what’s too risky to preserve and provide access to 100 years from now. Especially when it’s SOOOOO EASY to incorporate a CC license into your online work, letting everyone know exactly what you want them to be able to do without further inquiry. No one has to figure it out then. You’ve spelled it out. OK, OK. It’s not that CC licenses are perfect, without critics or ambiguities (what is non-commercial? is it really a good idea to “share-alike?”). But compared to doing nothing or doing something much more ambiguous (ideosyncratic interpretations of sets of rights to provide to the public), it’s way, way better. Do it. Visit Creative Commons. License your work. License your site if you publish to a particular site regularly. Help future scholars and others to make use of your work when you’re gone. They’ll thank you for it.