Things Seen: Digging Digitally

I’m going through a busy patch at the moment, which means I don’t have time to comment on some posts which I’ve seen. What there’ll be for the next couple of weeks will be posts from del.icio.us and the occasional bulk post like this one because I’m still reading, and many other blogs are going through strong patches at the moment.

Digging Digitally is well worth following if you’re an archaeological academic. Archaeological Data: Public Domain or Copyrighted? raises a serious concern about access to facts. Unlike experimental sciences Archaeology is destructive. If I excavate a site then you can’t. But my research protected by copyright, usually signed away to a publisher. So who owns facts? This is complicated in the UK by database rights. Any database, even if it’s made of facts in the public domain, is protected by database rights for fifteen years from the last time it was modified.

Things can get murkier still. If I find Excalibur then who can print pictures of it? I can, because I can photograph it. But can you? Obviously the artefact needs to be locked away and conserved, so its not the sort of thing you can access easily. In fact if you can only access it with my permission then I can insist that as a condition of access you sign over the photo reproduction rights to me. A lot of museums do exactly this. So objects created thousands of years ago can be hauled into the protection of modern media law. It’s not all glum news though, as mentioned in More on Licenses and Scientific Data.

One problem is that in the humanities Open Access isn’t a huge issue. I suspect that when the debate is settled then the Arts will be stuck with whatever the Scientists negotiate. The problem is Widespread faculty ignorance of Open Access.