Copyright

“A good [digital] collection respects intellectual property rights.”
A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, NISO (2007)

Determining the copyright status of the materials you make available online — and clearly sharing that status with your users — are essential parts of any digital project. Two important things to remember:

  • Owning a physical item does not necessarily mean you hold the copyright to that item.
  • Scanning an item does not change its copyright status or create a new copyright.

Can I Put it Online?

Public Domain
Many of the historical materials in your collections may be in the public domain, which means that copyright protections do not apply. Materials in the public domain may be freely used by anyone, without permission or attribution.

Books, articles, maps, pamphlets and other published materials are in the public domain if they were:

    • published before 1927

or

  • published between 1927 and 1977 without a copyright notice

Letters, diaries, manuscripts and other unpublished materials (including many photographs) pass into the public domain:

    • 70 years after the death of the creator (in 2017, that’s any creator who died before 1947)

or

  • 120 years after the date created, if the creator is anonymous or death date is unknown (in 2017, that’s any unpublished anonymous work created before 1897)

A detailed reference chart, Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, is maintained by the Copyright Information Center at Cornell University.

In Copyright? Get Permission.
If materials are not in the public domain, you’ll need to seek permission from the copyright holder before putting them online. The copyright may lie with the original photographer, artist, or author; his or her heirs; or, in the case of works for hire, with the agency that authorized the creation of the original work.

Contact the rights holder to request permission to make specific items available online. Permission request letter templates are available from Cornell University and Hathi Trust. Keep a record of when you contacted rights holders and what response you received.

Orphan Works
What if I can’t find the rights holder? What if I get no response after multiple contacts? It may be impossible to identify or locate the rights holder for many historical materials. In that case, the materials may be considered orphan works.

Many libraries and museums choose to make orphan works in their collections available online. For more information, see “Orphan Works: Statement of Best Practices,” Society of American Archivists (2009) and “Well-intentioned practice for putting digitized collections of unpublished materials online,” OCLC Research (2010)

Should I Put it Online?

Privacy and Ethics
Even if materials are in the public domain, there may be other reasons not to put them online. Be mindful of privacy issues and other ethical concerns, which are different from copyright issues. Give special consideration to:

  • Materials created by or depicting Indigenous communities
  • Materials created by or depicting protected populations (minors, inmates, medical patients)
  • Materials containing personal or private information (e.g. home address, birth date, medical history)

Fair Use
Be aware that, whether the materials are in the public domain or in copyright, the digital resources you make available online can be used by the general public for activities defined as Fair Use by Section 107, United States copyright law, including teaching, research and news reporting. You may wish to have a plan in place for responding to requests for reproductions, including any fees you might charge.

For more information, see “Copyright and Fair Use,” Stanford University Libraries.

Rights Statements

Each item you make available online through Recollection Wisconsin must be accompanied by a statement describing the item’s copyright status. This rights statement helps users understand what they legally can and cannot do with your materials. For more information, view our Copyright Policy.

We recommend that rights information consists of two parts:

  1. Copyright status statement (e.g. in copyright, no copyright/public domain, or copyright undetermined)
  2. “For More Information” statement (name of organization providing the item)

Note: The rights statement should reflect the actual copyright status of the original object. Do not use the phrase “Digital image copyright…”

Sample Rights Statements

  • Copyright 2010, Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved. For more information, contact University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries.
  • Public domain. For more information, contact the W. J. Niederkorn Library, Port Washington, Wisconsin.
  • Copyright status undetermined. For more information, contact the Langlade County Historical Society, Antigo, Wisconsin.

Recollection Wisconsin is beginning to work towards adopting the standardized rights statements developed by DPLA and Europeana, available at rightsstatements.org. In the future, the appropriate standardized rights statement URI will be required in a separate, additional field for each record provided to DPLA. If you’re ready to start implementing the standardized rights statements in your metadata, let us know!

Further Reading