Welcome to free*the*books a liberating place where we challenge ideas about creation and authorship and discuss copyright laws, the public domain and orphan works.

What? you say, why in the world would I want to discuss copyright on a blog?

Well, copyright laws are what make the difference between reading several pages, a snippet or all of a text from that computer on your lap or desktop. Conservative interpretation of the laws and difficulty ascertaining authorship or even finding an author often keep books with little or no commercial value from use by researchers. Without access to a large well-stocked research library, few researchers can tap published data collected over time and great expense. This is true of all sorts of reports by governments about demographic, economic, geological, hydrological, health, legislative, production data to name a few. You really have to ask why and what can be done about it.

Same goes for all those books on subjects like folklore, heraldry and numismatics seldom consulted because few scholars with interest in these texts can travel to far-flung libraries to read them.
 
Here at the University of Texas at Austin we have riches of the Benson Latin American Collection. Bit by bit this collection is appearing on line but many books will remain on the shelves protected by copyright but undiscovered. I’ll be commenting on our findings as the books are digitized.

Sometimes it is just a matter of weeks or months until a book already in the public domain appears online. Determining the copyright status of books is painstaking, time-consuming work and doubly difficult for books published internationally. Copyright terms vary from 50 to 100 years from publication or the death of an author. Figuring this out is not simple–just take a look at our links!   

By the way, if you haven’t tried, click on “Google Book Search” in the right hand bar.
Look yourself up. Several authors have been surprised to discover citations and acknowledgment of their books, chapters, articles, and forgotten reports written long ago.

Better yet, talk to your publisher about moving your work to the public domain.
 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Benson Latin American Collection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.