archaeologicalgits
One of the problems of talking outside the “industry” is that they ask how does it work now. If you say nobody makes any money from it and nobody takes any notice of copyright and you will get comments like “if you have a real issue go elsewhere” or “This is not true” ….you won’t get much back. I think we should care first within the profession (commercial).
Why is it that commercial archaeology does not see what it produces in terms of copyright?
I don’t think that commercial archaeology has ever had a proper discussion about copyright mostly because commercial archaeology was conceived to provide grey data within the civil service and then through the establishment of educational trusts-the charity units and the university units. In council monopolies the reports belong to the units who produced them. To over come their rights to tax exemptions or if you like to satisfy the criteria of charitable status, the free for everybody based on the creators being vague about copyrights, has come about as the norm. You don’t find anybody saying outright what the rights should be or why. The ifa mentions copyright once in the codes as a short notice.
Currently a planning applicant has to pay for the cost of the authority processing the application, that presumably will included the cost of the curators “advice”. It did used to be relatively free but there have been charging issues over the years and I would expect the costs to increase. Are any planning authority process, EIAs, public inquires etc free?, somebody must pay. To process the applications the authority wants information to be processed and significanted. I don’t ever see that stopping, even by big society. If I ask the local HER for info to be collected they will charge me, although its still free if I travel to the HER, which costs me and I then charge the client. Either way it still shows that this information has a cost and a value. These costs might be miniscule but it’s a principle. Currently we do not try to find out what the market value of our information might be. Part of the problem could be that we have not set up a mechanism through which to collect any royalties or give anybody the opportunity to pay any. In the past access to a report was most likely to be through a smr if it existed. They might have had one paper copy and the HER was treated as a lending liberay who had a free copy of your report. People did not have digi cameras or photocopiers. The process of collecting and returning royalties would probably be pointless, how much would the liberay have to charge? Now we have nationally based databases which can easily be accessed from around the world. I dont know what take up oasis expects but why shouldent I expect a bit of the longtail maybe 10/20/500 pence every ten years for one report?
The poor copyright holder from the 1970s (and the diggers) should obviously feel very grateful that nice Dino is going “to manage to publish properly as part of something else but no one around here now has heard of the original author, which is a touch awkward”. We could just take it that in the 1970s they did not make any effort to preserve their copyright, so who cares, obviously not the profession. How will Dino resolve the situation? Why shouldn’t a royalty be paid to someone, possibly just to show that you did undertake due diligence or to cover the extent of your due diligence. That could sound a bit like a form of insurance. Maybe we should look at royalty gathering web based sites. The music industry has a few evolving examples.
One of the problems of talking outside the “industry” is that they ask how does it work now. If you say nobody makes any money from it and nobody takes any notice of copyright and you will get comments like “if you have a real issue go elsewhere” or “This is not true” ….you won’t get much back. I think we should care first within the profession (commercial).
Why is it that commercial archaeology does not see what it produces in terms of copyright?
I don’t think that commercial archaeology has ever had a proper discussion about copyright mostly because commercial archaeology was conceived to provide grey data within the civil service and then through the establishment of educational trusts-the charity units and the university units. In council monopolies the reports belong to the units who produced them. To over come their rights to tax exemptions or if you like to satisfy the criteria of charitable status, the free for everybody based on the creators being vague about copyrights, has come about as the norm. You don’t find anybody saying outright what the rights should be or why. The ifa mentions copyright once in the codes as a short notice.
Currently a planning applicant has to pay for the cost of the authority processing the application, that presumably will included the cost of the curators “advice”. It did used to be relatively free but there have been charging issues over the years and I would expect the costs to increase. Are any planning authority process, EIAs, public inquires etc free?, somebody must pay. To process the applications the authority wants information to be processed and significanted. I don’t ever see that stopping, even by big society. If I ask the local HER for info to be collected they will charge me, although its still free if I travel to the HER, which costs me and I then charge the client. Either way it still shows that this information has a cost and a value. These costs might be miniscule but it’s a principle. Currently we do not try to find out what the market value of our information might be. Part of the problem could be that we have not set up a mechanism through which to collect any royalties or give anybody the opportunity to pay any. In the past access to a report was most likely to be through a smr if it existed. They might have had one paper copy and the HER was treated as a lending liberay who had a free copy of your report. People did not have digi cameras or photocopiers. The process of collecting and returning royalties would probably be pointless, how much would the liberay have to charge? Now we have nationally based databases which can easily be accessed from around the world. I dont know what take up oasis expects but why shouldent I expect a bit of the longtail maybe 10/20/500 pence every ten years for one report?
The poor copyright holder from the 1970s (and the diggers) should obviously feel very grateful that nice Dino is going “to manage to publish properly as part of something else but no one around here now has heard of the original author, which is a touch awkward”. We could just take it that in the 1970s they did not make any effort to preserve their copyright, so who cares, obviously not the profession. How will Dino resolve the situation? Why shouldn’t a royalty be paid to someone, possibly just to show that you did undertake due diligence or to cover the extent of your due diligence. That could sound a bit like a form of insurance. Maybe we should look at royalty gathering web based sites. The music industry has a few evolving examples.
Reason: your past is my past