Copyright, Diggers and archaeology

[Unitof1]

I'm interested to know why you believe that the work undertaken by diggers is covered by copyright.

I believe that copyright should be taken seriously but isn?t taken very seriously. Currently the approach taken appears to be that of the photographer working for a company with the default that the copyright rests with the company. There are though photographers who retain their copyright and there are many who work for companies and have various contractual agreements. I think diggers should purely see what they produce as copyright (made to see actually). Maybe we need diggers to be differentiated as non copyright and copyright. There is a thread on at the moment considering what is an archaeologist. I think that they should be defined by what they produce. An obvious set of archaeologists are the academics and they most certainly bitch about copyright.

I currently have sitting in front of me some kind of contract that I am supposed to sign two copies of and send one back to something called the archaeology data service but which also has the address: Department of Archaeology, The king?s Manor, University of York. This thing also has on it the signature of a professor entitled the director of the ?Institution? Archaeology data service and for the University of York.

The document appears to make it clear that via a director institute professor that the University of York wants a non exclusive licence from me. Without it they will not make available my reports over the ether. Don?t worry as an expert in watching briefs for extensions for little old ladies (I like to yodel the last part) the world is not missing anything and in fact I have uploaded reports to the university. But they want my signature. And I am still thinking about it. might I like a specific clause that if at any time I want and for what ever reason I can remove from their university and all its whatevers all and every copy of my documents? Maybe it would be nice to sign it over to my old university -what ho. Also they clearly are not going to pay me any royalties why not. Do york university compete against me for work. Presumably they are going to charge students tuition fees?so much to ponder.

Now I am not sure that I had to sign something similar with the SMRs, HERs. There was a time quite recently when the main reason that I went to an HER was to browse the grey literature as it was the only place that they existed. I can remeber one or two times when photocopying and copyright was raised. Now there is gateway and pastscapes, oasis, presumably they all have people making a living out of them. It still stands that I don?t need any of these databanks to undertake an evaluation and I only need the evaluation to undertake an excavation. There has been for a long history of curators trying to make HERs statutory (after changing its name from smr) so that they can grow their pension pots, make themselves statutory?.

But I digress. I have done a bit of illustration in my time and have been everybody?s talking computer. And it was in a university. And the grey literature reports were defiantly used by those institutions when it came to research assessments and other inspections used to justify their statues and government funding. And did they pay me a 18% non contributory pension like the four directors of the so called unit were getting. But they wanted my illustrations and my context sheets. sorry still digressing. The key, the core, for field archaeology is the copyright generated in the field. It is the integrity, commercial and professional of an archaeologist. Curators particularly dont understand this or do they. They are awfully insistent that I sign my copyrights away.