Copyright issues

[Doug Yanega]

Gary Rosenberg's excellent posting on this made a few points worth not
forgetting, and this one is especially important:

>Many items in natural history museums
>were acquired through donation, with the donor expecting that the specimens
>and information about them be freely accessible to qualified people. Other
>items came from publicly funded research or expeditions with similar
>expectations.

Any retroactive blanket policy will certainly violate any such intentions
or agreements. It would be one thing to tell all prospective donors "Once
you give us that material, we claim rights to charge money for access to
it, and we fully intend to do so", but it is (dare I say it in public)
bordering on unethical to retroactively claim such rights on material
donated WITHOUT the donors' being made aware of this.
        Related to this is the observation that
>Also the defendant could request the plaintiff to prove legal ownership of a
>specimen collected in another country.
        Which would certainly be a major issue, were any such cases to come
to court. Realistically, it is unlikely that any of us would run afoul of
such things, unless we were to take photos of, say, a Tyrannosaurus fossil
and make them into a t-shirt; but the questions "Can the museum PROVE that
they obtained those bones with the official approval of the country in
which the fossil was found? Can they PROVE that whoever donated it has no
objections to fees being charged to examine it or reproduce its image?"
would doubtless be raised. I suspect that many such fossils, at least the
older ones, might *not* have that paper trail (though I may be wrong, not
being familiar with the details of archaeology at the turn of the century).
Let's face it, this is probably exactly the sort of scenario that prompted
the NHM to draft this rule (and I'm sure they will point to such examples
to defend their policy), but - to cover their bases - they wrote the rule
broadly to cover every single object in the museum, rather than try to be
picky about what would and would not be covered...and in the end, even that
original intent probably would not survive a legal challenge. All it
effectively does as far as most of us are concerned is place another
barrier to doing science on a shoestring, like most of us practice.

Along these lines, Anita Cholewa wrote:

> Now in nearly all cases
>museum specimens are being held partly for research purposes so
>researchers should have access and not be charged a fee.
[snip]
>3. But there is also the issue of natural history museums setting up
>policies (legal
>of course) that would control access to specimens with respect to
>illustrating.

The NHM charges hefty fees for access to the research collections to begin
with, even (as I understand it) if you are voluntarily identifying
specimens for them. So, the scenario is that one pays to get to the museum,
pays to look at or identify material once there, and signs away the
copyright if you want to take photos or record label data away with you. As
pointed out by others, it's not much incentive to use that museum when
everything you do there costs you money, and the fruits of your labors
STILL aren't yours in the end. This sort of approach might be fine if every
single taxonomist in the world had a grant which included bench fees and
such in their budget, and a legal staff that could handle the copyright
negotiations *for* you when it came time to publish, but this is not now
nor ever likely to be the case. I doubt the NHM will be the last museum to
head this way, either. Not a cheery topic or precedent, is it?

Peace,


Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315 (standard disclaimer: opinions are mine, not UCR's)
                http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82