Re: [GLAM] Default maximum "Public Domain year" for digitizations

Hi Fae, Under UK law, the technically correct but unhelpful answer is that no such cut-off exists - because of the deeply silly 2039 transitional rights for unpublished works. You can, of course, advise them to do the sensible thing and ignore this, & the BL's Illuminated MS page is a good example of how to do so: https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/reuse.asp (and a convenient precedent should they want to justify taking the same position) For published works... The ARROW study the BL did in 2011 - https://www.arrow-net.eu/sites/default/files/Seeking%20New%20Landscapes.pdf - noted that the extreme cases can be very extreme - during 2010, at least one work from 1859 was still known to be in copyright under life+70, and during 2011, at least one from 1865 - 151 and 146 years since publication. These are both now PD but it demonstrates the challenge of setting a 'safe' hard cut-off. It is quite possible that there is some notionally copyrighted pre-1874 material still out there; that's 142 years, less than these two extremes. If I was to make a wild guess at the edge of a "reasonable presumption of safety", covering almost the full range of material but leaving off the extremes, I'd say 140 years - work published at 20, lives to 90, life + 70 takes it to 140. This sounds like the 1874 threshold you mention. The Wellcome published a report looking at digitisation of both print and archive material - http://www.create.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/CREATe-Working-Paper-No.… While they didn't use a cut-off for considering books PD - they assessed rights on an item-by-item basis - they did decide to post some material on a "we'll see if anyone complains" basis, and this was given a basic date-triage: "The WL requests for permission to publish online which did not illicit a response will be made available in three batches – the first, which included titles published up to 1930; the second, from 1930 until 1970; and a third batch, from 1970 up to the present day, which caused the greatest concern to the Wellcome Trust’s legal team. The most recent batch is regarded as most problematic because the rightsholders will almost certainly still be living, and therefore could be more likely to object to publication without permission." For archive material they took a harder line, and (given the subject material and dates) presumed it all to be in-copyright and requiring consent. This may not be relevant for your situation... Andrew. On 9 September 2016 at 10:33, Fæ <faewik(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk