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Open Science Preconditions: Legal issues I: Copyright

VO Sharing is daring: Open Science approaches to Digital Humanities

Please read the lesson script below and complete the tasks.

Questions, remarks, issues? Participate in the Zoom meeting on Mon, 30.03.2020, 5 p.m. - 6 p.m.!
This week's topic of discussion:
Where do we see ourselves in relation to "copyright" (or "Urheber*innenrecht")? Do we focus more on our role as creators or as recipients of cultural and artistic works? How does that influence our opinion about Open Science?

Mon, 30.03., 16:45 - 18:15: Open Science Preconditions: Legal issues I: Copyright

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In last week's Zoom meeting, one of you asked about the practical side of "persistent identification" - where and how can you get PIDs for your own research outputs? The most established and easy-to-use platform for this is Zenodo. Zenodo is a general-purpose open-access repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. The name "Zenodo" is derived from Zenodotus, "the first librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and father of the first recorded use of metadata, a landmark in library history" (isn't that poetic?). Zenodo can be used for the publication of all research outputs from across all fields of research ("Sciences and Humanities, really!", is what their website says). All uploads get a DOI to make them easily and uniquely citeable, and any type of content can be uploaded there - be it datasets, be it papers, be it software.

Task 1

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Go to the Zenodo website and log in. You do not need to create an account because you already have one: Last week, you created your ORCiD account, which can be used to sign up for Zenodo as well (see how the PID systems are conveniently connected?).
Please go to the "upload" area, click "new upload", and archive something, anything!, that you have created in the past. This could be a term paper you wrote for a seminar, a photo you took, a piece of software you wrote... If you encounter problems, or if you are not sure about what information to fill into the fields that Zenodo asks you to provide, do not hesitate to ask in this session's Zoom meeting (I myself did not find Zenodo very intuitive when I started using it).
IMPORTANT: Do not publish your upload yet, but save it as a draft. We will discuss copyright in this session and open licensing in the session after the Easter holidays - after we will have talked about these topics, you will have a clearer picture of how openly you can and should publish your upload.

Before we approach this week's topic, let's take a step back and take a brief look at the bigger picture. In our "Introduction to Open Science", we encountered the terminology we operate with and the concepts it refers to before we looked at the infrastructures and networks that provide a framework for Open Science in the field of humanities research. Now that we are investigating the preconditions of Open Science, we concern ourselves with rather technical concepts such as identifiability and legal issues such as copyright and data privacy. We notice that some of these core topics and methods of Open Science are only loosely connected to what we perceive as our core concerns as humanities researchers. The question is: How are these two worlds even connected, and if they are in fact not, how can we bring them together? Marcel Knöchelmann has summed up his thoughts on this issue in his post on the LSE Impact blog.

Task 2

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Read Marcel Knöchelmann's blog post "Open Humanities: Why Open Science in the Humanities is not Enough". If this post sparked your interest and you would like to dive in deeper, read Knöchelmann's paper "Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?".
Do you agree with Knöchelmann's perspective? What do you think about the relationship between Openness, Humanities, and Digital Humanities?

This week, we will learn to understand the concepts of "copyright" and "Urheber*innenrecht". Let's start with the basics: You might not be aware of this, but "copyright" and "Urheber*innenrecht" are actually two very different things. Alright, maybe not very different; they both define the scope of rights someone has to a piece of art or other type of intellectual creation. Still, the frame of reference is quite divergent.

Task 3

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To understand the difference between "copyright" and "Urheber*innenrecht" as well as the basics of Austrian Urheber*innenrecht and the European dimension, please watch the first 30 minutes of the video "Open Science Basics: Copyright and Licensing" --> slides (if you'd already like to dive into our next session's topic, which will be open licensing, feel free to watch the entire video).
If you prefer to learn about Urheber*innenrecht from a German video, please watch "Intellectual Property Rights and Copyright". For a summary of the most important legal issues in Digital Humanities (in German), including Austrian Urheber*innenrecht / copyright, please refer to the ACDH-CH website: Legal Aspects of Digital Humanities Projects. For a more generic overview in English, please refer to the CLIC's (CLARIN Legal and Ethical Issues Committee) Copyright Law Overview.

Now that we have understood the concept of the "work" as a "unique mental creation" ("eigentümliche geistige Schöpfung", according to Austrian Urheber*innenrechtsgesetz UrhG), we can move on to understanding the concept of the "orphan work". An orphan is a living thing that has lost its parents (= those who created it), and similarly, an orphan work is a work that has lost its creator. As we have learned that the protection of a work remains intact even after the author's death (for 70 more years), the concept of the "orphan work" does not refer to the work losing its creator in the sense of them dying, but rather in the sense of them becoming unidentifiable. Orphan works can be used more freely than works that are in copyright (similar to works that are in the public domain).

Task 4

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Please visit this site to understand in detail, what orphan works are. Subsequently, visit the European Orphan Works Database: What information is collected about orphan works? What can you as a user learn from this database? Can you think of a scenario in which you would use this database for your own research purposes?

As we learned from the video in task 3, there are things that are not in the narrower sense "works", but that are still protected in some form. The most important of these things in the Digital Humanities context are of course data and databases. These are not protected by copyright / Urheber*innenrecht, because data are facts and facts are not copyrightable. For this reason, the law has invented the sui generis database right (sui generis = a right in its own kind, a unique right).

Task 5

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Please visit this site to learn the details of sui generis database right (and related rights). Please keep this special dimension of copyright / Urheber*innenrecht in mind - we will consider the interesting case of databases again when we speak about (open) licensing in our next session.

Let's sum up what we learned today. Copyright and Urheber*innenrecht are not exactly the same thing, as the concept of "copyright" focuses more on the (financial) exploitability (the right to copy - and sell) of creations, while Urheber*innenrecht focuses more on the person who created it and their individual genius. However, in both cases, the work in question hast to have been created in some form - the thought alone is not sufficient for rights to emerge, the thought has to materialize in some way. Once that happens, the creator has a number of rights, some of which they can give away, and others which they cannot get rid of (such as the factual right of being the creator of the creation). Even without being a "creator", we can in some cases obtain certain rights to things - such as databases -, on the other hand, things that (used to) have a creator might become rights-free if the creator vanishes and their work becomes an orphan.

In our next session after the holidays, we will follow up on a number of issues we learned today, as the topic of (open) licensing, i.e. sharing rights to our works with others, is very closely connected to copyright questions.

For now, let's process what we learned in this session. To follow up on this, you are warmly invited to participate in the

Zoom meeting on Mon, 30.03.2020, 5 p.m. - 6 p.m.

During this meeting, we will have time to speak about any questions or issues that might arise in general. In addition, we will use this meeting as an open space of discourse to discuss the following questions:

Where do we see ourselves in relation to "copyright" (or "Urheber*innenrecht")? Do we focus more on our role as creators or as recipients of cultural and artistic works? How does that influence our opinion about Open Science?

Reading & resources

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