Publishing online digital exhibits containing orphan works: a case study
by Mary Aksim
I just wanted to proudly show off my small digital exhibit online. How complicated could it be?
More complicated than expected. I am part of a growing digital humanities community that is interested in curating collections of items into exhibits and publishing them online. Exhibit creators often include items that fall under copyright in their exhibits and, to legally publish their creations online, need to seek copyright permissions from the items’ creators. Copyright in Canada lasts for 50 years after the creator’s death. But what happens if you cannot find an item’s creator? If you know the item was created in the last 50 years, you cannot reproduce it online without seeking permission.
I ran into this exact problem while trying to publish my exhibit Reasons We Are Part of the Feminist Movement (RWPFM), an exhibit that two classmates and I had created as a cumulative course assignment during our Master of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. The exhibit contains 15 items from the Canadian Women’s Movement Archives, a unique collection hosted at the University of Ottawa’s Archives and Special Collections, including buttons, t-shirts and posters from the late 20th century second-wave feminism movement. Unfortunately, all but one of the items we selected for the exhibit had an unlocatable copyright owner. Either the creators were unknown or the organizations who were mentioned on the items had long since disbanded.
The situation was complicated further by the fact that we were trying to disseminate unpublished materials with unlocatable copyright owners. The Canadian Copyright Act only provides an appeal process for published works. Under current Canadian legislation, there is no legal way to publish an exhibit containing unpublished orphaned works. How was I going to legally post our exhibit online?
In response to the issues that specifically arose with the CWMA collection, the University of Ottawa’s Copyright developed a copyright risk-based framework to enable its users to share their projects online. This framework assesses the risk of publishing orphan works without copyright permission since their creators cannot be found. Under the framework, if items are classified as “low risk” they can be published online with a copyright disclaimer notice and link for takedown requests.
My article Publishing online digital exhibits containing orphan works: a case study highlights the gap in Canadian Copyright Law in regard to publishing digital exhibits with orphan works and the procedures Canadian university libraries have put in place to help their clients share their work. Throughout the paper, I use examples of my personal challenges while trying to publish Reasons We Are Part of the Feminist Movement (RWPFM).