Access Copyright: profiting from dead creators
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Access Copyright wants you to pay for public domain material.
“Our licences give content users immediate, legal access to the copyright protected materials they need to copy from to get their jobs done, while ensuring that creators and publishers are fairly compensated when their works are copied,” it says on its site.
Even if they’re dead. 
‘A comment by one ‘Sysyphe’ on my blog yesterday about Access Copyright (’AC’) pointed out how AC is listing PD works in its repertoire for digital licensing,” 
blogs famed Canadian copyright lawyer Howard Knopf, going on »»»
For those outside of Canada, AC is a collective that purports to license reprographic and digital reproduction of books, magazines, newspapers and other publications,”
A quick check reveals the same practice in its transactional licensing tool.
Check out the AC licensing wizard,which offers to sell a license to make ten copies of 10 pages of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion for $25.00.
However, says Howard, the “inconvenient truth” is: Shaw died in 1950 and his work is in the public domain in Canada.”
This, “does not speak well for AC’s repertoire claims or to credibility in its long awaited and still invisible public domain registry,” he observes dryly.
In a comment post, “This version of the Bernard Shaw play is not actually in public domain because there is another contributor, Feliks Topolski (1907-1989),” notes Stephen, going on »»»
While of course the unedited text of Shaw is in the public domain, the drawings are not and therefore the work when viewed as a whole is not. The AMICUS bibliographic record can be seen here:
Because there are a lot of factors that go into making a public domain assessment, you can see that constructing a PD registry has its challenges.
Adds Howard:
“The comment from Stephen below is interesting. The particular 1942 edition of Pygmalion I pointed to above does indeed have some still protected illustrations – but AC’s Wizard will take my money regardless of which pages I am copying. It should only take my money for the protected pages. (leaving aside the question of whether AC actually has any rights here, which is always interesting).
“However, it took me only a few seconds to find another Shavian example of a work clearly totally in the PD where AC is quite happy to take my money. It has photos, but the edition was published in 1931 – so even the photos are now in the PD in Canada. Here’s the AC Wizard page for the 1931 NY Dodd, Mead edition of Don Juan in hell : from man and superman. Here’s the AMICUS entry for that edition.”
(Cheers, Marc)
Howard Knopf – Access Copyright: charging for public domain material, July 28, 2009
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July 29th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Can’t some laywer with a brain go and pWn4g3 them?
July 29th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
You see companies charging for public domain stuff all the time. Take Old Time Radio for example. If you do a search on audible you will find that publishing companies are charging users, all be it not much, for a package of programs, basically for people who don’t know any better. There are very few series’s that are not in the public domain.
July 30th, 2009 at 9:05 am
The licensing of public domain is thoroughly common by the music performance rights licensing organization, the so called PROs. There are various “reasons” or tricks why public domain works are still exploited:
-anyone can claim ownership of anything without risking any penalty or possibility of being charged with fraud. Said “owners” simply register the public domain works because they can then collect some money.
-music that is registered when it is not in public domain and then goes into public domain is not removed from the so called PRO repertoires because no one at the PRO has any clue as to how to remove the new public domain music.
- the PRO’s themselves are not subject to being accused of fraud. The law enforcement people are too busy with other minor stuff done by the lawyerless.
- the victims of the PROs (radio stations, clubs, television) have no spirit to fight fraud or, better, are afraid of being sued by the PROs because they perform a great deal of music without being able to realize that the licencne they pay for to the PROs does not license the music performed
- the public domain works have no legal owners that may challenge their illegal licensing and the representatives of the real owners, the general public are nowhere to be seen.
- then there is the stupidity of the “copyright system” that creates confusion by making a same music public domain in one country and not in another.
- the arrangements of a public domain work is registered in a PRO and the PROs do not object to that, even though arrangements do no even qualify for copyright protection (at least in USA).