Copyright and the Ethics of Access in the Digital Humanities
Image by Marvin Meyer. Free to use under Unsplash license.
The internet has vastly expanded access to information across the globe. Instantaneous answers to questions, high quality news coverage, hours upon hours of streaming content, and for a research student like myself, access to journal articles, books and grey literature that previous generations could only dream about. There is a leveling that occurs with this openness of access. In times past, only those with significant means could afford to spend time scouring libraries, especially if that meant travelling beyond your city, state or country. Now, anyone with a device and internet signal can access petabytes of information to suit any particular interest.
However, with this instantaneous access to information comes important questions of ownership, copyright and attribution. Early peer-to-peer file services such as Napster, LimeWire and other BitTorrent platforms popularised the easy, and free, access to music, movies and photos as well as any other kind of digital file. For early Millennials such as myself, as we sat at the cusp of this proliferation of internet content, the temptation of access without the accompanying cost was enticing. It also fueled the false perception that items in the real world cost money, whereas on the internet, everything was free.
Of course our naivety as consumers was not shared by the copyright holders of the media that was being pirated.
Free is good news to the consumer—yes, those like myself who could have otherwise choosen to pay—but more importantly for those who would be prohibited from access if there was a price attached. Free, for those who lack financial or social capital, results in a leveling of access, a more democratic distribution of knowledge, learning and entertainment, and thereby a more equitable society.
However, free is not necessarily good news for the creator. While we might dream of a glorious utopia where artists, scribes and scholars are able to produce content merely for the altruistic reward of others benefit, in the real world, artists, scribes and scholars also appreciate food on their plates and rooves over their heads. And these trivialities usually cost money. In 2010, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sought to “stiffle groups that support free culture and digital rights” arguing that “if their views are allowed to gain strength, music creators will find it harder and harder to make a living as traditional media shifts to online and wireless services. We all know what will happen next: the music will dry up, and the ultimate loser will be the music consumer.” - Wired.com
A decade later, it is not just Nashville and Hollywood that have had to wrestle with openness of access vs. honoring appropriate copyright claims. In 2017 the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) posted an article by Nancy Sims detailing the difficulties in appropriately accrediting copyright while in the process of digitising library catelogues. Rights Statements and Open Licensing are not easy fixes, even for items in the public domain.
“While the law permits certain uses without permission, and intentionally defines some of those uses flexibly, the law does not usually take such a flexible approach to rights ownership.” - Nancy Sims
While the concern for both the ASCAP and the ACRL concerns the further distribution of other’s already copyrighted material, the conversation around ethics of access gets more interesting when thinking about the issues related to digital humanities and Web 2.0. Cathy Davidson, in her 2012 chapter Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions cites a number of questions that arise from a humanities that encorporates the principles of openness, collabortaion and access that are central to the methodology of “Web 2.0”.
“Once we champion openness, we enter a new world of social, intellectual, and curatorial rules. An open repository challenges the borders between disciplines as well as between professionals and amateurs, between scholars and knowledge enthusiasts. It raises questions of privilege and authority as well as ethical issues of credibility and responsibility, privacy and security, neutrality and freedom of expression.”
To these, we can add our original questions about copyright, licensing and the (implicit or explicit) expectations on providing free access to digital content. When the scholar publishes online and the artist loads their work onto copyright free platforms, who pays the rent?
Once again, free is great for the consumer and the humanities student. I have certainly benefited from access to open source documents and scholarship, not to mention the Creative Commons and copyright free images that are all over this website. I am grateful for sites like Wikimedia Commons and Unsplash particulalry. I am benefiting from the opportunity to blog on an open platform and the generosity of my employer Youthworks in being able to republish my articles—with appropriate attribution—to intellectual property for which they have the moral and legal ownership.
However, the access to free images and documentation presumes upon the generosity of the creatives and scholars to provide their intellectual property for next-to-no cost. I do not know Marvin Meyer whose image tops this article. But my use of his image presumes upon his ability to put food on his plate and pay his bills, without any contribution from me. There is no legal requirement that I pay Meyer for his work. He has made the image available for free under the Unsplash license. This is of significant benefit to me, and more so to those who could not otherwise choose to afford images to enhance their own creative endeavours.
However, does my desire for free content create an ethical conundrum? It may not be as black and white as stealing music through Napster. But, perhaps I am participating in a system in which the presumption of creatives providing free licenses denies a worker their wages?
These are not questions that I have clear answers to at this time. However, one immediate implication for me has been to make sure I add in the optional attribution to articles, scholarship, and images that I glean from around the web. In this small way I can give promotion to scholars and artists upon whose generosity I am able to create my own work.