4 Licensing
Scott Althaus; Brandon Butler; Kyle K. Courtney; and Glen Worthey
Licensing use case
Let’s identify a use case for you to keep in mind as you are moving through the Licensing chapter.
Let’s say a TDM scholar has a new critical interdisciplinary research project on women’s roles in top 50 corporations in the United States from 1920-2020. For their analysis, they want to create a data file that includes both the text and basic metadata for selected articles focusing on women’s roles from key national newspapers, which also includes coding work developed for the project to mine and index all the information. The scholar believes that the unique dataset they will create via the TDM process, which includes both the metadata and full text of the articles, would be incredibly useful to other researchers studying this same interdisciplinary topic. Because of the scope and range of the timeline, the 1920s through 2020, some of these articles are in the public domain and some are in-copyright.
For those that are in copyright, the TDM scholar can access and hopefully mine some of these articles through their University Library’s licensed resource. These types of databases are commonly sold to a higher education market by a vendor that has a relationship with major newspapers and collects, indexes, and provides full text access to these newspaper articles that are historical in nature.
However, some of the articles will be accessed and mined via a subscription agreement. The TDM scholar has an online subscription to this newspaper, and receives daily emails featuring the day’s articles. Additionally, one national paper in particular that was the subject of some of the scholar’s research provides access to the historical newspaper articles via a separate agreement, which is not part of the daily circulation agreement.
The scholar wants to mine these newspapers, develop the coding, and publish this dataset, with the selected articles in full text, as a public-use file.
This might be a very familiar scenario. As we will review, a license or contract is an agreement between two parties to specific terms. A license or contract can modify, change, or alter rights.
And while the licensing of digital content exists in a legal realm that is separate from copyright law, they do interact—as they most likely will in this scenario or any TDM scenario.
Now, please take a moment now to reflect on this scenario. What issues do you see arising? What are some factors identified that will benefit this work? What might require more explanation or negotiation? How would you begin to strategize in understanding any risk on the use, input, and output of the data and full text?
Contract & licensing basics
While we read about copyright and fair use in the earlier chapter on copyright, the second step is to determine the details of access to the materials. Many different contracts and agreements govern access to copyrighted materials and define what particular uses a rese