Rights research at WGBH

Today I met with Casey Davis, Project Manager of the American Archive of Public Broadcasting at the WGBH Educational Foundation to review my research goals, get her feedback, and learn a bit more about workflows and processes related to rights clearance at WGBH. 

The meeting was extremely productive and Casey feels my thesis is starting to focus in on a really compelling topic: how the climate of open access is impacting the rights and licensing landscape in public media amidst the push for digitization--especially as compared to current trends in other time-based media archives and the digital reproductions market prevalent in the museum world--and how copyright reform and advocacy may further influence the course of public media's approaches and policies in the future. 

Casey outlined three current streams of thought about open access initiatives in the public media sector, which I outline below:

1. The all open access movement that is pushing for all content made accessible via Creative Commons licenses. Individuals to contact:
1. At Columbia Peter Koffman, a big open licensing in public media advocate (Casey is connecting me)
2. Newshour, WNET's Winter Shank
3. Jo Skinner
4. Melody Joy Kramer
2. The middle ground: WGBH -- working to digitize, make accessible, but also in a position to monetize
1. I am going to review the WGBH stock sales website to familiarize myself with their policies/procedures
2. Casey is going to connect me with the stock sales department lead, Allison Smith
3. See below for data to be requested
3. Faction in public media encouraging digitization as the key to more revenue. 
1. Led by the former stock footage licensing AAPB director, now at CBP p
2. Pushing for stations to monetize archival content--potentially stymieing vision of open access
3. Released recent report to reference
4. Concern that this will hinder access
5. Metadata vs transcripts vs content -- some encouraging stations to even license their metadata!

DATA TO COLLECT:

Reference & Reproduction requests

Revenues - gross and actual, pre/during-digitization

Actual costs of digitization

Numbers from member stations

Determination of non-contracted/orphan works

Background to AAPB:

The AAPB and Library of Congress received a grant for digitization. At that time many member stations had already signed basic agreements with the CPB. The AAPB held a rights-related meeting early on with folks from the Berkman Center, WGBH legal counsel, and the LoC and determined they needed to go back to stations for firmer contracts if they were to put digitized content online.

Many stations actually don’t have contracts with content producers, and didn’t know what they had in their collections, so the AAPB requested they sign a quitclaim, which allowed the AAPB to make things available to the extent the stations do in fact own the content.

The team then developed a strategy to review content in order to determine what was legally appropriate for the online reading room. With new collections the Archive uses a deed of gift modeled after Peter Hirtle's example in Research Library Issues, which includes the request for donors to dedicate content to a CC license, however, the stations can choose to sign the agreement and not comply with that request. They must, however, agree to open all metadata up to the public domain. 

This meeting was very fruitful. Casey is going to put me in touch with several individuals, and member stations, and recommended a few resources/reports to review. In addition she will share the AAPB's Deed of Gift with me. My next step will be to set up an appointment with Allison Smith at WGBH after reviewing their stock sales information, and to update myself with a literature review refresher to see if anything new has been published on this topic in the past 6 months or so.