0.2 The grub street project: imagining futures in scholarly editing  (Page 2/14)

In terms of the project’s goals that are less “scholarly” but more crucial overall, this project aims to promote public access to scholarship and public domain documents. The site and the editions contained in it will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license that will enable the digitized documents and editions to be accessed and used freely. Making digital editions usable, accessible, readily annotated, and free of restrictions will help to ensure sustainability for non-commercialized projects. Perhaps the most important issue facing scholarly use of digital texts—possibly more important than TEI-compliant markup, machine-readable texts, digital tools for collocation and concordance, etc., as valuable as they are—is copyright, and the public access to high-quality, carefully edited, digital editions (whatever the future structure of digital “editions” might be). ^{See also Allison Muri, “The Technology and Future of the Book: What a Digital ‘Grub Street’ can tell us about Communications, Commerce, and Creativity,” in Producing the Eighteenth-Century Book: Writers and Publishers in England, 1650 – 1800 , ed. Laura L. Runge and Pat Rogers (University of Delaware Press, 2009), 235–50.}

Copyright and sustainability

Copyright issues are not new to digital projects, but the atmosphere of restrictions and controls over these materials is much more vigorous today. When scholarship is owned by commercial interests, we risk losing our ability to participate in our own discourses. Copyright has been, mostly, a fair means of protecting authors’, publishers’, and scholars’ interests in the world of print. However, everything changes when digital technologies render all communications as copies. This situation has resulted in sometimes excessively restrictive user agreements written for companies that have built their business models on distributing books and journals in the age of print, when it was harder to copy and re-use words or images.

As an example, consider the legal notice for the OED Online , which reads as follows:

you may not … systematically make printed or electronic copies of multiple extracts of OED Online for any purpose; … display or distribute any part of OED Online on any electronic network, including without limitation the Internet and the World Wide Web (other than the institution’s secure network, where the Subscriber is an institution); … use all or any part of OED Online for any commercial use. ^{(External Link) .}

Merriam-Webster Online similarly limits the use of its text:

No part of the work embodied in Merriam-Webster’s pages on the World Wide Web and covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the written permission of the publisher. ^{(External Link) .}

The commercial and legal motivations for such notices are understandable when the tools for copying and publishing are ubiquitous and easily employed; however, a dismaying trend here, by no means unique to these publications, is the explicit overriding of any principles of fair use or fair dealing. Aside from the obvious vagaries of terms such as “systematic” or “multiple,” readers and writers are apparently forbidden to use any portion in an online work, in a commercial work, or in the case of Merriam-Webster, in any work whatsoever. An added irony is that a significant proportion of these dictionaries has been compiled from a long and profitable tradition of stealing, pilfering, and fair use. If one compares, for example, the definitions for theft provided by OED Online and Merriam-Webster Online to those from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dictionaries, it becomes clear that each definition draws heavily upon and uses the same words as its predecessors. ^{Compare the obvious “borrowings” in Thomas Blount’s Nomo-lexikon (1670); Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (1728); Benjamin Norton Defoe’s A Compleat English Dictionary (1735); Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1756); John Marchant’s A New Complete English Dictionary (1760); Daniel Fenning’s The Royal English Dictionary (1761); Francis Allen’s A Complete English Dictionary (1765); John Ash’s The New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1775); James Barclay’s A Complete and Universal English Dictionary (1782).} The OED ’s “felonious taking away of the personal goods of another; larceny” comes almost unchanged from early printed dictionaries: Thomas Blount’s Nomo-lexikon (1670) defines it as “Felonious taking away another mans moveable and personable Goods....  See Larceny and Felony,” while Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (1728) has “felonious taking away another man’s moveable and personal Goods… See Larceny .” Clearly, the copyrighted definitions that we may not freely use (if we were to obey the legal license in its strictest sense) have been appropriated from the public domain and potentially from fair use or fair dealing.