Cohen and Rosenzweig (Digital history,2005): Owning The Past?

Just like Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University law professor), who have promoted the notion of the internet as “Creative Commons.” We all like to think of the web as a place where creators and users meet. And sometimes as creators, we find ourselves becoming users of others intellectual creations. This is where the copyright issue arises.

According to Cohen and Rosenzweig(Digital history,2005) thought that copyright law establishes a balance between the rights of holders and and the rights of users which is a give-and-take that rewards authorship but that also fosters the dissemination of knowledge for educational and academic purposes. Copyright laws change depending on the types intellectual property (digital material, paper written material, web material..), the country, and the philosophies of authorities in office. However, Cohen and Rosenzweig (2005) suggest that as historians, we actively participate in the process of shaping the copyright laws in order to make it more receptive to the sharing of ideas and expressions. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/1.php
Cohen and Rosenzweig thought that the advantages of digital media: First, flexibility,which allows you to combine sound, moving pictures, and images with text poses a major new challenge to digital historians. The rights for images, sound, and moving images are often more complex and more expensive than for text. Second, manipulability of digital data creates another, less common legal issue. Third, its global accessibility which by an author's intellectual property available to a broader audience or specific audience may easily help web user or historians to violate the rights of other authors. http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/2.php

Cohen and Rosenzweig thought that not Even the most carefully placed or most threateningly worded copyright notice protect an author, if his/her work does not meet the requirement enunciated in the feist case that copyrightable works reflect a minimal degree of creativity and originality. This means that digitizing someone else's work does not grant the copyright protection. In general, historians are often most concerned about someone stealing their ideas, and the copyright law does nothing to protect ideas, only their formal and fixed expression. For this matter, Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest that the authors use license agreement notice and a log-in membership procedure for their websites. When it comes to universities and educational institutions, there is controversy on whether academic materials should be comodified and copyrighted or just be considered as shared intellectual materials. Nevertheless, Creative Commons has primarily encouraged copyright balance by offering free legal advice to those who want to promote an ethic of sharing and mutuality. With the help of some high-priced legal talent, the creative commons have developed a series of licenses packaged under the rubric “Some Rights Reserved.” For example, their “noncommercial license” permits free use and distribution of work only for noncommercial purposes. Other historians, who put a priority on getting their perspectives widely disseminated, might select the “attribution” license, which allows any site to display their work if it gives them credit http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/3.php.

Cohen and Rosenzweig clarifies that not every material is published after 1923 is necessarily copyrighted. For a website or any other material to be copyrighted,it requires a notice of copyright or a proof of registration with the “copyright office”. Additionally, copyright laws even on the web vary depending on the country where the material was created or copyrighted. One difference between U.S. laws related to intellectual property and those of many other countries is that those countries give authors “moral rights” that do not exist in American law. For instance authors, even if they have sold their work’s economic rights, might have the right of “integrity,” which prevents alterations of this work for example, colorizing a film http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/4.php
Furthermore, Cohen and Rosenzweig think that the hardest task for historians will be determine the rightful owner of a material in order to ask permission or determine what is “fair use” of another author's intellectual material http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/copyright/5.php