Are digitized books on Internet Archive public domain?

Question

A fellow researcher would like to include in a profile all of the text (verbatim) from a very romanticized US county history.

I had removed it for fear of copyright infringement, but its copyright is expired and it was digitized on Internet Archive. I don't know if this puts it in the public domain or not. I know that FamilySearch and Ancestry also have digitized public domain documents ...and yet to publish a downloaded image from those sites would violate not only their terms of service, but also be copyright infringement as they have copyright on the digitized content.

Is verbatim text from a book digitized on Internet Archive fair game for a profile?

At present, an excerpt from the book is included in the sources with a link to the actual text.

But the fellow researcher wishes all of that text to be included in the biography. I am opposed to this because it does not add to the biography, only muddies the well sourced facts (it's also a tertiary source as the numerous erroneous facts are not even sourced within). However, the fellow researcher believes it is equally important to include the text as a means of showcasing the legends that can come about in a family history. And I think that can be a valid argument... so long as we're not continuing to perpetuate the myths.

Under "Research Notes", there is also mention of two other inaccurate (and disproven) accounts of the ancestor's life. But not the florid accounts themselves. Should this third "history" include all of the lengthy text or just key parts (and, of course, sourced with a link to the book)?

Comments

1 - I tend to agree that profiles aren't improved by big blocks of quoted text.  I wouldn't read it on the profile page, I'd follow the link and read the book on archive.org (if available, but...)

2 - The basic principle of the Berne Convention is that foreign authors aren't at a disadvantage to home-grown.  This means an American book which is out of copyright in America can still be under copyright in other countries.

The big sites handle this by finding out where the reader is.  Many books available to American readers are unavailable to European readers.  WikiTree can't do that.

3 - Which may not matter, because a single potted bio from an old county history containing dozens is probably covered by fair use.

4 - There's a separate copyright in the scanned image.  In principle this applies to all use of the scanned image, even transcribing off-screen, so it can be illegal to transcribe from the image where it would be legal to transcribe from the physical book.  This is the right that such as Ancestry.com rely on.

5 - Uploaders to archive.org have to own their scans and put them under a Creative Commons license (which usually requires attribution).

6 - archive.org has rights, but waives them and imposes no limitations itself.

Answer 1

I don’t think Wikitree is the place to post an entire book.  Extracting and quoting or summarizing a couple of important or pertinent sections makes sense, but why wouldn’t you just include a link to the book in your sources?

Comments

Some books have pages themselves, example:

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:The_Carr_Family_Records

Answer 2

 Thus, if a work was published in 1922 or earlier, it is now in the public domain. 

Lengthy explanation for books published after 1922 also here:

http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/OpposingCopyrightExtension/publicdomain/SearchC-R.html

Answer 3

There is the possibility that some are under copyright but available at archive.org.  The way you tell is to look in the information below the book image. It will tell you the status of the copyright.

The best way to use such books is to extract relevant info and then give a complete source citation to let others find the right page of the book.

Answer 4

"4 - There's a separate copyright in the scanned image.  In principle this applies to all use of the scanned image, even transcribing off-screen, so it can be illegal to transcribe from the image where it would be legal to transcribe from the physical book.  This is the right that such as Ancestry.com rely on."

The above statement is incorrect.  The clarifying U.S. Supreme Court case is Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co.  It established that the mere reproduction of a public domain document and that "sweat of the brow" in doing so is insufficient for copyright protection.  A scan of a public domain book is still in the public domain.  References:

1. http://www.likelihoodofconfusion.com/who-owns-the-copyright-scans-public-domain-works/
2. https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:No_Sweat_of_the_Brow_Copyright
3. https://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2004/07/the_public_doma.html
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co.
5. https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/499_US_340.htm

Comments

Which makes it hard to understand how there can be copyright in a photograph at all.

Answer 5

The recommendation on the WikiTree help page for Copying Text is not to copy text, even when it is in the public domain and copyright free.

I like the idea in the help page, that there is "value in original content" and that just copying and pasting text often stops us from reviewing the facts, particularly as you say if this is a romanticised version of a history, then it probably contains some errors or glosses over some issues?