[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Elliott: Welcome to the University of Washington Libraries Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion podcast. This podcast is a companion piece to the Digital Scholarship Summer Immersion program, or DSSI and is meant to give you a greater insight to the world of digital scholarship at the UW Libraries. In each episode, we interview a UW Libraries staff member whose work impacts or intersects with digital scholarship in some way. I’m Elliott Stevens, the English Studies Librarian and Research Commons Librarian.

Perry: I’m Perry Yee and I’m the Online Learning Support Manager for the UW Libraries.

Dovi: And I’m Dovi Patiño, an Online Learning and Engagement Specialist at the UW LibrariesAnd we are the teaching team for the DSSI Podcast Track. For the last three years, we have offered online digital storytelling workshops using video and podcasting formats. We thought this podcast would be a great way to introduce ourselves, introduce our colleagues, and give you an idea of the breadth of digital scholarship support at the Libraries.

Our guest today is Maryam Fakouri. Maryam is a Scholarly Publishing Outreach Librarian and is from the Scholarly Communication and Publishing unit in the Libraries. She has experience working with the UW community, and as a former lawyer, has expertise in monitoring developments in intellectual property law and communicating those developments to campus stakeholders. Maryam, welcome to the show.

Maryam: Thank you.

Dovi: Great, so what is your favorite thing about the summer?

Maryam: This summer’s been beautiful, beautiful weather. It’s been delightful to be outside.

Dovi: Yes, the sunshine is incredible. It makes me love Seattle and miss California a little less.

Maryam: Yes, really. This is my second summer out here, and last summer was really hot and dry, and I was shocked. It was so unlike the Seattle--what you hear about Seattle. But this summer has just been glorious.

Dovi: Do you have any memorable summer stories you’d like to share with us?

Maryam: This question makes me think of summer times when I was probably around middle-school or high-school age, and we used to go to a pool. We had to drive to this pool, and I remember the smell of the car going to the pool in the hot summer, and then when we got there, just running around with the other kids and playing at this pool.

Dovi: That sounds so fun.

Maryam: Yeah.

Dovi: Thank you. And so can you explain to us a little bit about what you do here at the UW Libraries?

Maryam: In a nutshell, I work with rights issues, and there’s a lot involved with that. I help people who make things understand the rights that they own to those things. And people who want to use things that they don’t own the rights to--I help them do that, too. That’s in a nutshell. And wrapped up in that is a lot of copyright and fair use contracts--publishing contracts, Creative Commons licenses--all these words that people may have heard bandied about but maybe not interacted with or used or engaged with really deeply. So I help people understand those things and make decisions about their own work and use other people’s work. You know, I foster good practices in using other people’s copyright protected work.

Elliott: So, Maryam, if a lot of your work has to deal with copyright and rights and all these things, how does that all relate to digital scholarship?

Maryam: That’s a great question, Elliott. There is so much of that wrapped up in digital scholarship because I don’t think people realize how low the bar is sometimes to owning a copyright. So if someone in the digital scholarship cohort creates a script, and they read it online, they own the copyright to that script. They probably own the copyright to the sound recording of them reading their script. And if they incorporate any third-party protected copyright content, such as background music that they didn’t create and record, they need to know how to use that third-party protected work and what their options are for doing that. And now if someone’s going beyond audio production--building a digital project that’s graphic, for example--then that’s another suite of rights people need. For visual content, they’re dealing with the public display and public distribution of other people’s work. If they are incorporating text or data, those are additional considerations. So, in this--you know, when you’re dealing with digital--it’s commonplace and easy and encouraged to actually mash up things all the time. And depending on where those different components come from and how they are going to be used, there are all different combinations of rights. Ownership rights and also usage--usage rights--and possibilities could be protected by contract, could be a fair use situation. It can get very complicated very quickly, depending on how much is being used. I enjoy these questions, and usually there is a way forward, and my job is to help people think through them and decide what’s best for them. How they want to work through it all.

Elliott: That’s what I think is so cool about your job--or cool about you--is that, like, you have complicated work, and you have, kind of like, a humorous and interesting and very curious attitude towards the work that you do. Maybe taking one or two steps back, I think you’re also someone who’s, to me, always seems to be in demand from faculty and grad students. Are there things in your position--are there things that you think a lot of people don’t seem to know or could know? Are there things that faculty members or graduate students seem to be unfamiliar with in general when it comes to copyright and rights?

Maryam: That’s another excellent question, and I’m trying to think. I get a lot of questions about publishing requirements for depositing dissertations. Someone’s already deposited a dissertation, and then they want to write an article that’s based on their research that’s already published through our depository--or vice versa. They’ve published an article, and now that article is in their three-article dissertation that they have to deposit, but, uh oh, they already published this article. Can they now make their dissertation publicly available? So I get those two questions a lot. So I would like to see a greater awareness of the Creative Commons and adoption of that. That in itself would make everybody’s time finding content to include so much easier. There’s music. There’s photography. I believe there are icons that you can use as well. There’s a lot of great stuff that creators, for their own motives, are willing to share with everybody at no cost, and that just makes everybody’s lives so much easier. I use Creative Commons images all the time in my Power Points. I rely on it a lot in my own work. I want people to just have a greater understanding of what the rights are. Copyright. It’s a singular word--copyright--but that does not really describe what copyright is. A copyright is six things. It’s a right to copy, which you are doing any time you are making a digital work. It’s the right to create a derivative work, which you may be doing, depending on what kind of digital content you are using. It is the right to publicly distribute a work, which you are doing when you publish something digitally. It is the right to display a work, which you may be doing. It is the right to perform a work publicly--if this is a work which can be performed publicly, as a choreography. Things like that. Number Six is the right to distribute a sound recording over the internet, essentially. And that’s what people in your podcasting workshop are going to do.

Elliott: So why is this all happening in the Libraries? Why is this something that we have a role in here? Why is your position in existence, do you think?

Maryam: That is a good question as well, and libraries have been in the middle between providing a lot of copyright protected content for their patrons to use. Librarians are a very service oriented profession. We want to spread knowledge and help connect people to resources they need to do their work. We advocate for the users. At the same time, we do respect the rights of copyright holders, and we are bound by a lot of contracts, especially in the digital world. A lot of what we have is available digitally. We don’t get print copies of everything anymore, so we’re in the middle between the content providers and the content users, for want of a better word. And we want to help our users make good use of their content, and now, due to various reasons--market forces--libraries have become allies, and in some cases service providers, to people on campus who are creating their own content. I think we just fill this growing need that people have in this world of digital scholarship that maybe other departments are busy studying in their discipline, but they are not providing these services campus wide, so libraries have stepped in to do this kind of work.

Elliott: In this digital scholarship summer institute people will be doing just that. They’re going to be making their own things and things like digital scholarship, digital publishing, scholarly communication, copyright, rights--these are all going to be at play in this immersion program. If people just want to get started, what are some places where people can get started. You mentioned Creative Commons. That’s a great place for people to get started--to be aware of those licenses and to use those materials. Is there anything else that you think people could do just to get started in this kind of work?

Maryam: Creative Commons--great place. If you have questions about law, go to copyright.gov--the US Copyright Office’s website. There is a lot of information there if you really want to learn about copyright. They have a bunch of circulars. Just their circular on copyright basics distills the law so well. There are guides here under the University of Washington Libraries. If you just type in the search for them, the copyright guide.

Elliott:  And we can link anything that’s mentioned in this podcast. We can link to things.

Maryam: So if you look at the transcript of this recording, you’ll see links to some guides that I’ve created here at the University of Washington about copyright basics and Creative Commons and the Creative Commons licenses. Ask you facilitators at the digital scholarship camp. Ask me.

Elliott: So instead of looking at corporate kinds of websites or things like that--would you be looking at government websites or organizational ones? I guess another question I have is that you’ve been really generous with mentioning places that graduate students and faculty members can go to find things. I think I’m also curious about where do you, Maryam Fakouri, go to get good information, reliable information?

Maryam: Oh, yeah. I would recommend that anyone out there who is really interested in copyright to use the same sources that I use. There’s a lot of very good sites out there, and that’s maybe a better way to handle the situation. I use copyright.gov a lot. If you look in the US Copyright website there is a lot of good and very clearly written circulars and fact sheets in there. I use their site to find the law all the time. Stanford has a good center on Fair Use. University of Michigan--my colleagues there have done a great guide on copyright for use. Berkeley. There’s a lawyer and a librarian there named Rachel Samberg, who’s doing fantastic work. She’s put a lot online there. I have a couple of secret weapons, and one of them is a listerv I get from a bar association that I belong to. What that does is it gives me little write-ups about cases. It’s very litigation focused. New cases that are happening around the country and what the ramifications of them might be. Also, because I’m a librarian, I get--I’m also on a listserv--and I get updates from the advocacy offices of the American Library Association’s Washington office. They are actively monitoring federal legislation on information policy beyond copyright. Net neutrality, for example, is something that they’ve been very vocal about. That’s a good place to go to see what’s happening about any kind of legislation that might be up for congressional consideration.

Perry: So, Maryam, as we kind of wrap up this interview today, what do you want someone who’s new to copyright or new to creative commons--what do you want them to walk away from this interview knowing?

Maryam: Without oversimplifying things, I think that anyone in your course can understand the basics of copyright. I want people to know that it is very easy to use creative commons content. You can save yourself a lot of deliberation and time by just starting there. And hopefully you’ll find something you can use. Use it right away. The way you want it. And go about doing the fun things--the fun parts of creating and remixing content. I want them also to know that there are places they can go if they really have some kind of question. They can bring it to us. We’re here to help them. I’ve always found copyright law very interesting and again, without oversimiplying it, I’m always learning new things and over time I’ve gotten comfortable with how, quote unquote, gray it is. A lot of things are a matter of--your internal temperature for risk tolerance if you want to use works that you don’t own the copyright to, for example. Now that should be informed by some general principles. If you know how some cases have turned out, they can guide you. You can learn from other people’s experiences of being taken to court for things that they’ve done, right, so there’s precedent that you can learn from. Over time, trends in law emerge, and one of the benefits of us being such a litigious society in the United States is that we have a big body of Fair Use law that we can look back on and see trends in and learn from so in this country we have a well developed--and still developing--corpus of Fair Use law that is helpful to us. Now, if you’re not intimately familiar with all of those cases, there are still some general principles that could guide you, and over time, as I’ve been watching these thigns and reading about them, I’ve just grown more comfortable in that. But I understand that that’s frustrating sometimes for novice users. They just want guidelines. What is too much to use? Is this use fair? Well, if I change it in just this little way--if I take this part out--does it make it fair use? I can’t answer those, and I can’t give anyone legal advice, but I’m happy to help guide the conversation and try to clarify any issues that people might not feel comfortable with or feel that they understand. And just offer alternatives that are less risky. Sometimes that’s what people really need to go to the next step on their project.

Perry: And as staff members here at the Libraries we really appreciate having you here because not all of us feel comfortable navigating those gray areas.

Maryam: Yeah. I understand. And sometimes, honestly, if you ask ten different lawyers, you’ll get ten different answers. So even the people who do this have different sort of internal compasses about risk and what they would advise. Sometimes I feel kind of like I’m surfing. Like there are all of these forces underwater, and I’m kind of surfing along the top of them, trying to stay balanced and get where I want to go.

Perry: So, as we wrap up today, is there anything else that we haven’t mentioned that you might want listeners to know?

Maryam: I hope everybody else has as much fun making their podcasts and doing their mashups as I have on my very first ever experience in an interview like this. I feel like, I don’t know, like a celebrity or a famous actress or something like that!

Perry: You are a celebrity to us.

Maryam: Thank you.

[“Peacoat’” by Blue Dot Sessions]

Perry: That’s all the time we have for today. Check out the show notes for a link to the transcript for today’s recording. And subscribe to the DSSI Podcast on iTunes and Google Play and wherever you get your podcasts.

Music for this episode is provided by Blue Dot Sessions. Their song, Peacoat, served as our intro and outro music. Check them out at www.sessions.blue for recordings that are Creative Commons licensed for noncommercial work.

Thanks to Maryam Chin Roemer for chatting with us. And a big thanks to you for listening to the DSSI Podcast. Catch you on the next episode.