As far as I understand, if you were to gain access to any of these materials legally, without signing a contract to not distribute them, you would be able to redistribute at no cost. So, that means, that if you want to license an image for use on a website, T3Media’s terms are likely to include forcing you to take responsibility for your viewer’s actions or tying your viewers up in contractual ropes.
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Makes sense. We all know how effective that will be. Does Public Domain override a contract? What’s to keep someone from breaking that initial contract and making them available in violation of a contract? Others who redistribute from that point are not contractually bound to T3Media. They are redistributing something that has no copyright, so it sounds to me like T3Media cannot claim ownership and have it taken down.
The materials will remain in the public domain. It’s just another one of those cases where contract overrides copyright.
For me there are also other concerns.
Google Video (remember them?) announced a big partnership with NARA to digitize its media holdings and make them available online. They did 101 films. Amazon announced a DVD-on-demand program with NARA that gave them some sales exclusivity and the exclusive right to hold onto their digitized materials for a period. This fizzled.I can’t imagine T3Media can make enough back to cover its costs. I think the DoD is going to throw a lot of money at T3 to cover its digitizing, metadata and storage costs, T3 will pay something and get the right to license the materials at prices of their choice, while public access becomes harder.
I’d like to see whether T3 is required to complete the job, whether there is a guarantee that the digital materials will be publicly available for free at some point and when, and what share of expenses each entity is covering.
mindysan, there is already a great deal of historical military material available pretty much for free at National Archives. Duplication can be costly, but there are no rights costs, and it is trickling online. I don’t think this is an end run around declassification. This is only for declassified material. Classified material is no doubt being handled similarly by the same or another contractor. I wonder who?
Obviously, if the material was classified, it would never go into public domain in the first place. Do you mean that T3s pay wall is supposed to be stronger than a Top Secret class?
One thing to consider is that much of these assets are recorded on old, fragile videotape and it takes significant expertise, equipment and expense to go through an archival digitization process that preserves the content… given the number of items in the collection, regardless of who does it… it will take skill, time and money. Should our audio visual heritage just get trashed because nobody want’s to pony up to properly preserve it? If not some deal between a private industry that sees an opportunity to get paid to do the work, then who? Remember these tapes will just age and eventually become useless… things like sticky shed, lack of working tape players and lack of analog video engineering expertise will make most magnetic media into crap very soon unless people, companies and organizations put up the resources to preserve them.
I say we build one or two less F-22s and have the money right there to pay for it. The military’s budget is about 30% of the GDP, maybe even more at this point. The DOD can pay for this, they just don’t want to. Maybe they could shut down one or two of their thirty or so golf courses to help pay for it too.
And I still think laser plane was better for national defense than more jet fighters. Likely cheaper too.
I’d agree, but this should have gone out to bid.
In exchange for covering a share of digitizing and hosting costs (the government will pick up an unspecified share of costs as well), T3 Media will provide access to the government and receive a 10-year exclusive license to charge for public access to these public domain materials.
I would not be surprised if the government ends up paying more to this company than it would just paying for the digitizing itself.
The contract calls for 4.99 Million to be paid by DoD to T3M.
As several others have pointed out… the digitization, metadata creation and storage of files of all these materials is not without cost to the contractor.
Nor is it without risk to the contractor that it won’t get its investment back.
Acquiring and maintaining the motion picture scanning, video tape decks, audio decks, still image scanning and devices to to other paper media is also not without cost. Significant cost.
As there are fewer and fewer working, rebuildable or usable parts-donor video decks and parts for common formats—particularly 3/4" Umatic and VHS—it will be a challenge for any contractor do do the work and do it well.
Figure that this contract began on or about Aug. 28. 2013, and will run for ten years. How many of these machines will be functional in 2023??
How many experienced, analog VTR maintenance engineers will be around by the time this contract ends?
How many experienced tape operators who know how to anticipate problems with tapes, recognize the problem(s) as they occur and address them without doing further damage to the tapes?
Education and training of replacements is essential, because for some huge collections in the US, this kind of activity can require several generations of people to do so.
Can Sony—for example—be persuaded to make another batch of 3/4" BVU-950s… or VO-9850s and significant stocks of spare upper drums, (head assemblies), other parts that are intended to take the wear as tapes are played? Make enough to handle the volume of tapes that are currently un-digitized?
If there’s a large volume of Quad tapes to be migrated… is this the tipping point where it’s less costly and faster to create a modern Quad machine using today’s off the shelf components—instead of trying to find and restore aging machines for which parts are rapidly becoming made of Unobtanium?
It takes MONTHS to restore a Quad… much like restoring a vintage car to long-term useful condition. And it is NOT cheap. Depending on what’s needed, it could run the cost of a top of the line new Lincoln Navigator or more.
Yes, we don’t know the exact terms of the contract—yet. And we may not be happy with all of the terms and conditions.
On the other hand… if one is going to fight a war against decay and obsolescence—and that’s what this is—one can expect that some accommodations will be needed in order to get the process going. And to sustain it long enough to get the job done.
Maybe a few less fighter jets might free up some funds to address the funding problem.
But that’s not happened yet… and part of the reason is that there’s not enough horsepower lobbying for the idea (or very many archival projects) in Washington.
The archival and arts communities haven’t focused resources on that part of the picture. Or found the right combination of empathetic, committed lawmakers to carry that ball successfully through the halls of the Capitol.
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Do you feel any responsibility for having accurate numbers, or for fact-checking what you write? A quick search shows that the military’s budgets is less than 5% of GDP, and has only ever been anywhere near 30% [during the peak years of WWII][3] .
[3]: Analysis of Recent US Defense Spending[quote=“Lexicat, post:19, topic:17255, full:true”]
The alternative is for project like http://public.resource.org, perhaps under the righteous efforts of someone like Carl Malamud to put the gate keepers out of the business of charge rent over the artificial scarcity imposed by a single gate.
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That’s not really an alternative, though. I believe that Malamud and similar organizations mainly operate by re-publishing already available documents, and making them available for free. Sometimes this involves paying for access to legal documents through PACER and sometimes this involves stripping out copyrighted portions of state code (when Lexis or whomever makes state code available on a government’s website, they have copyright in the indexing, referencing, and notation features they’ve added to the code). I don’t believe that going in to agencies and doing the actual archiving and scanning is a core part of what they do, and with DoD materials they would likely need security clearances in order to do this.
In light of Feist v. Rural Telephone and Corel v. Bridgeman, I believe that it is pretty clear that merely scanning digital scanning does NOT involve a high enough level of creativity for the digitized images to constitute a derivative work eligible for copyright protection independent of the original “works of the US government,” which are ineligible for copyright under US copyright law. Now as net23 pointed out, there may well be a fair amount of effort involved in digitizing these works, but the supreme court has explicitly rejected the “sweat of the brow” doctrine that would grant these scans copyright.
I’m sure that the Internet Archive would love to be participating in such a digitization project.
Where is the Internet Archive going to get the money to take on this size of a project?
Its already trying to overcome the results of the fire that happened in the small annex at its San Francisco headquarters.
They don’t have the equipment or staff to do this size a project right now (and I daresay that neither does T3M just yet) and there doesn’t seem to be public support to take on a project of this type. Or it would have happened already.
The statement of objectives actually addresses part of the original reporter’s concerns (“there is no guarantee that DoD will offer them to the public online when the 10-year window expires”). The last sentence of section II is “At the end of the contract period of exclusivity, the Government will acquire all digital copies in the contractor’s possession not already copied to the Government storage, and will carry on its business of distributing imagery to the Military Services, Department, Federal Government, and general public.”
So it seems that unless the government decides that open distribution to the public is not part of its business any more (which it has exactly the same ability to do with or without this contract), after 10 years, the material will be available under the same terms that have always been in place.
Based on what evidence?
The contract probably contains the magic words “cost plus”.
Huh, I guess I interpreted “public domain” as something that does not require a security clearance. Can you source your claim?
There are lots of things that are public domain, or are not subject to copyright, but which are still classified. This is especially since ideas can’t be copyrighted, but the point of classification is to protect ideas as opposed to how they are expressed. So photos and schematics of secret weapons designed by the US may not be copyright by operation of law, but they are still classified.
Anyway, to answer your question, even the Statement of Objectives linked to in the BB snippet makes reference to “the handling requirements for unclassified but unreleased imagery,” and discusses compliance with [DoD Instruction 8582.01][2] about the Security of Unclassified DoD Information on Non-DoD Information Systems. So while it looks like the DoD will do the initial isolation of classified materials, there are still security concerns for the contractors that would probably be difficult for smaller organizations to meet their ongoing obligations in this regard.
I think this is fairly typical of government contracts, in that there are a lot of additional qualifications that must be met that simply are not required in private industry.
[2]: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/858201p.pdf[quote=“Burzmali, post:35, topic:17255, full:true”]
The contract probably contains the magic words “cost plus”.
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The Statement of Objectives clearly say “no-cost to the government.”
I’m not smart enough to understand your comment.
Can you please explain why our photos going to a private company for 10 years is a good thing for the citizens and the archive?
I mean … I understand how it is good for T3Media … but how does this do me any good?
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Who ever heard of the military going off-budget due to some of-the-moment allocation? Nobody? I failed to convince you it was so? Good citing though.
I for one am glad it’s not that tasteless “Mens’ magazine” T2. Feminist film has been almost starved for tropes in the wild and tired of her resulting build being called ‘Knocky.’
Huh. I am not really following your argument. You wrote “I don’t believe that going in to agencies and doing the actual archiving and scanning is a core part of what they do, and with DoD materials they would likely need security clearances in order to do this.”
I see where you followed up with a lot of text, but nowhere do I see you citing a source that says a security clearance is required to handle unclassified materials in the public domain.
