Larry, (01)
I'm a volunteer at the Computer History Museum (CHM), on the Software
Collection Committee. The committee was formed to develop techniques
for collecting software, as the museum currently does with hardware
and other artifacts. I'm leading one of the testbed projects, to
preserve Doug Englebart's NLS/Augment system. Henry Lowood, the
Curator for History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford
is an advisory member of the project. Doug Engelbart is also directly
involved in this project. (02)
I'm working on the legal aspects, and was very interested in what you
had to say about orphan works in your blog. NLS/Augment was a
seminal system, and we'd like to release not only NLS/Augment
documents but also the code itself to the community for study on a
non-commercial basis. Up to now, we've been are holding off until we
can track ownership and get a release from the current copyright
holder. This has proved more difficult than we ever imagined. (03)
NLS/Augment was originally developed at SRI in the late 1960s through
the late 1970s. It was subsequently sold to Tymnet/Tymshare, and
eventually to McDonnell Douglas. We believe from copyright records
that McDonnell Douglas sold it to British Telcom before they were
acquired by Boeing, and that BT subsequently sold it to MCI (now Verizon). (04)
We've spent over a year on this so far. Our plan was to contact each
company along the way, establish whether they have ownership and
records of ownership transfer, and eventually locate the current
owner. It's been long enough ago, and with so many acquisitions,
that we've found no one has a record of ownership. In light of that,
our approach has been to get some kind of quitclaim or statement of
non-ownership and release. (05)
So far, we have a release from BT to the effect that they don't have
a record of their ownership but have no problem for their part in
releasing all of the copyrighted material for non-commercial use. We
were working with Lew Platt, Chairman of the Board at Boeing and a
CHM friend, who seemed willing to provide a similar release. With
his recent, untimely death, the legal group at Boeing has turned cold
to the idea of a release, and we may be at a dead end there. We're in
the early stages of working with a semior IP attorney at MCI/Verizon,
and have managed to enlist the help of Vint Cerf', another CHM friend
and former MCI vice president, to help open doors there. If we run
into what we did at Boeing, we'd be pretty much at the end of the trail. (06)
John Toole, the CEO of CHM rightly points out that this is not a
scalable approach for other test bed projects in our committee, let
alone ones that the museum staff might undertake in the future. Even
with this project, we'll have to assess the risks of declaring the
work to be orphaned and release it, even with our paper trail and all
our diligence over the last year. The problem is that orphaned works
aren't currently recognized under copyright law. We think this
project could be a poster child for those advocating such legislation. (07)
I'd be interested in meeting with you some time in the next few weeks
to get your input on this project's situation and more generally on
the impact of orphan works on academic and preservation efforts like
ours. Please let me know if this is something you'd be interested in
discussing further, and whether you'd be willing to provide some
input and guidance to us in this area. (08)
Best regards, (09)
Philip Gust
Nouveau Systems, Inc.
3120 De La Cruz Blvd., Suite 120
Santa Clara, CA 95054 (010)
phone: +1 650 961-7992
fax: +1 520 843-7217 (011)
mailto: gust@NouveauSystems.com (012)
Nouveau Systems collaboration-enabled infrastructure and applications
provide integrated information management, process automation and
knowledge capture. To learn how Nouveau Systems products can help
your knowledge-based organization drive innovation, visit:
http://www.NouveauSystems.com (013)
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