 We'll make a start. I'm sorry that there are more people here because this is really a matter of life and death and careers in academia that we're going to be talking about. And I don't think we have answers, but we certainly have a lot of questions. I'm Jean Anderson. I'm from Victoria University in Wellington where I set up the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation in 2007. And the other panellists are in order. Russell Scott Valentino who I probably don't need to introduce. He's current President of ALTA and Geoffrey Anchor. I'm sure some of you have already heard talking about some of the legalities and complexities of copyright. I don't think he's got the answers today either, but he's got some plans. So what I wanted to talk to you about today is what the implications are of this increasing pressure to have all PhD theses and some master's theses deposited in electronic forms so that they are thereby released into the world at large in due course. I think there are actually three main areas of concern and if you have a message to take back to your respective institutions I think you should also bear in mind that we're not just talking about literary translation. There are some particular issues around that. We're not just talking about creative writing programs or other creative areas within the arts although there are issues there. There are also some very major implications for all PhD theses and as we'll see from the handout in a little while the universities that are on to these kinds of things and I'm thinking here of places like Oxford and Cambridge and some of the world leading universities are on to this already and are advising their students to put off the electronic deposit as long as possible for reasons that I will come to hopefully shortly. My main concern here is a personal one because it seems like every two years we have the same conversation with the administration. We make the case for creative writing and literary translation practice-based thesis work to be excluded from this compulsory electronic deposit. We have support from the university's copyright lawyer and then two years later we have the same conversation because we're told it is a legal requirement. If research is publicly funded it must be publicly available. Now interestingly just last week I finally got around to asking our Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Research if he could point me in the direction of the relevant law to which he responded I don't know where you heard this I have certainly never said it and I can't find the email in which he certainly did. So we're looking at a requirement which certainly in New Zealand is not a legal requirement. There is no law that covers this. It's possible that the Freedom of Information Act of I think 1992 could be invoked to get some of this data released to an individual member of the public requesting it and I know from talking to Lynn Penrod here that the Canadian situation is different. So we have a global issue which has different jurisdictions different sets of laws applying in different contexts. So as I said I don't think we have answers for you today but at least like to tease out some of the problems. We have been told in the case of literary translation practice based theses that it is the students responsibility to ensure that copyright is met copyright requirements. I have tried to point out that where translation is into English you're essentially expecting a publisher to give you worldwide English language translation rights which no student I know of could possibly afford even if the university had a fund for students to apply to the university couldn't afford to cover these things. So there are some financial implications. There are certainly legal implications. One of the ones that we've discussed at some length internally is who is actually responsible if there is a copyright infringement in this way because the student doesn't actually publish the thesis the university does. So my interpretation of that I am not a lawyer and I have no legal training would be that the university is liable if there is an infringement. The student didn't publish the work. The student did a thesis. The university then decided to make that available worldwide and if as I said the student couldn't afford the worldwide English language rights then surely that's the university's liability. I'm sure Jeffrey will shoot me down and flames shortly but it's an argument that has had a limited success so far. How are various universities managing this? I have a handout it's just behind you on the desk next to you in which I have just gathered together some rather random information about what happens in various universities as I said there's not a great deal of clarity about different types of thesis and most of the advice that's being given to students applies globally to all PhD thesis and as you will see if you work your way down the list most of the big names are already telling students to take the longest possible embargo term at least two to five years and most of those big name universities are quite happy to grant those exemptions and they have their own reasons for that. Obviously if we move on there there's a question here about what publication actually is is putting a thesis one copy in the library publication I have been told that this is a form of publication in which case the modern languages association is going to have to stop advising us to refer to unpublished theses because clearly there's no such thing. Publication in that format is obviously very different from sending it out on the internet to whoever can Google. Universities I assume these these ones who are a little bit more on the ball are presumably aware that it's not in their best interests for their best and brightest students to not be able to publish their work in book form so that that's I'm referring there to PhD thesis more globally if as some documents that I've seen and getting ready for this panel if for universities this open access thing is a matter of storefront and making the world at large aware of how wonderful that university is in what areas then they are also shooting themselves in the foot in terms of the book publication and I don't know how your research evaluation exercises work but in my country if I said oh yes I put that on the internet as opposed to yes it's a book I imagine that would be a difference of zero points in the first case and ten or eight or something a bit more respectable in the second so I don't see how they can have their cake and eat it too but that is the nature of power presumably so what are the concerns as I've said this is just to sum up there at least three threads to this already immensely complicated discussion one is that if we're going to put all of the PhDs in electronic form out on the internet then it is a serious threat to book publication some of these universities are advising students to check with potential publishers before they decide whether or not to make the electronic deposit this is largely British universities I'm talking about in the case of copyright issues around practice-based translation projects obviously you won't probably find a publisher ready to fund you're already we all know translations are far too expensive to produce you won't find them willing to put that investment into a book publication if it's already available to anyone who can google the issue over the rights I can foresee this being a massive problem assuming you can negotiate with the publisher I have a student who has had clearance from a French publisher to do a translation within the framework of a thesis but I would be prepared to bet that if that publisher knew that that meant stick it on the internet afterwards there would be no authorization or permission publishers rely on selling translation rights to make a business and they're not about to just cheerfully sign them away there is one interesting case and if you'd like to look at the top of the handout the city university of London they have they run an MA in translating popular culture which covers things like comics graphic novels big pardon popular fiction of various kinds and they have had a number of cases where MA students and they don't have practice-based PhDs so they can only do this at MA level um they have in fact contacted publishers for permission and ended up with contracts and book publication I think that in the case of city university of London they have a lot of students from Europe who are translating from English into less global languages and I suspect one of the reasons for this success is a that they're close to Europe there's a sort of network already in existence there and the other is that they are translating into Italian or German or Polish excuse me that's quite a different situation from someone who wants to translate into English I suspect although I'm interested to hear um from Reiner Schulte at UTD that they haven't had any problems obtaining rights for translations obviously that's something that sort of explored further with them but I haven't had time and the third stream and perhaps Russell you might be talking a little bit more about this too is what happens with creative writing project where the original creative work is online and readily available as I said which publisher do we know of who will pick up something that's already out there and Lynn Penrod here from Canada was earlier talking about the fact that this applies to set design all kinds of humanities areas where all the specs the drawings everything is going to be out there and available for anyone who wants to pick them up and use them with or without authorization potentially so those I think are the three main areas for concern as I said we're getting very different policies from different universities around the world even within the same country there's different interpretations being made of what exactly this applies I think and we were talking earlier about potentially killing someone's career if your thesis cannot become the really important first book on whatever what does that do to the stepping stone for a career in academia so there are lots of consequences Russell had suggested that he might talk about some actual case histories flesh out some of the potential difficulties and then we'll hand on to Jeffrey as I said to solve all the problems possibly not and hopefully we'll have lots of lots of time for questions and practice if you've got illustrations from your own experience that would be useful for us to hear as well thank you great so I'm going to sit here I don't have anything to project so I will speak up make sure you can hear me first I want to sketch a tiny bit more the the pressure on the institution to make theses available theses and dissertations and theses might include undergraduate theses honors theses it's not in my experience it isn't if you're the graduate dean or the undergraduate dean of undergraduate affairs and you're you're charged with doing this it's not so much a question of legality they're not told you are a public institution therefore you must put all these things online at least not in American institutions US institutions haven't faced that issue as a rationale it's more a question of outcomes measuring outcomes having data being able to say we have x time to degree here is our placement rate and then here are the products and graduate deans and undergraduate administration officials are under some pressure to be able to show their the outcomes that that their institution has they're they're they're expected to do that and I think that has increased in recent years they're expected to show results some kind of results and then then they want to compare programs with programs at one institution and another institution sometimes within the same institution in order to do that they need data and if you're filing your thesis in the library that's not data and they want it online they want it tangible easy to get to so that they can start creating what they call metrics which is their way of comparing apples and oranges because no two programs are the same no two institutions are the same so they want to create a metric that enables them to compare these these things that are not the same and the only way you can do that is by creating data google comes along and says hey we can help you with this we've got infrastructure we want content and at this point the equation starts to sound a little bit like a lot of academic publishing in general the academics are doing the research as part of their job then it gets published as part of their job which they're paid for and then the publisher gets to do with it what they want right and the publisher is relying on this free basically free labor model to have this content and that's what google is doing as well they look at this generation of content by faculty and now by students and say we can solve your problem for you by by having a data infrastructure and we'll plug in all the data just give just give us a pdf and we're ready to go and you can then have the data that you need to to do what you need to do and respond to the pressures that you have in your institution and across institutions and then the the problem then becomes the fact that google has just made this data there the actual content available now whether that rises to the level of a copyright infringement is now being debated all the time and I think the latest decision is in favor of google that is not a copyright infringement that it's considered a transformation that the snippet function it doesn't doesn't constitute an infringement it's just making data available or making content available people can't download it and they can't print it and they can compare things and it's a it's sufficient transformation that um it's not considered illegal google so far has won that battle and they they seem to be winning that battle what's really interesting i find that this is like a kind of a double speak what's really interesting about it is in the same set of decisions that i've read and jeffrey you can talk about this more uh translation is constantly referred to as derivative so you can't claim fair use for a translate your translation needs to have permission but if then you've created a translation in context of a university structure where you didn't get permission and google takes it and puts it online google has not violated any copyright laws according to the latest decisions because they transformed it in a manner that is sufficient to correspond to the fair use doctrine but you didn't so you are liable and maybe the university is liable i don't know that's that's the part where it gets kind of fishy i'm not exactly sure so the at that stage we've entered a new a new domain where these other considerations that gene brought up come into play and i would add a third which is the question of dissemination of knowledge there's what to do what university is supposed to be doing and if you embargo the results of years of research for years they're not disseminating any knowledge they're not doing what they should have done or should be doing in many cases they're charged to do that they're charged to do that as well as being public institutions they're charged to to build on the this is a science model obviously to build on the knowledge of previous generations and disseminate that to the world so that we can build on that further and this new equation or this new this new technology that could be developed by something based on research done in your institution doesn't happen because there's an embargo on the on the thesis that's that's a an additional consideration the the careers one is is palpable where you have a thesis that is the translation of two-thirds of a novel let's say or three-fourths of a book of poetry or it's an anthology of poems based on a criteria that you've you've developed as part of your thesis research they're not finished they're part of your thesis it's part of an apparatus you've got a little introduction you've got some notes you wouldn't publish it that way necessarily if it went into book form and yet it's all available all the stuff that you did is available and that has happened um and uh then so the nightmare scenario is uh you unknowingly do what the university tells you to do which is file your thesis electronically and and then the summer after you graduate you email your theses advisor which is me and and it's uh i just found that my thesis is available and i didn't ask permission from the authors or the rights holders and what do i do how do i get it taken down well the answer is it'll never come down i mean you can try but it's always going to be available somewhere at some point um you can trace it so uh at at that point then it becomes backtracking and trying to say let's let's take it down graduate college um and so this is again something that has happened on numerous occasions it happened to me while i was at Iowa with students filing thesis theses and then finding out that that um this was in the initial stages of the digitization revolution and they had signed a contract with google and that's exactly what the scenario was they were hoping to use the data that google was going to provide as part of their desire for content to create metrics and use use them as part of the graduate college's um measurements for success among a variety of programs that included the translation mfa that included included the writers workshop included everybody and so the response from those programs was to not to embargo but to go and look for some of these exemptions exactly like uh melbourne uh monash does uh or no the university of east anglia so they say uh phd theses often practice based exemption from e-deposit is almost routine now it's almost routine at iowa to have the exemption but uh in order for that to happen the graduate dean has to know about it the person who oversees the intake of the theses has to know about it has to be on the website it has to be in the graduate student manual all the graduate advisors need to know about it needs to be a form that you routinely provide to the students it says check i do not want it has to be simple form check i do not want my thesis thesis electronically deposited what happens then it goes in the library the same way theses have always gone in the library and it's available through interlibrary loan anybody can get it you just and libraries are good at coordinating that they've done it for a long long time there's nothing unpublic about that it's available yeah i don't know if it's published or not what i i don't i don't know about that the technical definition of publishing it but it is definitely available to anybody who wants to get it in some cases the library will make a copy of a chapter and send it to you i mean they really do those sorts of services it does not restrict knowledge in any way it's not as readily available but you can get the whole thing sent to you and you can read it and that's a i think that's a perfectly reasonable solution for most many at least maybe not most because as i say this argument about dissemination of knowledge could be made for some of the disciplines and it's easier when it's online it's true and for some disciplines they don't care so much they're not thinking that they're going to publish that p that's phd thesis in physics or organic chemistry as a book they're probably not they're going to publish some articles based on it yeah you had a question permission and what did they say so okay so so i my argument and i and what we and what we put in place while i was there and i think it's still in place i don't think they've changed it in the two years since i left was that um if you insist on students trying to get permission to publish things you're going to kill the program yeah that's not a good way to support your program um the way we've always done it the way we had always done it up until then for 40 50 years whatever it was was the way i just described you don't have to ask anybody for anything anybody can translate anything actually if you want but then after that that's the question if you're going to then use it as part of a thesis it never came up in the past it's part of a thesis that has an apparatus that goes with it which is you probably do this in archetype i think you do you have a an introduction of some kind which contextualizes the work you might talk about translation problems that you faced history of the author of the genre things that sort of thing you might have glossary you might have notes right that's part of a it's an academic project that's a fair use project and it's going to go in the library the way all theses used to go in the library i think you could probably win that argument jeffrey you can tell me if you think i'm right we never had to make the argument in the past and so that's that's the line that we drew and they they bought it they said okay exemption from the e deposit and go ahead and continue doing it the way you've always done it no permissions necessary can i can i just add to that that we have had that model agreed to probably three times now but that each time they come back to this yes but you know it's not an electronic deposit and so things probably are going to just shift backwards and forwards if they haven't at iowa kudos um it's shifting sands in our case i agree anyone can translate anything anyone can put that into the body of a thesis which traditionally a thesis is not a publication if you then insist on it being published and internet is where the real issue arises then that completely changes the situation we have a very simple form but invariably the students who need to say please don't make this electronically available uh they've pressure on them as individual students i've seen them wording in some of the letters and it's really quite alarming yeah they have to take the initiative to say no i don't want yeah they do and there is another um related issue which has just gone out of my head and will come back um which has to do with no it will come back sorry we had a question there i can send you one of ours it's a very simple yeah yeah it was i can tell you exactly what it said i mean it or almost it just said i i as here name of the thesis name of the student um i request exemption from the e deposit sign the form and date that that's what that's the form we created um so there's nothing fancy illegal about it just that that's that's the form that we had and that's what they i think that's what you need to have library agreement and admin agreement that this is a possible option for a student to select um i'd be happy to send you a copy of our form the the thing that escaped me was um that sometimes it's difficult to ascertain who actually holds the rights yeah for translation i've had one instance of a canadian student in fact who had asked the author and there was online and i said but does the author actually have the rights and that disappeared offline so presumably the answer was no right um and that's that's sometimes very difficult to find out and what are they going to do to track down track down the descendants for try finding a state this was a living but yeah yeah and through so i want to make sure i understand so the student asked for an embargo uh of the graduate college at arkansas oh yeah so so what we're talking about is a stage before that it never gets digitized yeah and when i was at the i review even we i remember finding we one of our authors wrote to me saying i just found some of my poems at pro quest for 495 apiece it was we didn't authorize it they just started selling it should follow the the things you've done before we didn't have to really log in as an official exemption the student now chooses electronic to positive for hard copy the issue of translation person how far are they to get the publisher or most generally the student will get permission as jean has said to use um the translation to get the end of the year early you will not putting it in however in the last funding from sure that you will um be open for open access and that really includes all kinds of research um and research production areas including the fine arts so that's put us in a in a little bit of a well a very big dilemma because it means that the old days we were doing things which were perfectly reasonable and rational without embargoing things all made us subject not to um statute but a ruling from a grant agency that says you have an m o view sign with us university fx and if you can't apply by our decree then any funding from us which of course they go oh well we have to be situation at the moment as i see it is that we are all still trying to figure out what the definition of as the gene has already said what is what is and also in terms of the grant agency we're responsible for disseminating if we have their money so if it's open access and then we end up with researchers whether they're students or faculty members who are having their careers damage whether in terms of faculty evaluation or students able to get um get jobs i'm not sure we know exactly what we're going to do so some of the procedures adopted by british universities or american universities we we're trying to use those but now i don't know how they're going to stand up under plagiarism now comes in under all you know how as supervisor or as a student or as someone translates or works in these areas how do we keep on we're trying to track on the internet what may be out there is out there so the really sad cases students students and it's still out there it's really not much partial translation that can take somebody a pretty long way jiffy ready sure uh can we carry on now and move plenty of time for questions later i think jiffy and if you know if you'll forgive me i i think it will be easier for me to use selector in terms of seeing and it's easier to breathe and i'll also bring this along so i can watch time so i'm jeff angstrom nothing i say will be legal advice i'm not admitted to practice in the state of arizona and i will dodge some questions specifically for that reason but i think there are some legal issues that we can at least bring in some information on i'll back up just a little bit and reflect on how we got here the open access movement was born because in the sciences work was being published in journals that could cost five thousand dollars a year for a subscription where people were having to pay very substantial funds in order to be published and much of that work did have some kind of government subsidy so the argument was made the government the people through the government are funding the research they're paying for publication then our universities using public funds are strapped to pay for all of these journals and then the journals are being bought up by large conglomerates that keep running up the prices and so we're paying for our colleagues for access to our colleagues work so the solution is proposed for the sciences to start publishing in open access and the some of the solutions for the sciences have been elegant public library of science plos wonderful online resource it's worked well for many of the sciences but the juggernaut kept moving and these solutions were not well adapted for the humanities and science was important to have speedy publication and for them getting getting their article out there getting their research out there quickly was very valuable very valuable look over to sciences and social sciences and the humanities the american historical association has called for an eight-year embargo on publication of dissertations you think about it for many people that dissertation can have data and work that will be mined for several book projects and you know the the problem of undermining a career by forcing outdated that somebody spent a long time in archives to come up with but at the dissertation level hasn't had time to really develop the interpretation and make full use of so i think you know open access has had many wonderful aspects but for for translators it's created an absolute nightmare and a real legal mess i'm going to go in a somewhat unsystematic fashion and just address some of the questions that have come up there is good reason to be confused about what we mean by publication there are different legal meanings for publication in different contexts so why are a lot of science dissertations embargoed for two years in most of the world if you publish if you make public your invention or new system you lose the capacity the possibility of patenting at that instant in the united states if you publish your invention you have one year to file for a patent if you don't file within that year it's lost what does publication mean when it comes to invention of a device it has been found that having a dissertation sitting on the shelf in a university was publication for purposes of patent showing a neighbor whom you had invited over for dinner your invention and how it worked was deemed to be publication so for some students and faculty in the university publication may mean holding up something saying look what i invented you see how it works that could be publication under copyright law when we're dealing with whether we're publishing a translation of a work the legal definition in the u.s. canadian law is a bit different other systems are a bit different but in the u.s making a copy available to the public so if you have it posted online and it can be bought from pro quest if it's up there in a pdf and it can be downloaded that is publication if a if you've made a chat book and you distribute it to friends as a new year's gift that's generally considered sort of private circulation it's not being made available to the public and there is of course some gray area in between the two so there are cases that have gone to court to try to tease out whether something has been published within within the within copyright law but that's that's the basic standard for copyright if a copy is made available to the public the i think sometimes when when this sort of major change comes along we respond with with two tax and i think what may be needed here is a short-term sort of band-aid first aid uh perhaps a defensive approach especially in institutions where the administration is not being helpful or where you're facing national law or or regulation forcing publication students may be told for this project for you as a student you need to work either with something in public domain or something for which you can get permission when you're facing legal uncertainties you know we'd like to get things cleaned up but when there's a possibility of liability the choice of the text to translate might need to be more conservative and the longer term i believe what is needed is to get these stories pulled together and you go to an administrator or perhaps in Canada to a legislator and say these policies are being very damaging one of the first things they'll want they will ask you know can you show me that people are actually being harmed is there really a problem and we need to have a ready answer names addresses telephone numbers and descriptions of what happened with those people so real problems evidence of real problems that need to be solved two we need information pulled together so we can say here are the organizations that are protesting the sort of policy that is there and i'm hoping that we may be able to get such statements you know perhaps through alta perhaps through pen perhaps through authors guild perhaps through the british society of authors the stakeholders in this situation certainly bringing in the the the statement from the american historical association and others if you go to administrators and they have to answer to others who are wanting this we have to make it easy for them to do the right thing and by assembling the evidence that they would need to persuade others we can be more effective advocates you know pardoning for in the united states there's been a movement toward where canada has gone at this point if your project has gotten funding this isn't happening to us but in other departments if funding has been received from the national institutes of health i think the current period is a six-month embargo and then the research findings have to go online there have been calls to expand that to a much wider area that may pass it might not but it's certainly in the air in the united states so i think we've got a lot of work ahead of us i think it i think our best hope is to get adverse advocacy from groups who are in a position to collect the information and make it available to those who need it so i'm hoping that alta may be able to be of some service there so can you say something about the fair use argument and the transformation of a text so if we put it inside a thesis and analyze things that are in it as opposed to just translating the book and putting that book as part as the thesis sure i mean so uh i'll back up just a just a smidge in the 1660s you know the scientific revolution comes along the royal society is established and just this this watershed and intellectual history comes along and it's understood that scholars need to be able to demonstrate what they do and it's the notion that a scholar has a duty to publish to make public the findings and so that's as as you brought up there's that sense that that's part of our responsibility especially within academic institutions there's a responsibility to put out the findings of what we've learned copyright law says if you were the creator of the work or if the creator has passed rights to you you get to restrict the flow of that information there's an exception there in american law and us law for fair use saying requiring you to look at five different points to sort of weigh out to to tease out whether this is a fair use or not and one of those is what purpose you're making of of the text and if you're using a portion of something in instruction in scholarship that counts toward fair use you have to look at all of the elements to make a determinism determination of fair use so part of it yes it's being used in learning in scholarship one thing that favors a finding of fair use so you don't have to get permission you can't end up in trouble for for making use is if your use is transformative so if you have changed the work in some way so that what you're using really isn't going to replace that original work so if google has scanned whole books and people can search and they just see snippets that's not going to replace the purchase or the sale of the whole book so that's why the google scanning case there was a finding that that was fair use and that's considered transformative there's the court found that transformative i see yeah it was some people have been surprised yeah but that was considered transformative with translation i think one why is it called derivative in the copyright statutes the probably the most important section if you're going to read anything in american copyright law read section 101 of the copyright code that's the definitions the most you know that's sort of the mother low and the definition for derivative work you know translation is the classic derivative work it takes that original work and makes a direct use of it so is a translation fair use the translation can replace the purchase of the original work so the translation itself is sort of a classic not fair use if you've got the whole thing there um and i'm sorry and you can watch a movie so a movie can replace the film adaptation is also derivative right i think it is in the it's i think you know i i think that's they always say if if you ask a lawyer especially good lawyer any question what's for lunch it depends so if it's a really bad film adaptation it is it's farther transformative it's farther from being a direct use but if if you can recognize the work it's it's getting really iffy uh no it's like generally a film adaptation while it you know it's basically a derivative work but it is farther out there than translation some others just ask one of the areas in which we've had debate in my institution had to do with whether a translation was like a performance of something so you've got the music and the translation is the performance of the music is is that that would be well i think the author of a work no no the the author of a work also you know part of the copyright is the right to public performance so a public reading of a text would be addressed under the public performance right of the copyright putting a copy online is the right to make a copy or to publish to make copies available and so public performance is just another facet of copyright it's i always i always say copyright is the most complex it's the nerdiest area of law next to tax and perhaps and i would say just about as metaphysical as tax so i i think with other things i've made the points i really wanted to make if there are questions we can pursue i wonder if i could i like the idea you you suggested about public about responding to the challenges by looking at your program and modifying the program somewhat rather than trying to fight fight and so you look at a translation program you say well let's let's restrict the program to public domain works that could be really interesting it doesn't change the nature of a lot of programs i mean they really people focus on contemporary works because often what gets them interested in it sure but um you can still do plenty with contemporary works without making them your theses yeah that you can be they can be workshopped they can be developed in other forms you can do all sorts of things before you get to the thesis stage and the thesis stage is a is a public domain work and there are plenty of good public domain works that are not translated or have been translated badly and a lot more actually discussion you could have about public domain works and in ways the re-translation is fascinating that that's also a really interesting domain so that that that's not a bad tack to take is to look at your own program and say how could we transform our program in order to not fall into this this problem yeah i think another possibility would be for a director of of a translation program in university to call up the director of a publishing house that has a substantial list of of of of works or that's you know i guess you know get a hold of people who control rights for a large corpus of works that would be of interest to the students and say is there any way that i could sort of count on being able to have a student get in touch with you ask for permission to do something as a project to school and get some sort of smooth passage for reaching a decision you mean the foreign publisher yeah the foreign publisher yeah or if there's an agent for that that publisher in in the u.s. yeah and you know perhaps work things out so there's a safe list yeah for shorter projects things like the french publishers agency would love to have translations of chapters from works the rights for which are available so if there's a possibility one of finding safe works and two just building into the program some more training on how to get rights and permissions and you might even be able to get a local lawyer to come and sure that can be part of the program professionalization part of the program should be I would like these discussions have gone on among programs supervisors and administrators we're also running around trying to figure out what all of this means for the social science series of work jobs so on doing all these wonderful things it might not be a bad idea just have a very clear course series of workshops where we get people to come and at least lay out the problem I was I was of course reminded when you did the science the science thing about why open access started I'm sure there are a lot of people who don't who don't know that who reminded me of it that I know we have lots of graduates do too who don't really understand this and if we if we have a better sort of information ground level it might it might help us get some subtraction but teaching the program in terms of what we actually do for our leases party we don't have too many students who want to do leases but we probably don't make that that's a problem yeah and and within the British system there aren't courses often attached to masters or PhDs so there isn't going to be an obvious opportunity to do the contemporary stuff which ironically enough we're also under pressure from our government to demonstrate that what we are training our students to do is is of real world usefulness and so 19th century is it's not going to actually probably be very persuasive other than by pointing out that it is the general skills training that goes in there but where we would fit in contemporary under that thesis only model is it could happen but it's not as obvious I think from that point of view and actually I'll modify my earlier suggestion if instead of having the head of a university translation program speak with another with with a foreign publisher if if the head of an organization that can help get information to its members saying I'm in contact with translation programs around you know throughout the U.S. and we have a problem it's hard for us to clear permissions for translation students perhaps you have works on your list that are not particularly likely to attract the commercial trans translation but you'd like some attention drawn to those works is there any way that we can help each other here if some communications could actually open a path for multiple institutions this would be a lovely thing it's easy for me to say because I wouldn't be the one doing the hard work so you will be did you say I'll be doing other hard work that depends I couldn't resist first this there's really no such thing as international public domain so public domain is according to so what really matters is if you're working in this country is it in the public domain where you're working so if you are if you're moving to Iran and you're going to do your work there and there's no recognition for his copyright in Iran you're home free if you're crossing you know if if you go you decide you want to move to Egypt and there you know his work is under copyright you got a problem so you just need to look at whether it's in the public domain where you are or where you plan to publish so if you really want the book to be distributed in england us canada you need to look at whether you need permission in those places but but isn't that exactly the problem we're talking about with with internet that we we don't control which country it's available in i'll put it this way if if i write something very nasty about Zimbabwe i'm and and i publish it in a blog or a newspaper i'm almost certainly violating Zimbabwean press laws and a british journalist was just fine until he went to Zimbabwe so if you're violating copyright law in countries you will never visit where you have no access or you will never stop in the airport it it doesn't matter this is not legal advice get real legal advice before before traveling across the zone yeah your zone can look at this not because you can't because it is under some point i mean jesse to ask to answer your question i just write directly to robert chandler and ask him how because he's translated a lot of platona in the in the uk and see whether he has had to get permission or his publisher has had to get permission he should know um platona is a great case because he was writing during the so early soviet period i don't know when he died i don't know why yeah and so did the family has it i don't know i don't know anything about what happened there so he would know the mask i will say to sea lions all the time i would say some of the most surprisingly spectacularly successful careers have been those of people who have the nerve to phone up the top people in various fields and say you know i'm interested in this could you answer a question please careers have been built because someone had the nerve to make a phone call send a letter show up at a doorstep so the worst that can happen is you phone someone famous they don't take the call get it back but it's amazing how generous people can be when somebody shows interest so be bold young person i think we may be it yeah we're heading close to cutoff time so very happy to talk to anybody outside session but i think we might call it to a close and thank you very much for coming i have found it personally extremely informative you do this i hope you have too thanks very much