 I'm very excited to bring in free state government information, which is a blog and a group that's been working on issues in copyright and state government information. And they're going to present or talk about themselves and tell you who they are. Our basic coverage of the issue today will be about copyright and state government. Good morning. We're almost afternoon for some of you. It's morning for me here on the West Coast. We are very happy to have a chance to talk with this group about copyright and state government information. We're covering, I know these webinars tend to be geared towards kind of more practical services side, but we're talking about today is more of the back end policy issue dealing with state government information and copyright. So our agenda for today, I would like to actually, before we launch into this, just get a sense of who we have in our group, how many of you are working with digitization projects or web archiving projects that involve state government information? So as Linda said, we're going to introduce ourselves collectively. We go by free state government information or FSGI, but individually we are Bernadette Bartlett, Kyle Courtney, Christina Eden, and myself, Chris Casanovic. With the exception of Kyle, none of us are lawyers, nor do we play one on TV. You can see what our titles are here, so all of us have had or actually work with state government information in some capacity as part of our regular jobs, and of course we run into the issue of copyright law when dealing with these materials. Given our various experiences, and I would actually say more like frustration with state government information and copyright, we came together to figure out a way to bring clarity and ideally change the copyright policy landscape across the 50 states with regards to state government information. And so that's why we came together as FreeScapegov Info. So we want to go over the what and the why here, give you some context. First I want to clarify and make sure everyone knows this. When we deal with state government documents or state government information, we're talking about publications and not records. We know that when you're dealing with records, and you can see this down at the bottom of the screen, it's kind of a word cloud of the kinds of things we're talking about. Records have some different issues involved with them, but when we're talking about getting materials, state government materials either in the public domain or getting some kind of clarity with their copyright status and how they can be used, we really are talking about those publications. So they're published in distributed materials, they're print online, or they could be in any other format. You probably have a lot of CDs, DVDs, there's stuff from Floppy, Microfeesh, and it's for the public's consumption. Oftentimes you'll hear it referred to as state government information, state government publications, state documents, and a lot of times we even hear people call them records when actually what they're really talking about are publications. So we're not really talking about the records, so the emails, memoranda, correspondences, or anything like that, but the public would have to file a formal Public Records Act request to get. So simply put, in case you were unclear before this webinar, given the way the copyright law is written, state government information is copyrighted. We may not think it should be, I don't think it should be, but it is, so we have to deal with this. A lot of people out there believe that state, and I'm going to throw in local government information, is in the public domain just like the federal government information is. But in reality, state and federal government documents are not alike when it comes to copyright law. So section 105 of the U.S. Code, title 17, if any of you work in a federal depository library, you probably are very familiar with this, it gives us very simple and direct assurance that works as the United States government are not subject to copyright in the United States. However, if you look at that section 105 language, it doesn't say a single word about state government documents. So state government documents are not considered works of the United States government. So by default, full copyright protection attaches from the moment of a state document's creation. So just like a novel or anything else out there. So unless there is state legislation, to the contrary, per section 102A, which covers the subject matter of copyright, state government information has copyright protection. From the inset, it is fixed in any tangible medium of expression. Beyond the default set in the Copyright Act, states can and do insert copyright over their publications. And they may have their own laws, rules, or policies that address intellectual property rights of state government information. And Kyle's going to address this in a little bit more detail in his section about the state copyright resources center. So to kind of drive this point home a little bit better, if you look here we've got the public domain for federal government information. So as soon as it's published, it is in the public domain now. For 50 states, it will be public domain in 2112. And the last concept we want to drive home to is the difference between publicly available versus public domain. So there's a bit of a misperception that we've encountered out there that a state statute or policy granting public access is equivalent to public domain. However, talking with the lawyers from Hoppe Trust and I believe Kyle as well, this does not relinquish copyright. And Christina is going to go into more detail about this. So we've seen some statutes that say the material has to be publicly available and the assertion is that since it's publicly available it's public domain and that's just not the case. So why are we doing this? Well, we all feel that state documents should be in the public domain or at least given some type of a creative commons type of license or something that better describes how those of us say in libraries in the public can utilize and distribute, digitize this material. These materials are created for the public, typically using public funds and should be treated in the same way as our federal government publications are. So we see this as copyright law styming our work and the work of others. And even the Google Book Project runs into this issue when dealing with state government publications. So over the past year and a half or so our group has looked at how libraries are handling this issue. We've got some immediate approaches and then we're also looking at some longer term approaches here. So a lot of what gets done is we seek permission. So you actually contact state agencies and ask them, can we digitize? Can we put these materials up at our institutional repository? This is time consuming as you can well imagine because you've got to find the right person at the right agency, give them the permission notice, and ask for them to respond to that and that can involve getting their legal counsels involved. Other people we've seen use something called a takedown notice. Many of you may be familiar with this if you do web archiving. So they will scan and make state documents available, but they'll put a statement up on that site saying that they believe it to be in the public domain. And if that's not the case, the agency can get in touch with them to sort out the details. And then there's also a copyright review. And this would be following the changes to copyright law, looking for copyright marks on publications based on, we actually look at Peter Hurl's copyright chart as kind of a guidance and Christina is going to cover this in more detail. Now long term, we would actually like to see better solutions. That would be clearer and fixed for the long term. So we've worked over the past to get people involved, especially if they feel that they could bring about some type of legislative change in their state. So is there a way to have a law passed to get the copyright statements either clarified or declaring the materials to be put in public domain or even through executive authority? And I would just point out here that state legislation could change that U.S. copyright law default, but then again, it's got to be done at each state. So that's 50 states having to kind of introduce legislation and do that. We've also talked about using Creative Commons. I mentioned this briefly. Public domain designation is not palatable to state governments. We've also talked about using the Creative Commons as a way to maintain control, but to still be very clear to users what they can and cannot do with the materials. So how are we doing this? In addition to all of the kind of research we've done thus far and the discussions we've had with various groups, at our own institutions we are grappling with this. I'm going to talk about the perspective and projects from academic institutions. And Bernadette and Christina will cover how they're handling this in each of their areas. So we are considering Hoppe Press as a digital library and Bernadette will be covering her perspective from a state library. And again, these are our perspectives from our own individual institution that hopefully you may find resonate with you or you may also find that, hey, this is completely different. So we're not generalizing across for every state library that's out there or every academic institution. So at my library, which is a major academic research institution, many of our researchers want digital access to state government materials and local government materials in print. I have a really good recent example about a faculty-led project studying state banking practices from 1920 to 1940. And they requested that we digitize runs of the state banking reports, the annual reports from the banking commissions. It's a fairly reasonable request, given that we do have the means to digitize and do mass digitization here at our campus. And I would also note that the trend since about the MIDOT has been for state and local governments to publish their materials online only with no print distribution. So a lot of the work that we do is bringing together the online, the published online, and making the print materials digitally. So that way a researcher like this group would have a really nice data set of materials. Additionally, I'm also engaged in web archiving of government websites. And I also run into this copyright issue in dealing with the web archiving. So to move forward with any of these projects at our institution, our general counsel requires us to seek permission from each agency. And this is mainly because we do allow access to the materials through our catalog without any restrictions. We digitize the material, we put it into our institutional repository, and we provide access to the objects through our library catalog. And on the screen here you'll see I've put up a portion of what we send to the agency when we seek permission. So you get an idea of what we ask. This language was actually vetted and approved by our deputy director and general counsel. And basically we just kind of tailor it to whatever the request is. We have some standard language. We send it in an email to whom we think is the appropriate person at the agency that can give us permission. And then we have to keep track of all of the permissions that we receive or don't receive. So finally, once we do put the material into a digital collection online, we do include a use and reproduction statement that indicates we have permission from the state to make the materials accessible. But we don't say anything about public domain or Creative Commons. We do indicate that states may limit further use. And so this is, in my eyes, it's not ideal, but it enables us to keep moving forward. If I had my preference, we'd probably do this differently. But as I noted, other institutions do use takedown notices. Some don't even bother with this, and they assert that the materials are in the public domain. So there's a variety of approaches out there, but this is how we're handling it here. All right. So I'm going to turn it over to Christina to talk about her perspectives. Thanks, Chris. So my name is Christina. I am Copyright Review Project Manager for HathiTrust Digital Library. I've been working on the copyright for about four years. If you don't know HathiTrust, I'm assuming many of you do, but it's a partnership of primarily academic libraries, over 100 members. And the collection is contributed digital scams from the partners. And I looked up, we do have North Carolina State and North Carolina Central, our HathiTrust partners. So perhaps we have something from those collections in HathiTrust. So HathiTrust is primarily about preservation. We're doing scanning of the works even in copyright under 108 for preservation purposes. And when they're taken in, an initial bibliographic determination is done to see whether or not they can be open to full view or whether they need to be closed for presumed in copyright. So state documents coming in, if they're prior to 1923, they will be open and full view. And anything after 23 and later are presumed in copyright until we can find out more about them. So if they are closed, that means that they are only keyword searchable. Nobody can view them in HathiTrust. And we started getting some inquiries from researchers who were very anxious to get access to the closed materials. And we have been able to work with them to get documents open. I won't go so far as to say, call us if you have a researcher interested in getting some documents in HathiTrust open. We have a lot on our plate and we are working on stuff. But definitely you can email me if you have an inquiry about using some of the state information that is in HathiTrust if it's not open. One of the things that we'll be working on soon are Canadian Patent Office. We had an inquiry for a researcher for those. So typically we are able to provide access in one of two ways. We have tried seeking rights holder permission to apply Creative Commons license and open the works. And the most productive for us has been doing copyright review on batches of documents and looking where to find their public domain. We looked into state legislative language as a basis for opening some. However, the language has not so far been clear enough about documents being public domain for us to rely upon it in the case of a mass digitized library. So it tends to talk either about things being publicly available or in some cases it just has too many carve outs that we couldn't apply it across a batch of works. We have decided instead to do a copyright review pilot project. We identified about 50,000 works in HathiTrust that were public state documents that were closed and we've been working our way through that over the last year. So this is how we're working on copyright review. We had a grant from IMLS actually three grants to develop an interface. And this is pulling documents directly from HathiTrust that are closed and we're reviewing the closed documents through the system doing an analysis and submitting a rights code back to the HathiTrust rights database. And this goes through overnight. If it is determined to be public domain, the document will be available and viewable in HathiTrust by the next day. Right. So we're getting really positive results. We're getting about 70, over 70% public domain. And the basis for our copyright review is a U.S. formality for documents published between 1923 to 1977 must contain a copyright notice. Technically the requirement went through 1989. However, that later period there was an ability for them to do a remedy within five years and which would be an extra research step for us. So we're not working on those through 89 right now. We're just sticking through 77. And this still gives us a candidate pool of around 50,000 documents to work on. So here are the results that we're seeing in looking for no copyright notice in the front matter and in the back matter of state publications. We're getting about 73% public domain, meaning they were published without copyright notice. 27% end up in our undetermined needs further investigation. That is typically because they contain adjunct materials such as photographs, things that could be from another agency, perhaps a foreign authorship on it. And we're really finding very few that are published with notice and that are in copyright. So we've been able to open up about 13,000 state documents since May of 2014 and again finding about over 70% public domain. So this for us has been the best approach. Some of the interesting things that we're finding are quite a few of the state documents are not published with notice. The cases in which they are tend to be where there is a state partnership with a corporate entity doing the publication. In some cases this has been state annotated code. The code itself would be public domain for being enacted law of the state. However, with annotations it could be copyrightable. And when there has been publication with a corporate entity it has more likely to have contained copyright notice and have been renewed for copyright. We also saw a number of records of the Supreme Court decisions which had been published through a corporate agency which also contained copyright notice. So just saying when you've got state government and private partnerships there has been a tendency for more likely to view it as copyrighted than just states publishing it alone. We've also seen reports published with, it clearly states that it's published with federal funding or it's published in cooperation with a federal agency and where under section 105 publications of the federal government would not be eligible for copyright. Because of that joint authorship with a state agency we're considering that has a joint author that does have copyright or could potentially have copyright. And therefore even when you've got a partnership with a federal department we still have to go with a copyright review. In particular looking at research from the Great Lakes area we've also seen joint authorship with foreign researchers. For us it would be Canadian. And when you've got foreign authorship on a document there could be other issues such as restoration, copyright restoration through treaty. Even if they failed to follow the formalities of U.S. copyright during that time. So we're getting a lot of good results. We're planning on continuing this for as long as possible. We've got over 40,000 left to work on. And we do like to hear when people are interested or when people are using state government documents in Haughty Trust that helps build a case for working on these and knowing that they're valuable to people. So with that I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Bernadette to talk about State of Michigan Library. I am the Michigan documents librarian at the Library of Michigan. So I deal with copyright and state documents from multiple arenas. Of course I'm often talking to the agencies themselves as creators and distributors and then also helping our staff in-house deal with copyright issues and then of course users, researchers and other libraries as well. In Michigan statute and case law does support the state's right to copyright its work. But unfortunately there's not really good follow through at the state level on that. There's, I do think the state government could improve their delivery of copyright information and services. Copyright is generally asserted and defined through policy but there's a lot of ambiguities especially across the three different branches of government. There's no uniform language or point of view regarding copyright. Of the three branches the executive branch is the most clear and concise laying the responsibility for getting permission on the user. And then the legislative branch has more of a, is more concerned with whether someone thinks that they're infringing on someone else's copyright. And then the judicial branch I don't even think it sounds like a copyright policy at all. So that lack of consistency, that lack of uniformity I think is very misinformative and makes it difficult for users. And I won't say that each branch intentionally has a different perspective but there's just a real lack of clarity and it's a hard issue to navigate at state government level. In addition to this there's no training or education component for state employees on how to inform them, how copyright impacts their work, their agency's information sharing practices or how to address user requests related to copyright. And I do think there is definitely an opportunity within administrative laws such as rules, policy and procedure to establish standardized practice and provide an informed and consistent response to copyright related queries. Until a few months ago I would have said that copyright was not on state government's radar and I still think that is true the majority of the time as it is not often addressed at the individual state agency level. However there are some indications that the agency that sets policy on Michigan.gov which is the state's primary or official state government portal and then also sets policy administratively for all executive branch agencies that they may be paying more attention to copyright. They recently used the most specific language I have ever seen since I've been following the issue. Expanding on a general statement about complying with intellectual property laws to specifying the types of use not allowed without permission. And they actually used the phrase to saying that creating derivative works is not permissible except under law which tells me that someone actually has looked at copyright law when they wrote that policy. And then there's also been an internal policy that came out with restrictive copyright language that really could affect other state government libraries including the library of Michigan in doing things like document delivery and interlibrary loan issues. So we're keeping an eye on that just to see what happens. The role of the state library is that in Michigan by statute we serve as the state documents repository with obligations to capture, preserve, and provide access to state government publications. Unfortunately statute does not include any exemption or mention of copyright with regards to these obligations. So technically we operate under the same copyright limitations as any other creator or user of state government information. We are following the lead of Hottie Trust and the copyright review project as Christina just talked about. And we are operating under the premise that most Michigan documents are free of copyright through 1977 because they did not follow the formalities for the most part. Unless there's mitigating factors such as actual copyright statement which is rare or authorship of the document is shared with the non-government entity then we of course pay more attention at that point. We're also a source of perspectives on copyright and information on copyright. We're a common point of contact for state government and the public for questions regarding copyright and state government information. We're careful not to cross the line into advice but in many cases there's not really anybody else out there to ask. We are also a provider of born digital and digitized state government information. Since 2006 the designated format for a Michigan document in the depository program has been electronic and we preserve and provide access to archived born digital and digitized state government content on a site called Governing Michigan. On Governing Michigan we offer a typical warning that the information available there may be protected by copyright as well as a takedown notice and a redaction procedure as well. We have taken on some large scale digitizing projects for state agencies cooperating with other state agencies and I always open a dialogue with them to talk about copyright and make sure that they understand what we're doing by putting this information up there and make sure that we can get permission if we need it. If an agency is reluctant or specifically requests that we also use the built-in digital rights management system features or limited IP access to restrict access to items in line with the fair use of copyright. For state documents that are already freely available online or were freely distributed in print, we don't worry about copyright over much as it relates to our activities in preserving and providing access to state government information. We're relying on the protections afforded libraries under copyright law and assuming that one state government agency is not going to sue another. With these recent policy changes, we do need to be aware of that issue and it's going to be interesting to see what the feedback is from those queries. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Kyle. Great, thank you very much. Obviously, the problems that have been outlined are affecting all of us across libraries, academics, state public or otherwise. We have a role at Harvard University as copyright advisor working with all 73 libraries and occasionally issues like this would come up. One of them in particular that kind of piqued my interest. Before I even was aware of the group, FSTI was the graduate school design wanted to digitize these rare urban planning reports. These are things that scholars have been wanting to get their attention to. These urban planning reports are generally authored by state commissions in some capacity and it was very difficult to track this. Some of these urban planning reports are the very foundation of what we call the suburbs here today ranging from the early 50s to the 70s. We started to dive into the research of this particular problem focusing on what states and how can we perhaps work them out. Ideally we wanted to green light a lot of this stuff which a lot of my colleagues want to do. We want the most yeses we possibly can for our patrons. We discovered that Ashley messenger and she is the lawyer for NPR out of DC and she wrote a mini article in a journal called communications lawyer in 2013 basically talking about that with regard to her reporters for NPR can they reprint state materials to supplement their articles and stories. She worked with an intern and did about five or six states as I recall just looking into them which was a great start for us. I called Ashley and I give her a huge shout out for starting this research and after you didn't happen to the 45 other states when you had your intern in the summer with your intern and she said no but if you wanted to do that have that it. We very much did want to do this. We thought it would be a research guide that would be very useful for a community I think far beyond what we had imagined but obviously we were focusing on our library's problem initially. In 2014 we hired T. Zimmerman who is a librarian that is going back to law school. We hired her to do what we referred to as a scores the earth type research where we looked at all 50 states DC and Puerto Rico and tried to determine what was the answer to the question of whether or not a state's assert copyright over their materials and we recorded all our data, we wrote it up, we developed a score which I'll share with you and some of our analysis solutions, our area was we were focusing on our work with model legislation to fix some of this and I'll talk more about that and then along with the rest of the office that I work in the office for scholarly communications we had two developers build this website and make it accessible to the world so that we can share our results. We should advance the next slide Chris. These results were kind of really interesting works of state government and I would like to point this out but stuff that our scholars want to get at is stuff that's not necessarily seen this often again we have the state development plan program, state right housing elements, you can click again and Chris that would be great, there's definitely a variety of, there we go, states that produce this stuff which again sits on our shelves and you know they can't do much with them unless they go to your place and in some places and I'm lucky to have an institution which collected from all 50 states for a long time in this arena, we have stuff that the states themselves don't even have so we want to get that and some of the more interesting ones is we also have third party materials inside some of these, this is one of my favorites, the affluence of youth and their mobility, this is from a report in California just talking about when these young people get accessibility to cars, how does that change the scope and fabric of our highways and our systems and again so these are really unique items which we want to clarify in some capacity for our scholars to give them oversight, we decided to build this research center which addressed these facets, now this is what we looked at when we gave what is ultimately referred to as an openness score, the factors addressing the score as you can see we looked at a lot of this stuff, finding a lot of this stuff was half the battle and that's why this scores the research project we wanted to share with the world but we would look whether or not that openness existed in the state constitution, whether or not there was some sort of ban on commercial use, we looked at language so often there would be a committee that had something to do with copyrighted or intellectual property or openness or public records in the state and finding those was a challenge but useful and of course many states actually asked their very own attorney general the same question that we asked so attorney general opinions were important, policy statements and then probably my favorite the statement of the state archives is state institutions talking about when they did this. We did address a lot of these factors and we boiled that in into our overall map and this is available, you can click on the link and go there right now copyright.live.harvard.edu slash states and what this is is our score and as you can see there's not a ton of green up there but green indicates the documents are presumptively in the public domain per some important statement et cetera but again we balanced it all out we balanced our case law statutes, opinions, lots of other stuff and so I just wanted to take you through this site very briefly here so you can see what we address as we do this. On every single state has the same exact uniform approach in that we are looking for relevant laws, legal sources that affect the copyright status of government documents and each state will have some or all of the following information so we look to the copyright status, open the score, binding law, advisory sources and public related law. Now again we have an overall bibliography for the topic as a whole and a state specific bibliography for the topic restricted to that state and I would like to talk about the openness score here, the openness score is a quantification of all these factors we've identified and I went to law school so I didn't have to do any more math but it turns out I had to do some more math. We calculated the score by quantifying the arguments and factors related to the copyright status and the same factors we described in that text where opinions, advisory opinions, the constitution, et cetera and these factors are based on the major court cases that were considered when a few states were asked this exact question what is the copyright status of government documents and these cases were New York, Florida, California, and South Carolina. Those state cases did an overarching survey of where they would look inside their own state to determine this and so we took those factors and amplified them across all 50 states and so the openness score that we did is this is the score of that quantification and measures the standard deviations of a state above or below the average across all of states and so if you advance this the copyright guide itself is an interactive guide to these state policies. We do uniformity and presentation so there's no confusion. It's fully accessible we have a text back up so those with jobs or other programs that are printed stabled or low vision can access it it's also mobily accessible. It links as much as we could possibly to the law of cases and regulations that were open. Now the irony in this is that some of the laws themselves are actually copyrighted so we couldn't link to those but I just wanted everyone to know that we did our best to open our links to the most open sites available so that you can read what we read when we did this and we cross reference frequently between states that they have adopted similar policies and it's fully updateable in fact we have already received updates from certain states where we could access more codes or laws of the past and the intent there is that this is a living resource. The state copyright resource center is going to be adaptable over time. It's not just a snapshot of 2014. It's going to be adaptable over time so I figured I'd take us through just a particular state if you could advance the slide Chris. New York is a classic red state in the not on the political spectrum but on the spectrum of our openness store so when we take a state we say what's the law? Is there any binding on point law that's available? This one happens to be the county of Suffolk New York versus First American real state solution. This was a fundamental case of this arena which mandated basically said yes there is the ability for states to copyright specifically on an agency level but we also always look despite the fact that there may be on point case law we also look at the advisory sources. We also look at the public record law because even though it's not necessarily on point it has an influencing factor we also say does the public record law restrict the use of disclose records? We do a big survey on this and we have specifics of examples. Many states have freed up certain things and not other things and we try to outline that. So if there's copyrights in a statute, copyrights in a judicial sentence, if they're using creative commons in some capacity or certain types of outputs that they're making whether they're not reports legislation committee we note that. We note how it applies to a specific document and if it's based on a particular field of law and again we've done this for every state. If you advance again Chris we also include things that you may want to consider when you're making your policy decisions in that the state legal code may say different things. This is what's kind of interesting. Some states are doing one thing publicly and then saying another in their cases or statutes. And we have actually calculated the data on this and we call this a rightness for change for. Meaning they're acting as if they're open but yet also a certain copyright at the same time that can be kind of confusing. And then at the end obviously it's where else you may want to go or other states maybe it's similar and then we have our sports the earth bibliography of every single case law et cetera and if you advance that Chris please which includes statutes, attorney general opinion committee reports other as we like to say and you know we include footnotes when available when necessary of this and again the intent here is by the way to link to as many open documents and laws as we can so you don't hit a paywall or have to go through Lexis, Nexus or some other day to day and we do that specifically because that's the point of the project. Now I'd like to share with you just some example survey results and analysis here of how we generated these particular scores these are interesting. So when we looked at the state constitutional provisions when we were applying a sort of states we gave you a plus one. We gave your state a plus one if there was a universal right of access included in the state constitution. We gave you a minus point five if the right of access included was only for specific records you know it only freed a few areas. We also did the purpose is there's a purpose statement includes the concept of public ownership of documents we felt like well that's a leaning towards what we wanted so we gave that a plus one and we gave a minus one if the statement of specifically excludes the intellectual property of the state. As you can see though in that column 58% of all the states we looked at had a statement that described public access to records as valuable but focuses on transparency rather than the property themselves and we found a lot of blurring lines of that area but we still thought it helped influence those decisions. One of the other interesting ones is the library and archives factor here which is my favorite one I assume everyone's favorite one that's on the line. If there's a clear public demand statement by the state library or state archives we give you a plus one if there was a clear proprietary statement give you a minus one but as you can see 52% of the nation's state libraries or state archives had no real policy statement they kind of ducked it. The interesting example in this is from South Carolina. South Carolina is the most recent state with a judicial decision on the copyright status of their government documents from 2008 and they based it on the New York Suffolk County which was read as I showed you before but this was interesting they held that yes state entities are not prohibited from obtaining copyrights for state public records but South Carolina state library however has one of the clearest library policy statements of a country that says the South Carolina State Library considers records documents and information made available by the agency of the South Carolina state government to be in the public domain according to U.S. copyright law. So we consider that a very powerful statement and it highlights the important point that even though your state might say yes there is copyright that they can oversee on their documents it doesn't mean that the conversation is over it means that policy statements may be equally as important so that's part of it. So if you want to get involved in this and you think this is interesting at all and like to help us out if you advance the slide Chris we are doing a call to arms if you will because we need you and Chris will probably repeat this our greatest contacts in the arena are our local contacts. We will not be complete without our help from our fellow librarians, archivist, researchers and others that are on the front lines in these states doing this work. My first partner when I started doing this and I found out about FSTI I immediately thought I need to join them and they were happy to let me join and so we've been working on this together but we need state specific experts to help us develop, update and improve this and as we're talking with legislatures around the country those advocates can really give us a hand. So thank you for listening to that check out the state copyright and I believe I'm handing it back over to Chris now. All right thanks Kyle. So we've got about five minutes left so I'm going to just blow through this next slide pretty quickly but we wanted to let you know that part of the work we're doing in addition to partnering up with Kyle and the fantastic resource that he put together we've been trying to monitor other projects and issues that are impacting this area. One of the big ones that's been out there is publicresource.org which is run by Carl Malamud. He you may have read about him. He's actually being there's a lawsuit with the state of Georgia over his release of I believe it's the statutes of the state putting them up publicly on his publicresources.org a couple years ago there was something that got passed by the Uniform Law Commission which is the Electronic Legal Material Act or ULMA. Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act in various states are adopting that. There was a recent report that came out in 2015 by Sarah Glassmeyer on state legal information census report which dealt with the issue of copyright specifically as a like a speed bump to making information available and usable and accessible in the states. The free law project is out there and they're mainly looking at scraping court websites and making court information freely available and they're using a variety of tools where you can download through APIs. We also have the main state library which was fantastic. They tweeted that they started using CCO license for their materials in Coffee Trust and we know that Ohio is currently trying to pursue a legislative solution. The majority of the projects that we see here are really dealing with a lot of the primary legal materials so the codes, the statutes, the constitutions, regulations, court records and not all of the other materials that come from say the executive agencies which that's a lot of the kind of the meat or the tofu of the materials that a lot of our researchers want to access as Kyle showed you and for my example as well. So again, we do want to put out a call to all of you to get involved with us as Kyle said in order to keep the state copyright resource center going and alive and thriving. If you've got information that you can share to enhance your state's information that would be great. We would love to hear if you are interested in pursuing any type of changes in your state, what you're doing, how we can support you with Free State Gov Info and I think if you would like to get in touch with us, I know we didn't put up individual emails, but if you go to stategov.freegov.info there is a contact form and you can get in touch with us through that form. We're all monitoring that email so you're very welcome to send us questions that way as well. I should also add that California just has a piece of legislation that's being introduced that came out last week to 880 which they're trying to encourage state and local agencies to assert copyright over their materials. I'm going to have work to do in California, I can see. One thing that we would encourage you all to do as advocates for government information is to monitor what's going on in your state legislatures even though there's something already on the books. Things can get introduced into the state legislature at any time and a lot of times it's because your elected officials may not be aware of the issue and so having the state copyright resource center, paid for your state at the ready to hand over to them is actually a really great resource. I know I've already started circulating it around with our state library, archives and even our legislative council office. Do you say the bill was being introduced to assert copyright? Yes. I'll send you. It's up on to this. I know and it's funny because there is another bill that's been making its way through that does just the opposite. Clearly those few assembly members aren't talking to each other. What's the justification they give for asserting? I think a lot of it, from what I'm understanding and I haven't actually read the bill yet but according to the article, I don't know if you know about Yosemite and the fact that there is an issue of intellectual property right over the names at Yosemite like the Awani lodge. The state gave the company who's running the resorts out there rights to those names. And so there's a kind of legal battle at the moment as to who has rights over that. And so I think they're saying that that's tied into what's going on with this controversy in Yosemite that state agencies can assert it so that way they don't lose control over their content and intellectual property. So there will be more to come. I've been gone for the last two weeks out of the country and just came back and opened my email this morning and saw this article. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you everybody for attending and have a great Monday.