The narrowing of the public domain through the copyright law has always to me been veiled in corporate cynicism and has always been associated in my mind with the famous ways massive corporations, like Disney, have expanded these laws to their advantage. Reading the ways the ways the Historical record has interacted with public domain, in the story Folsom v. Marsh where the Washington papers were demined public, rather than private, property; establishing the legal precedent going forward for historical referencing of public documents and Historical record. The section in the Cohen & Rosenzweig reading about the battle for scanning DVD’s and more Cinematic references was really interesting as well. Reading comments on the Manuscript of “History Can Be Open Source,” revels just how much detail needs to be paid attention to; it also proves how much more you gain when elevating all voices: case in point citation: 179 and 180. (wait for an amendment to this post when I watch the film, good copy, bad copy. Very excited to watch more in depth the process)
As many of my peers have pointed out Wikipedia on the more obscure end is a lot more messy than one may assume. I checked out the pages: Amalgamated Meat Cutters, Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and Stone Cold Steve Austin. I wanted to see a diverse selection so I picked the history of an American labor union from the 1940s, a 1850s revolution in China, and professional wrestler from the 1990s. Each history section had at least 500+ pages of edits and comments and for the example of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters there were about +1,178 entries. The amount of editing not only for citation but for fair use pictures was very impressive. The Stone Cold page is constantly being updated for wrestlers who are constantly changing their names so it’s very fun to watch that in real time lol.
I am at a real moment of not knowing if we would need to use any copyright tools, I personally would not want to copyright any of our scholarship and don’t think we will be using work not owned or produced by UMW, unless we create it.
