Tag: topic guides

Researching events: Warning signs

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In my previous post, I talked about researching events. This time, let’s look at some specific things to evaluate when considering events.

Why am I going into this in this much detail on a blog about research? First, it’s helpful (and I like being helpful!) but it’s also a concrete thing to evaluate, because we all have some experience in the physical world, and how some things work there.

Learning how to evaluate specific points with things we know something about helps us learn skills we can use when we’re evaluating things we know less about (like new information or subject areas.) It also helps us learn to ask better questions, which can guide our research.

Researching events: loaf of bread and bowls of grain and lavender on a table, ready to share

Information wants to be available

(Or rather, people planning an event should want to make it easy to find the important things about the event.)

One big warning sign – for events, for people, for research – is information that is seriously insufficient for what the resource wants to be able to do.

A well-planned event will want to tell you important things so you can make decisions about your plans in good time. They won’t make it terribly hard for you to find things like where and when the event is, practical details like what you should plan for, or any costs.

A poorly planned event, however, will often talk up guests or big plans – but they won’t mention exactly what those guests are going to be doing or focusing on (which makes it hard to plan.)

They may mention dozens of panels or activities, but not provide any kind of schedule in advance. They might talk about accesibility or inclusion, but not actually provide advance information about accessibility resources (or ways to ask) or think about different parts of the community.

No event can be all things to all people – but the good events will give you lots of information up front so you can figure out if it’ll work for you, if you need to ask some more questions, or if it’s not a great fit for you (at least at the moment).

You’ve probably known people in your life who talk up a thing, and don’t have follow through. You can apply the same skills here. If something seems a little weird to you, follow up further.

Where is that information?

Another warning sign is for an event of any size that doesn’t have some sort of stable web presence. Facebook and Twitter (and other forms of social media) can be good ways to get the word out, but there are plenty of people who don’t use them, or who don’t use them for parts of their life.

(I use Facebook for professional reasons, but avoid things that make my religious life obvious there.)

It can be really hard to find current information on a lot of social media sites – so if that’s the only place an event has a lot of information, people may miss important things or necessary details. That’s no good for anyone.

When is that information ready?

Obviously, it takes time to put together the details! However, if information isn’t available roughly along the timeline in the last post, that’s a good time to think about some alternate plans.

First time events often don’t leave quite enough time for programming information to be finalised, or they may have changes up to the last minute (if they have open slots, they may add things, or people may need to change plans and can’t do what they signed up for.

This is somewhat less common with large well-established events, but even then guests can get sick or have unavoidable conflicts come up.)

The plans are based on a sensible foundation

It’s a rare event that starts out and can have a couple of thousand people there the first year. Most first year events start with a couple of hundred people at best – and sensible event planners will start there.

Ambitious plans can be very attractive – but they’re one of the easiest ways for events to go wrong.

Think about the money

Some of it’s about money. If you are touting an event as really big, you need a place to put those people. Big event spaces cost a lot of money, and come with a lot of other complicated commitments (like AV and technology rental, stages, things like tables and drapes and chairs.)

With smaller groups and smaller spaces, you often have a bit more control over what you need to spend money on, and what you can find some other options for.

Even a small event (off-season, in a modest amount of hotel space that is not competing with wedding parties) can run $10,000 very easily, and often quite a bit more. So just because an event has raised a lot of money, doesn’t mean they have enough to make a huge event.

Some costs associated with the event are things that it’s hard to estimate if you’re not familiar with event planning in general (to have a sense of the range of things that will cost an event money) and the place the event is taking place in specific (because there are tons of regional or even neighborhood differences).

But you can spot some of them, like “More guests probably involves a lot more money” and you can make some rough napkin calculations about likely amounts for plane fares and hotel room nights for guests based on details the convention tells you. If those don’t seem to add up, you can tell other stuff might not either.

And about the infrastructure

It’s not just about money (though the money is an issue too). A big event needs a lot of infrastructure.

Running operations takes some people – someone’s got to register people or check them in, and be available for operational help (the AC is on too high, it’s too hot in there, we’ve run out of water, do you have some tape?) But someone also needs to be on hand for more complicated needs like managing high-demand lines or events, or providing security.

If there are party rooms, alcohol, competitions, or special guests who attract a lot of attention, you probably also need some kind of security or at least a plan for people to circulate and make sure things are going legally and smoothly.

Who’s providing medical support if medical issues come up? Smaller events in hotels or other rented buildings may not need anyone specifically focused on it, but bigger events or outdoor events do. Even in a hotel-based event without particular physical risks, a group of a few thousand people has a decent chance of someone having a significant medical issue during the event. You want the event to be thinking about safety concerns, and especially to be clear about options for events that are at campground or festival sites, have significant outdoor activities, or at times of year when things like heat exhaustion or cold might be a problem.

Competent staff don’t grow on trees – so where is this event getting them from? A lot of events run on a lot of volunteer help (especially for things like badging, supporting programming or panels, or the vendor/dealer room or art show). Where are those volunteers coming from? Is there a known number of people who are steady, going to show up for their shifts, and ask questions if they’re confused?

This list is woefully incomplete, but it gives you an idea of what to be looking for.

Follow the numbers

There are three sets of numbers you should pay attention to, especially for a new event. These are the advertised number of attendees, the number of guests, and the cost for the event.

Number of attendees

I touched on this one above, but it’s not that common for events to start big. Most events – even the ones that are now 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 people, started much smaller (often just a couple of hundred). Plenty of successful ongoing events started with a hundred or two hundred people in a reasonably sized rental space, and grew from there.

If an event’s success depends on it starting large – or if you see lots of urgent pleas for significant numbers of tickets – that’s a time to look closely at your options. Make sure you won’t get stranded if something goes wrong.

Number of guests

Bringing in guests is usually a significant expense for a convention – even the ones that are not big media conventions. It has to be worth it to the guest to give up their time (and for authors or other creators, it can often be a big disruption in their work schedule to be away from home from Thursday or Friday through sometime on Monday.)

It’s common for even very small conventions to offer their guests of honour at least housing, a food stipend, and often also transportation and at least a small honorarium. (Extremely popular guests, guests associated with big media productions like movies or major TV series obviously may have a lot of additional requirements).

Guests also involve time and infrastructure from the committee – someone needs to be focusing on where the guest is and needs to get to, that everything is ready for them, and to make sure the guest gets a chance to eat and sleep without disruption.

You can see why most small conventions often have one or two guests of honour. They may have other featured presenters, panel moderators, or people doing other programming, but usually those people are not getting the same sort of support from the convention.

So if you see a long list of special guests or guests of honour, be a little cautious. Or maybe a lot cautious.

Unrealistic funding streams

A lot of new events want to give everyone a discount! And yes, rewarding your early backers is great, but doing it with things that take money away from your event is not so great.

Take a look at similar events in the area, and what they charge for memberships or tickets or specific kinds of activities at the event. The chances are pretty good that a brand new, unknown event is not going to make a better deal for space rental or other kinds of expenses than a known event that’s been doing this for a while.

(Known events who bring in solid income for a hotel or conference center every year can sometimes make some really great deals – that can help them keep costs low, or bring in more guests, or do more special activities. But you need to build up a reputation of being easy to deal with and lucrative for the other businesses involved, first.)

If you see an event that’s half the price of similar events in the same area – what’s different? Sometimes you can figure out (One event is not doing a lot of expensive things that are at the other event. They’re in different seasons, and one of them is high tourism season or during some other regional big event when hotel prices are high, or whatever.)

If you can’t figure it out, be cautious of events that seem too good to be true. They quite possibly are.

Similarly. if the event is relying on crowdfunding, look for what the rewards are, and if those make financial sense for the event. It doesn’t make sense for an event to give rewards that take a lot of the money it needs for the event, does it? (That’s things like highly discounted attendance, or hotel rooms, or other big discounts.) Those things make sense if someone’s pledging a lot of money (like 10 times the amount of the ticket) but not just for the ordinary ticket price.

You will often see a wide range of ticket prices over the course of the event – that’s normal. Many events have an early bird registration that’s significantly cheaper, sometimes half the price of a later membership, to encourage people to register early and give them seed money for deposits for the event.

As it gets closer to the event, prices go up. But events should be pegging the costs so that their cheapest prices still would cover the expenses per person of the event, at a bare minimum.

Next in this series: evaluating smaller regular events.

Researching complicated details

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You get a bonus post this week! Here’s a post that I made for a writer’s community I belong to that I can now share. It’s in a slightly different style than my blog posts here (because it was designed for that community.) Several of the examples used came from people’s questions when they requested this kind of help.

(I have redacted two examples that are more identifying of the specifics of my day job than I do in public, but the rest of it is as posted for the community in February 2018.)

Quick! Research Needed! Pocket astronomy device used for ocean navigation on a table.

Introduction

Hi! Welcome to a (not that brief) guide to researching complicated details.

I’m Jenett. I’m a librarian by profession, and I work somewhere where I get asked weirdly specific questions a lot. I also really love geeking about the process of finding random bits of information and making sense of them.

I’m drawing some experiences I’ve had below, but also a couple of examples from the original comment suggesting this topic. Those asked about in-depth research about the effects of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the US Military, or details of things like whether a minor in Ohio can go to a psychiatrist without parental permission.

0) What do you actually need, and when?

Not everything is online or readily available (lots of stuff isn’t) so at some point, you may have to make a decision between ‘can find this with reasonable searching’ and coming up with something that may not be ideal but will work.

Because of this, it’s worth pausing with a complicated question to figure out how much time you want to spend on it. How important is it to what you’re writing?

Is it something you can write around (by referencing people doing the appropriate thing, without details, or by cutting the scene at that point and picking up in the aftermath of the thing happening?)

Getting something actively wrong is more likely to throw readers out of your story than either glossing over it, or picking something that is pretty likely but not actually provable.

Some topics are notorious for getting letters from readers if you get the details wrong, and others aren’t. If only a small number of your possible readers would know the amazingly specific thing, then maybe you can fudge more easily than something like horses, which a lot of people know a little about (and definitely have opinions about.)

1) Read widely

Not just books, though books are good too – but read a range of other material, so that you start to have a sense of what kinds of resources are out there. The goal isn’t to retain all the details, but to get a sense of where you can find them if you need them.

Soak in your topic:

Find a few blogs, or Twitter accounts or whatever your social media of choice is that are relevant to your current project (especially the places you might have questions.) Read them. Follow links sometimes. Don’t take notes, but do have a system for bookmarking particularly useful items you may want later.

The thing you really want to do when you know you’re exploring a topic is get a sense of the terms that are used about it. Don’t trust Wikipedia as the final word, but it’s great for giving you a sense of commonly used terms or phrases, and for putting things in some sort of historical, geographical, or intellectual context.

Beyond that, though, I really recommend adding a couple of general purpose things. Longform highlights a couple of longform journalism articles every day on a huge range of topics. Not only are they often very interesting, but I learn a lot of terminology, approaches, and ways people look at the world from them.

I also find Metafilter and Ask Metafilter really helpful in broadening my knowledge.

The former highlights links from around the web, with discussion, and the latter is a personal advice subsite. The kinds of questions people have – or specific detail about things like neighbourhoods or things to visit – can be really amazingly helpful. Even if they don’t have the specific information, they can help you learn about terms for searches you need to do.

2) All knowledge is contained in the Internet.

Not actually – we’ll get to that – but a lot, in the sense of ‘people who can point you to the information you want’.

Building up a diverse set of people you know online who know about stuff you don’t will pay off again and again and again. Online communities for people with shared interests can be a great place to ask (or shared goals, like writing communities.)

Of course, you want to be respectful of people’s time. That’s why a general “Hey, anyone know about X? Can I pick your brain for a couple of minutes about a specific piece I can’t find information on?” request can be better than asking specific people. Also because unexpected people may have answers. (It’s also good to tell people where you’ve already looked.)

I have a story about this. In my job as a librarian, someone asked me about particular map, which was not labelled in a way that he (or I) could read. I thought that if I could identify what the map was and when it was, I’d be able to figure out the names. (I’m obscuring some details here.)

I posted a photo with a few aspects highlighted to my personal Dreamwidth account, and within 2 hours, three different people had all identified it. Why? Because all of them are big board gamers, and the specific map is one used in the Diplomacy board, of Germany around 1901.

Not the way I’d have gotten that information, but with that, I could figure out what the place names were, and why it was labelled the way it was.

I have this kind of thing happen a couple of times a year on average. I am really good at searching, and using library tools – I do it a lot, after all – but sometimes someone with specific expertise will save me hours or days of work.

So long as you’re not interrupting or being pushy, people also often really love to share their knowledge, passions, and interests. A general post with a “Know anyone who can help with this?” lets people share that in a way that works out well for everyone a lot of the time.

3) Is this a topic there might be substantial resources about?

One of the things that happens for writers is that we want to know a lot of pragmatic details about how things work.

What was it like to put on clothing? How did it feel to move in it? How did cooking work? Or things people did in the household? What was the street outside like? What did medicine look like or taste like or smell like?

Unfortunately, these are often not the sort of details that are in a lot of resource books – you often have to dig pretty hard, and on the more academic side, they may not actually answer the questions you’re really interested in. They might talk about how to make the thing, but have no clue about what it was like to wear it or use it every day.

These days, this is getting better. For a lot of time periods (at least for English-language places) there are actually books called things like “Daily Life in Elizabethan Times” or “Daily Life in Colonial America” or whatever, that will fill in a lot of these gaps for you. Even if you can’t find quite the right time period, you can often get a long way by finding the closest one and then adjusting specific things that changed.

If you’re writing fantasy, this can also work if you can figure out what point in history your world is similar to.

Reenactment groups, experimental archaeology, and other similar resources can also be a huge help – there’s a genre of videos on YouTube, for example, of people getting dressed in clothing from different time periods. The Royal Ballet did a fascinating lecture series on changes in dance over time. Obviously, someone has to have produced the thing you’re interested in, but there are a lot more options around these days than there were 20 years ago.

4) Is this a topic that there will be public info on?

In some cases, the answer may be no.

For example, you usually won’t find a lot of detailed information on enforcement of online terms of service harassment issues (not them happening, but how a given site’s process handles them step by step) because advertising that kind of thing can make it easier for people to walk up right up to the line of what’s actionable and still make people miserable.

The same is often true for harassment, abuse, domestic violence issues, etc.

In other cases, people don’t publicise the information because it might put first responders at risk, or be easily misused in ways that can harm others. (For example, lots of sources on poisons won’t get specific about how much a lethal dose is. Which makes a lot of sense when dealing with people, but complicates things for mystery writers.)

Closed settings also present problems for research. Some details about military policy, practice, or procedure may only be available for people in the military or in some closely associated group. Handbooks about how a school handles something may only be available to parents, staff, and students at that school.

Other items might technically be available, but sufficiently hard to get to it’s like they’re not. This covers things like detailed legal resources (not the laws themselves, but analysis), some kinds of genealogical records, and other things where there are business interests who’d like to make you go through them to get it.

If you’re looking at a topic where this might be a case, one way in is through the next step.

5) Are there people who’ve lived through this experience?

Is it possible there’s a biography, memoir, podcast, blog, or another resource from a person who’s done this thing, is interested in this thing, etc? Sometimes this can be an incredible way to get details – especially for smaller things or emotional reactions.

Looking at our examples that started this, this is where I’d probably start for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. I might look especially for things from advocacy groups or lawyers working to help people affected by it, as well as people who were in the military and affected at the time.

(At the same time, I’d be exploring more formal research and writing through library database resources and focused internet searches too, so that I could get both the ‘official’ side, and the actual experience.)

6) Is this a law?

It can be really hard to track down legal information. While the actual laws are usually public in the United States (and also in other countries with at least a premise of democracy), a lot of the more functional ways to access those laws are through indexes, databases, and other resources that cost money to access and are designed for lawyers, firms, and law libraries, not for random authors. They’re also (unlike many other online resources) harder to get access to through your local public library.

One trick here is to figure out what the law is (the numbers or other identification) and do searches on that. Or, failing that, try tightly focused internet searches.

An example:

For our question about Ohio, minors, and whether they can go to a psychiatrist, I tried the search terms “ohio law minors parents medical appointments” (because I suspected that the relevant laws actually cover a range of medical issues, not just psychiatry.)

For reasons having to do with filter bubbles, your precise results will probably be different than what I saw (that’s a whole different discussion!), but on the first page of my search results, I found <a href=”https://www.akronbar.org/when-can-minors-consent-to-medical-treatment”>this article from the Akron Bar Asociation website</a> which says that minors can consent to outpatient psychiatric treatment on their own behalf at the age of fourteen.

Now, that blog post isn’t dated (though it comes from an organization that’s relevant to the question and likely to be accurate at the time it was written) so I’d want to confirm this information in other sources. But that post gives me the specific laws to go check, and here’s the law, which explains it covers only six visits, no medication, and what should happen when you hit those limits.

7) Is this a city/state/regional thing?

You can ask libraries in many places for help with local/regional questions – even if you’re not from there! Try other options first, since this can both take some time to hear back, and libraries have a large but limited capacity to answer questions, but if you get stumped, a lot of libraries will be glad to help you.

You may be able to get help from your local library, or from a large library in your region. (For example, anyone who lives, works, goes to school, or owns property in Massachusetts can get an ecard for the Boston Public Library.) But even if that’s not the case, you can also often ask libraries in other locations.

Many libraries have an email option or contact form. (It’s usually under ‘Research’ or ‘Research Help’ or as an option or link on their Contact page, but you might have to hunt around a bit.)

Some places require you to have a barcode for their system, but a lot of libraries are glad to get reasonable requests from other places. (And obviously, you want to do your best to ask in the language the library uses, though sometimes you’ll get lucky with other options.)

How do you figure out how to contact a library?

First, start with a large city in the state or area that you’re interested in (the largest one is usually best here – try the capital of the state or province, or if you need something slightly smaller than that, the largest city or town that will do.) Look for a contact form or method, and see if they put any limitations on asking that affect you.

How to ask:

The best way to ask questions, in this case, is to be brief, clear, and tell them what you’ve already tried or what you’re hoping for. It will be useful to the librarian to know that you’re looking for information as an author rather than for a school project or immediate legal need (because they might suggest other resources that could also help you.)

Take a minute to prepare what you’re asking. Your question shouldn’t be too long – two to three paragraphs is plenty. Explain your question in a couple of sentences, why you’re looking for the information, and where you’ve already looked. Here’s an example.

Hi,

I’m an author working on a story set in Cleveland, and I’m trying to find information on what Ohio law says about medical treatment and consent for minors. Can you direct me to a reliable source that explains what the options are?

 

I’ve tried online searches, but haven’t found anything that quite fits the question I have: I’m looking for the options and laws around someone who is 16 and dealing with mental health issues, specifically seeing a psychiatrist.

Note how this makes it clear in the first sentence why you’re asking a library in Ohio about this, which is helpful.

Getting an answer

Usually, libraries that answer questions in the first place will provide at least a brief answer (though it may take a bit of time for them to get back to you), but there may be costs if you want copies of material or longer research times.

Some libraries offer additional services for a fee if you go over a set amount of time, others just won’t answer questions that take the librarians more than 15 or 20 minutes and will point you at some resources and you take it from there. Some libraries may refer some topics – like detailed business questions or genealogy – to other sources, and libraries generally don’t answer detailed medical or legal questions other than pointing you at resources from reliable sources.)

8) Is there a relevant museum, society, or library?

If there’s a reasonable way to contact them, try asking.

I work for a highly specialised library, and I get questions from authors every couple of months. I’m always glad to answer them because it can help people understand what we do and our particular community better. (Also, they’re often fun questions to dig into.)

Small libraries, museums, and historical societies can be very slow to get back to you, though, especially if they’re mostly staffed by volunteers, or if the paid staff are wearing a dozen hats. The more clearly you can phrase your question, and the more you can do for yourself first, the better.

For example:

“I’ve looked at your website and your annual reports, but I haven’t been able to find something that explains exactly how the fees worked for students in 1890. Can you point me to something?” is a pretty easy question for someone who’s familiar with their materials to answer.

Either they’ll be able to point you at something, answer it quickly from materials they have handy, or they’ll know the information isn’t actually available like that for some reason and can tell you that (and maybe a best guess.)

A “Tell me all about your institution in 1890”, however, is a much harder thing to answer. That could take days to work through, and still not touch on the parts you were interested in.

And sometimes information just isn’t available.

We’ve had two questions about how domestic chores were handled at our institution in the 1840s, and we just don’t know a lot of details, because it’s something that the white professional-class men who were writing the annual reports didn’t write much down about.

We know there were servant-type staff, and we know students had some minimal chores. We know more about the fact that the students had to take cold showers (it was considered good for their health) because the students wrote a letter protesting it.

There might be more in some of our correspondence, but it’s in volume after volume of 19th century handwriting, and even the people who work there haven’t read all of that yet!

On the other hand, if someone asks me about that (as an author has), it’s pretty easy for me to explain what we know, where to find more, and what we don’t, and to point them to some things they can look at in more detail if they decide to.

A few final notes

The kinds of questions I mention here are exactly the kind of thing I’m glad to help with through the research consulting part of what I do here.

(To give you an example of how doing this a lot improves speed, none of the examples here took me more than 5-10 minutes to poke at, though obviously they took a bit longer to write up.)

Looking ahead to research: part 3

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Making a plan for larger projects

Here we are at part three of making a plan for larger projects. How do we break down a big project into something more manageable, when we’re not quite sure what we’re going to be finding once we start?

This post talks about five questions you can ask yourself. The final part of this series, next week, will talk about a couple of examples.

Looking ahead to research : view of rocks looking out toward a twilight ocean.

Questions

What do you want to accomplish?

Different kinds of goals have different outcomes. The kinds of information that will help you most if you’re designing a ritual may be quite different than those that help for non-fiction writing, fiction writing, or designing a divination tool.

One way to start is to figure out what your end result looks like or will be used for. That will help guide some of your questions and resources.

Another part is figuring out what you’re hoping to answer or learn about. Here are some possibilities (and there are many more I’m not listing…)

  • Answering a specific question (How did they do that thing, why does it work like that, how did something develop?)
  • Looking for a new direction for your path (much more open ended)
  • Finding resources that are like ones you’ve found and liked.
  • Beginning to learn about a new topic.
  • Deepening your understanding of a topic where you know some of the basics.
  • Connecting with people who have a lot more experience in that thing (experts, leaders in the community, people with specialised skills.)

Each of these will have different ways you might want to go about it.

These questions can also help you begin to figure out how much time this might take – or how deeply you want to get into a question.

For example, you might be writing a ritual that includes a deity or story you’re not as familiar with. Different people will have different feelings about how much research is needed, but there’s often a way to create a meaningful and respectful ritual that works with resources many people can access relatively easily (public in-depth info) and with 5-10 hours of focused work (plus some additional time for thinking about it, maybe, while you’re doing other things.)

And yet, someone else might decide that they really want to dive deeply into that same deity or stories, and that be a much more involved process requiring translation of texts, learning how to make sense of particular styles of art or styles of writing, and much more.

Here’s a way to try framing your goal: I want to understand X so that I can Y. (Examples below.) Try replacing ‘understand’ with ‘learn’ or ‘explore’ if that helps.

Do you have a deadline?

One really pragmatic question is ‘when do you need this by’? Some questions have harder limits than others.

If you are doing research to write a ritual, you need to have the information before the ritual and probably not the day before, either! You’ll want time to create the ritual and get the things you might need or want for it! Usually you’ll want to be done with your research at least 2-3 weeks in advance if not more.)

Other projects might take months or years or even decades! (Serious long-term study of Tarot or runes or astrology, for example – any complex system with many moving pieces, materials in multiple languages and from multiple cultures, and with many layers, is going to take you a while to get a grip on.)

With these huge projects, you should be realistic that they’re huge, and also figure out a way to break down the huge project into small pieces, so that you can feel like you’re making progress.

A good framing for your goal is: In the next X months, I want to Y. (Where Y is related to your specific research goal.) p

Are there subgoals in your project?

Often, once we understand our actual desire (what we want to do this research or learning for) it gets easier to break it down.

Maybe there are stages in our project – we have a thing we need or want to do first, and then continue later. Maybe our project is very big, but it’s clear we probably want to start with an overview of the topic in some way. Maybe we can do part of it on our own, but then we’ll likely want to find a way to get deeper and draw on other people’s expertise, like a course or talking to someone who knows that thing much better.

Are there resources that might help?

There are so many options here. Start a list.

It doesn’t need to have answers on it. It can have things like “Something that explains what this thing is” or “A book that gives me a general overview of what was going on here that century.”

(In my day job, I have had several questions come up in the past few months that deal with different parts of India, and while I can pick up specifics from a variety of sources, I have added a couple of books that give an overview of Indian history or a good look at current social issues there to my to-be-read list. Figuring out that would be helpful was one step, finding the books is a second, and reading them is a third, and it’s okay to pause on any step if you need to.)

Similarly, you might identify skills that would be helpful. These can be partial skills, not becoming expert.

For example, maybe becoming just a little bit better at some research skills will open a lot more doors for you (like learning what academic writing focuses on, how to make the most out of articles, or how to find academic sources.)

Maybe it’s learning a little bit of a language – Duolingo can be great for giving you an idea how the language works, some key vocabulary, even if you never remotely become fluent. And if nothing else, it may make it easier to understand how names or some customs work in that language or culture.

(I might or might not be working through sentences in Welsh and can say that I am a dragon and I like leeks, at the moment. Though I had to check and see if I like leeks plural, or if I’ve learned the singular yet.)

Final part

In the final part of this series, I’ll look at some different kinds of projects, and how I break them down.

Productivity roundup

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It’s the time of year when people start thinking about being organized next year, isn’t it? Here’s a roundup of thoughts about productivity. Here’s a recommendation for the productivity geeks out there, a few thoughts on planners, and my spreadsheet for 2018.

Productivity Alchemy

If you do podcasts at all, and you haven’t dipped into Productivity Alchemy, I highly recommend it.

It’s done by Ursula Vernon (writer and artist – her stuff is fabulous!) and her husband Kevin Sonney (programmer, for his day job), and together they have been exploring all sorts of different productivity approaches, tools, and techniques.

The podcasts are a great mix of Ursula and Kevin talking, Ursula as Wombat Test Subject for trying out different techniques (or refusing to try some out, as the case may be), Kevin interviewing other people about what works for them, letters from listeners, and other tidbits of their lives. They are funny, thoughtful, and interesting.

One thing I particularly like is the focus on talking to people who have a wide range of different kinds of needs and goals – the interviews include a lot of people doing arts or freelance work, as well as people with demanding office-based jobs.

They’re also great about including people who’ve got chronic health or mental health issues that make figuring out what to do or getting it done more challenging. So much productivity geekery focuses on doing more, more, more, that it’s really refreshing to have people focusing on ‘how do I get the necessary stuff done so I can do more of the things I really enjoy or want to do or feed my soul.”

Looking for a planner?

Episode 23 of Productivity Alchemy reviewed several planners (links are in their show notes, even if you don’t want to listen to the show.)

The Simple Dollar had a nice roundup of twelve planners with info on what they focus on that included a few I hadn’t seen before. (Also, in rummaging around later links in this post, I found my way to Rachael’s 52 Planners in 52 weeks series, which highlights some other approaches.)

I’ve also been thinking a lot about this post from Shawn LeBlanc, about working on projects in an eight week cycle: six weeks of focused work, a week to wrap up loose ends, and a week off. Specifically (being me, and with my religious life running on a Sabbat cycle), I am thinking about how to apply that.

(In my case, it would not be for work projects, because this model is not a great fit for librarianship or other jobs that are reactive to questions, and also because I don’t have final control of a lot of long-term project choices.)

I’m finding the Momentum Planner’s approach (which I discovered from the Simple Dollar roundup) might be a way to bring this together, and let me do some longer term planning. They have free versions you can check out over here, and you can buy a full year’s version with additional tools for $12.

If you’re the kind of person who really wants to build your own, I came across Agendio. That looks very promising for people like me who need some things in a planner, but not, for example, a major task list or daily schedule. I’m eyeing this as a thing to build, but haven’t tried it yet. Also very customisable in terms of colours and fonts.

Also in the mix for my personal planning is Briana Saussy’s Book of Hours, “a planner for sacred artists” that includes astrological information, brief but illuminating questions for particular events. You can get the questions and brief date info from her 2018 Astro Rx page, but the planner is gorgeous.

I put the questions for last year into Todoist, where all my actual tasks live, and I’m looking forward to taking a little more time this year to sit down and actually write.

My tracking for 2018

I’ve been working on updating my tracking spreadsheet for 2018, and it’s got some new categories, and a new layout.

Summary :

The first sheet pulls in the month’s data from all the other tracking sheets, and gives me a score for the day (out of 7, but it’s technically possible to get a total of 9 points). This helps me see if I have a run of especially good days or especially bad days, so I can make some corrections.

Embodied life:

Physical things, or relating to my physical body.

  • Physical activity
  • Exercise
  • Upkeep (did I take all my meds? Or was it a day I had a health-related appointment?)
  • Sleep time
  • Sleep quality

Several of these are tracked with apps (Human for activity, Sleep Cycle for sleep) as before. I get a point for at least 30 minutes of activity, and having more than 7 hours and 70% sleep quality. Also a point for doing whatever the necessary upkeep stuff is.

Doing:

  • How many words did I write? I get a point for any words, and an additional point for more than 1000, because I would like to do a lot more focused writing this year.
  • Tasks (total number of tasks, using my calculations for small/medium/large). I get a point for doing the equivalent of at least 3 large tasks.

Spirit:

  • Daily spiritual practice : space for me to track what it was, and I get a point if there’s anything in that space.
  • Did I do a creative/artistic/crafting thing today? What was it. (I get a point if there’s anything entered.)
  • Tarot card of the day.

Type of day:

This year, I’m adding a set of three columns. One for a rest day (if I decide I need a day to recover.) I get an extra point for any day designated as a rest day. (This is meant to make up for losing points on the ‘tasks accomplished’ because I want to encourage myself to rest when I need it.)

It also has space for unusual days (like travel, or other times my usual routine is knocked around) or if I’m sick. For the latter, I put in what kind of sick it is, so I can see any patterns. I lose a point for sick days, because even if I actually manage to get things done, they are not great days.

Summary

At the bottom, a set of 7 rows counts up the number of days with each set of point totals. Now that I’ve added in two points for things I should be able to do almost any day (the basic daily practice and taking my meds), it’ll be interesting to see how the adjustments go.

Additional sheets

I have summary sheets by week and by month (to help me see larger patterns), a sheet to track what I’ve written, a sheet where I store things I want to write about (since this spreadsheet is often open and handy).

And then the two I mention above, for tracking goals, and looking at them across seasonal blocks of time.

Copyright for Pagans: What creators should know

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This is the last part of my series on copyright for Pagans (at least for the moment.) This piece focuses on what you should know as a creator of copyrighted material (which you almost certainly are.)

Copyright for Pagans: What creators should know

You create copyrighted material all the time

… but that doesn’t mean you have to treat all the material the same.

You create copyrighted material every time you send an email (or write a text or a tweet or a Facebook update). You create copyrighted material if you post videos of yourself (or your kids) on YouTube. And if you’re a writer, or artist, or musician (creating original works), you’re creating copyrighted material there, too.

It’s good to sit down periodically and think about what you’re creating, and how you want to handle that. Every 6 or 12 months is a good range, or if something major changes in your life.

Questions to ask yourself:

1) Where am I creating materials?

Do I have a new blog or project or place I hang out and interact? It’s good to do a quick inventory of where you’re currently creating content – it makes it a lot easier to double check policies, think about long-term considerations, and make plans.

For example, you might decide you want to keep a copy of your own content. A regular review can help point out the sites that make it harder to do that. Maybe the kinds of content you’re creating have changed, and you want to keep copies now, but didn’t care as much last year.

2) Do I need to review policies on any sites?

Basically any online site that allows you to talk to other people probably has a clause in their terms of service that talks about allowing them to publish what you share for purposes of use on the site. If they didn’t include this permission, they couldn’t share your stuff with other people. That’s normal and reasonable. But watch out for sites that change their policies, or that try to restrict how you can use your content on other sites.

3) Do I want to give blanket permission in some cases?

Some people do Creative Commons licenses (that give blanket permission to share materials in certain circumstances, like not-for-profit uses, or with attribution) for all their content. Some people do it only for some. Other sites, like Unsplash, collect materials that can be shared and used freely.

4) Do my own spaces have clear policies and contact info?

Do spaces I control (like a personal site, business site, blog, etc.) have copyright statements and information? Is there a way for people to reach me if they have questions about my content?

You don’t need a copyright statement for things to be under copyright, but it’s definitely helpful in reminding people what your policies and preferences are. Because a lot of what I write depends on other material on my blogs or sites, I don’t do Creative Commons, but am generally glad to give permission on request.

5) Where am I getting materials that I use?

Are they coming from appropriate sources that have given permission?

Sharing on social media gets really complicated – but we can decide for ourselves what we’re okay sharing and using. I use photos from Unsplash (which can be modified or shared, and don’t require credit) for my blog, but give credit when feasible. I try to share materials from a creator’s own site or social media accounts whenever possible. I look for credits on art and other creative works, and make sure to share those.

You may make different choices, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good to review what you’re doing, how you feel about that, and whether you want to change anything.

6) Do I have a will that mentions intellectual property?

You create intellectual property, so it’s good to mention that in your will. (I need to do one for my current state: it’s in my to-do list for this month). If you have content online or offline, think about designating someone who can make decisions about that after you die, or whether you want to make a decision about releasing it to the public domain. (Or some of both!)

I have multiple websites, plus a lot of comments on a couple of forums, some of them lengthy works of information in their own right. Designating someone who can make decisions about it is a smart move.

Don’t believe me? Here’s Neil Gaiman explaining why this is so important (and not just for the brilliant writers out there. If you’ve ever created anything that’s helped someone else, moved them, meant something to them, then this is a way to make sure that can continue to happen.)

Legalities

Should you register your copyright?

That depends on a lot of factors. Registration can be complex, especially for things like blogs or collections of less formal work, but may be more worthwhile for books.

You don’t need to register to hold copyright – but registration does give you additional options if there are violations of your copyright about what you can sue for.

All of that said, suing for copyright is, in many cases, expensive and frustrating. Benebell Wen, a lawyer who does intellectual property (and who is also an author of works on Tarot and astrology) has a great overview of why copyright infringement is hard to fight. Because issues of jurisdiction, lack of understanding of copyright by many lawyers and judges, and other practical issues, bringing a suit often only makes sense in really significant (precedent setting cases) or other outliers.

Does someone else own your copyright?

If you have signed a contract with a publisher, there’s a decent chance you’ve signed over at least some of the rights you originally held as the creator. This is why it’s really important to have an agent or lawyer familiar with publishing contracts check your contract before you sign it. Publishers (and music producers, and people who make art available through prints, etc.) need permission or to hold the copyright to do some parts of that (making copies, distributing them, etc.) The details can vary a lot between different kinds of works – some things that are completely standard in music contracts would be completely wrong in book publishing, for example.

Contracts vary a lot about exactly which rights, what happens if an item goes out of print, under what circumstances (if any) the creator can get the rights back, and so on. Look for busy, well-run forums for creators of your particular medium for a place to start with advice or what to look for. I’ll look at pulling together some resources, too.

What happens if there’s an infringement?

Think about what you’d like the outcome to be.

Sometimes emailing and asking for a credit link may make more sense than legal options.

(Some people think you have to take action on any copyright infringement or you lose your rights. That’s a myth when it comes to copyright. (It is more complicated for trademark infringement.) You can decide to use a legal process with some infringements, and let others go.)

There are some legal processes that can help.

If your material is posted online, and you want it removed (and the servers are hosted in the US), the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has a specific set of steps for you to follow.

For large sites, there’s usually a form or other structured way you can make a report. For personal sites, you may have to figure out the hosting service and contact them. Benebell Wen includes a link to templates you can use when writing these emails or letters in the post I linked above.

Decide how much time and energy this is worth to you.

Some people find copyright infringement of their work to be a thing where if they know about it, they need to try and make it go away. Other people find that they spend too much time focusing on it, and it makes them miserable.

Figuring out which is the case for you is usually helpful in making long-term plans. If you need to know if things are misused, you might spend more time setting up automatic searches or using tools that help you find infringements and a system for dealing with them (i.e. having a template on your computer ready to go, reading about issues with copyright regularly, maybe a little consultation with a skilled lawyer who deals with intellectual property.)

If knowing makes you miserable, you might prefer to post more material in ways that are harder to copy or have other people use, set up searches in different ways, and make some specific choices about when and how you look for your own material.

A lot of people are somewhere in the middle: knowing that you’ve decided to make a DMCA report (or equivalent) in most cases, but will let things go if it’s more complex than that is a choice a lot of people make. Or that you care more about images than text, or text than images, or whatever’s true for you.

Using other people’s material

If you blog, share items on social media, or do a number of other common things, you may be using other people’s copyrighted material. Here are some general best practices:

Was this piece designed for sharing?

Retweeting a comment on Twitter, yes. Reblogging something that keeps the chain of who posted it and links back to the original? Generally okay on sites where that happens (think Tumblr). Copying and pasting someone else’s writing into your blog wholesale? Probably not.

Is this the original?

Link back to where you found the original and include whatever information about the original there is. If you can’t figure out the original source, seriously reconsider whether to pass it along and how. Links and information about where you found something and why you think it should be part of your work (or you’re sharing it) are great.

Have you checked out permissions?

Some creators are glad to share their material widely (Unsplash, as I mentioned above, is a way to do that. So are Creative Commons licenses) If that doesn’t apply to the thing you’re sharing, consider whether linking to it or referencing it would work just as well.

Is this an entire work?

Don’t repost entire works unless you’re sure it’s okay. That means don’t share entire copies of books, or entire artworks (or things like Tarot deck images, etc.) If it is okay with that artist or creator, a practice of linking to their own site and permissions with a “Shared with permission from…” is a great thing to do.

Is there a way to contact you?

If you’re regularly posting other people’s content, make sure there’s a way for someone to get in touch if something slips through (contact form, comments on your site, whatever works for you.)

A few last words on this series:

I expect I’ll be coming back to copyright sometime in here – if you weren’t clear about it already, it’s a topic I enjoy digging into. Have a question? Please ask (in comments or on my contact form.) I remain a librarian, not a lawyer, but I’d be delighted to see if I can at least point you in the direction of useful resources.

Copyright for Pagans: Examples

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There are a number of common confusions about copyright and Pagan uses. Here’s a quick overview. (Want more details about one? Contact me or leave a comment!)

Copyright for Pagans: Common Pagan Situations

Common confusions : libraries and used book stores

Some people wonder why libraries and used books are okay under copyright, when sharing copies of ebooks or other electronic files isn’t.

The short answer is that there’s something called the “first sale doctrine” that covers physical objects, but not digital ones.

One of the reasons for the distinction is that first sale grants some rights to redistribute a copyrighted work, but not to reproduce it (and in our current technology, a copy of a digital file involves a reproduction, even if you later delete the original from your computer.) Libraries and used book stores are working with the same object (either lending it, or selling it) and there is no residual copy left while the material is being loaned or once it leaves the original owner’s hands.

Some parts of the first sale doctrine have gotten attention at the Supreme Court in recent years relating to geographical limits for first sales. These might be of interest if you’re curious about some of the ways copyright can affect trade

(Other confusions about ebook and digital production costs, and about whether making illegal copies hurts people are better left for other posts. They have their own complexities.)

Complicated world : transformative works

Another way things get complicated is the idea of transformative works. This has been a growing area for discussion.

Transformative works take a copyrighted work and adapt it. Parodies are one example, and they’ve been a specific discussion in copyright law and copyright cases for a long time. These days, we also have things like fanfiction and fanvids, memes, mashups, and related concepts to play with.

If you’ve been around the speculative fiction or fannish community for a while, you’ve probably seen lots of examples of this in one form or another: it’s a way of playing with ideas or concepts, without having to create everything from scratch – or of using widely known material to explore new ideas

In a Pagan setting

Different kinds of actions have different implications when it comes to copyright. It’s hard to tell for certain unless we’re looking at specific cases, but here are some common actions in the Pagan community that are probably violations, some that depend a lot on the specifics, and some that are permitted uses.

Quite possibly a violation

Republishing of work without permission without any additional commentary/material. (Permission might include a Creative Commons license.) This would include sharing an entire copy of a work online.

Quoting large portions of a work, even for purposes like review. This would include the core of the work, extensive portions of the work, etc. Generally a few sentences here or there from a work of non-fiction is considered acceptable, especially if it is clearly not the core of the work.

Posting an image to your social media site if you do not know the original source/creator and have permission (either directly or via something like a Creative Commons license.) Some artists are fine if credit is given, others don’t want their work shared like this at all.

Gray areas: depends on the specifics:

Pieces used in ritual (especially public ones) such as chants, invocations, ritual dramas, full rituals from print sources.

These might be covered by implied license – the idea that people shared them in the first place because they wanted them to be shared in the larger community. In these cases, it’s still best to know where they came from, and share the creator’s name/etc.

Spells
Recipes are a complicated situation in copyright law – a list of facts, steps, etc. is generally not copyrightable, but something like a poetry verse in a spell generally falls under copyright.

Spells usually have some components like recipes, and some components (chants, text, descriptive language about what to do or what to focus on while doing the spell) that would be covered by copyright.

Sharing materials in a closed setting like a coven or small group meeting, taking steps to make sure sure they are not shared in openly available sources online.

This falls under some of the educational provisions, which get complicated. In general, if you want to share things year after year, you want to get permission.

Permitted uses:

Putting material in a Book of Shadows (or other personal religious compilation) that is not shared with others (whether in person, through print copies, or online). Including your sources is always a good idea.

Sending yourself an article in email from an online database or website, for your own reference and study. (A copy for yourself is fine. Sharing that copy could be a problem. It’d depend on the source.)

Passing down material through oral tradition. One person talking to another is not a fixed or tangible form.

Casual discussion, review, or comment on works without extended quotations.
“I liked this book because of these things” is just fine. So is “I didn’t like this book.” It’s the quotations that are the copyright issue. Brief quotations in the places where the specific wording matters are generally fine, but extended quotations where you could have summarised or paraphrased can be a problem.

Citing the source for an idea, even if the expression of the idea is new.

For example: you like someone’s approach to the myth of Persephone, but rewrite it entirely in your own words, it is great to rework it, but give credit for the idea. Storytellers and comedians have community customs about how you do this and when it’s important

Linking to a source or document online. Linking does not affect the original, and is not a copyright issue. Note, however, that some sources for Pagan materials online are themselves copyright violations. If you care about this issue, checking out the sources you’re linking to is a great habit to get into.

Using public domain images (i.e. from historical grimoires) to illustrate grimoires, journals, etc. Public domain images are no longer under copyright or never were, and they’re fine to use like this. In general, anything created before 1923 is quite possibly public domain: there are exceptions, but they’re pretty rare.

Some other examples

Ritual planning. 

“Beltane celebrates the coming summer and the love of the God and Goddess” is a general idea.

A discussion of planning a ritual with that idea isn’t under copyright (because it’s not a fixed form). But the actual ritual script, a video of the ritual, or an audio recording of the discussion would all be under copyright law, because they’d be a fixed form.

Creating spiritual images

An artist makes a picture, using a combination of a photograph they took and adding some effects in an image editor. They post it to their social media site. Even though it doesn’t say Copyright Artist Name 2013, it’s still a copyrighted image.

Sharing a ritual text

A Pagan group comes up with a ritual to celebrate the winter solstice. They share it on their website. While they’ve given permission for it to be used by members of the group, they do not give permission for others to copy it to their own sites (distribution or display), only to use it for their own rituals privately.

Photographs of stars and galaxies

Some things are automatically in the public domain. In the US, this includes things created by government or government agencies. For example, all the Astronomy Photos of the Day from NASA (but not necessarily other sources in the APOD site) are public domain because NASA is a government agency.

Coming next

Part 6 of this series will talk more about some common Pagan situations, including some best practices for avoiding copyright issues.

Copyright for Pagans : Fair use

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Fair use is a concept in copyright law that is about balancing the rights of the copyright holder with discussion (and exploration of) copyrighted works.

Fair use is what allows us to write book reviews or movie reviews, quote a short bit of a text in an essay, or reference a copyrighted work as part of a lawsuit or other thing requiring documentation.

It’s also what allows (at least some space) for parody songs, filk, fanfiction, fanvids, fan drawings, mashup images, cosplay, and much more.

Fair use is a weird thing. It isn’t set out in detail in law – instead, it is a possible defense if someone sues you for copyright infringement. A court or judge has to decide if your specific case is fair use or not. Unless and until that happens, you don’t know for sure.

This makes it very hard to make suggestions, though there are some educational guidelines (more on that in a minute) and a lot of sites have set limits on what they consider okay for the uses they see.

Courts look at four factors when making their rulings about fair use, but different courts have made very different decisions about similar amounts of material, or how material was used.

This is good place for a reminder that getting permission from the copyright holder is often a great way to avoid this whole question. (Either by getting direct permission, or by using materials that have been licensed for general use through blanket permissions: see the section on Creative Commons below.)

Factors

The four factors courts look at are:

  • How transformative the use is
  • The nature of the copyrighted work
  • The amount and substance used
  • The effect of use on the potential market

People have written books about all of these, so I’m touching on it briefly here, and if you want to dig into it further, the Stanford site mentioned below is a great starting place for a lot more detail aimed at non-lawyers.

Transformative

Have you used the copyrighted work to do something new and interesting? That might favour a transformative use.

Some things courts look for are if you’ve added new meaning by using the work and adding additional material or context. Maybe you’ve used it to make connections between different things.

Fanvids are a great example here: sometimes the song someone chooses and the video clips someone chooses bring out new connections in the existing material, or highlight something that might be lost otherwise.

(Need an example? Parachute by Thingswithwings is a Leverage fanvid that highlights the relationship between three of the show’s characters. And this discussion of the making of a vid for We Didn’t Start The Fire (the Billy Joel) illustrating 50 years of (Western media) fandom by Scribe and Fiercynn talks about some of the creative choices that go into this kind of transformative work, and could not exist without the source material.)

Nature of the work

In general, fiction and poetry (or creative work in general) gets more protection than non-fiction.

This is because sharing of information or information is seen as a key good thing in society, and so there’s encouragement in the law to do it within reason.

(However, sharing the information doesn’t necessarily mean sharing exactly how someone else said it: often it is better from a copyright point of view to give your own paraphrase and tell people where to find the original rather than copy an extended passage.

Copying directly is usually best saved for when you need to discuss specific wording, or are doing a detailed review or analysis where you look at a segment, then discuss it in detail, and then do another section.)

Unpublished works also generally get more protection than published ones. (Because the creator has the right to control how the work is shared in the first place.)

Amount and substance

Basically, the more you use, the more likely it’s going to be considered a copyright violation. Copying the entire thing, usually a problem.

This is why a lot of spaces set a limit like saying you can quote a certain number of sentences or words: it helps give some guidance about what ‘too much’ might be.

It’s not just about the number of pages or words or percent of an image or song, though – it’s also about how core that piece is to the work you’re copying. This is something it’s very hard to evaluate, but it’s a factor the courts consider.

However, parody is a little different here: if the whole work you produce is a parody, you probably have more license in copying memorable bits from the thing you’re using. The relationship to the original work is a large part of what makes the parody recognisable and effective.

Effect on the potential market

A lot of people try to say that their use won’t affect the market. That isn’t something that the user of copyrighted material gets to determine, though. You don’t know all the parts of the potential market like the original creator or copyright holder does.

Basically, though, if you affect the copyright holder’s ability to make money from their work (by providing copies for free, by using their work to create an effective alternative that people buy instead of the original) then you may find yourself having problems with copyright.

Providing citations and acknowledgement

A lot of people think that if you say where the original was from, that will keep you out of trouble.

This is where we come back to the difference between copyright and plagiarism I talked about in part 1. Telling people about the original is a good thing! But it’s not enough to stop a copyright violation if there is one.

Getting permission from the copyright holder, or using material which the copyright holder has agreed to share is a different situation. In that case, credit may still be required as part of the permission or license.

Creative Commons licensing is a method creators can use to give blanket permission for some kinds of uses, and some of the licenses require crediting the original in a specific way.

Educational uses

There are some very general guidelines for educational uses, which means things that look like a structured class This is usually material that is available to a limited number of people (not posted for the entire Internet to access), for the duration of a series of classes (not forever).

Ongoing Pagan classes like seeker, dedicant, or pre-initiate classes can fit into this category, but posting something in public spaces online or using it for a one-time workshop probably would not qualify.

The Stanford site in the resources has an entire section on academic and educational uses that may be of interest.

Resources

Stanford has an excellent and widely referenced site on Fair Use. (However, don’t trust anything you see in the comments without checking it in well-informed and reliable source: a lot of the comments there are just wrong.)

In particular, you might find the summaries of major fair use cases interesting, and they do regular updates on major cases that relate to copyright and fair use.

If you’d like detailed legal explanations, the lectures from class 9 of the CopyX class give an excellent historical and current overview of fair use (and how it got like this) with a lot of examples.

Next

I’ll be digging into more specific examples (and some common confusions) in part 5.

Copyright for Pagans: What is under copyright?

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Welcome back to my series of posts on copyright. This time, we’re going to tackle the question of what is under copyright and what isn’t, with some examples of complicated cases. Here are the parts in this series.

Image text reads: Copyright for Pagans: what is under copyright? (slate background, large green chalk copyright symbol in middle)

Works, not facts or ideas

The first thing to understand is that copyright protects many different kinds of works – books, novels, short stories, theatre, music, poetry, songs, computer software, architecture, among others.

Copyright doesn’t protect facts, ideas, systems, or what are called ‘methods of operation’. However, copyright can protect how those things are expressed.

A common example here is a recipe – copyright doesn’t protect the list of ingredients or the really basic description of how to combine them (that’d be the method of operation). But it would protect a description that went beyond basic instructions, or stories or commentary with the recipe.

Original work

Copyright covers original works in a fixed form.

Original means two things.

1) That it is an independent creation (not a copy of anything else)

2) That there is a modest amount of creativity.

A lot of copyright law is about defining these things.

Without getting bogged down in details at this point, one of the things that is very clear in the law is that you only need a very modest amount of creativity or originality. For example, if you were trying to copy something, and your hand slipped, it could count as an original work.

(A quote from a case in 1951, from Judge Frank, goes “A copyist’s bad eyesight or defective musculature, or a shock caused by a clap of thunder, may yield sufficiently distinguishable variations. Having hit upon such a variation unintentionally, the ‘author’ may adopt it as his and copyright it.”)

One intriguing thing about copyright is that it doesn’t have to be new. (Trademark and patent law care about whether something is new. Copyright doesn’t.)

It’s pretty common for people to have similar sorts of ideas about the same subject. For example, within the Pagan community, two people might independently strike on very similar wording for a chant for a particular ritual or deity focus. In these situations, a copyright case would look at whether they had any knowledge of the other work.

Fixed form

The fixed form part of the definition is a bit easier to explain. Basically, as soon as you have committed the work to a fixed form, it qualifies for copyright if it’s not excluded for other reasons.

This can include:

  • Saving something as a computer file.
  • Taking a photograph.
  • Painting or drawing artwork on paper (or another medium)
  • Writing down music
  • Notating the choreography of a dance or routine.
  • Recording a speech or performance.

What isn’t under copyright?

Some kinds of works can’t be copyrighted. The Copyright Office of the United States has a good summary of Copyright Basics (PDF).

Works that can’t be copyrighted include:

  • Works that aren’t in a fixed form (like a dance that hasn’t been notated or recorded, or an improvised speech that isn’t written or recorded.)
  • Titles, names, short phrases, slogans (these can be covered by trademark in some cases)
  • Listings of ingredients or contents (without other material)
  • Ideas, procedures, methods, systems, processes, principles, discoveries, concepts, etc. (Some of these may be covered by patent law.)
  • Information that is entirely common property with no original content (standard calendars, measurements, height/weight charts, etc.)

In the United States (and a number of other countries), material created by federal or state governments as part of their work is also not under copyright. For example, photographs from NASA used for the Astronomy Photo of the Day are not under copyright, or photos taken by a National Park Service ranger in the course of their job.

This means that laws, congressional actions, government forms, etc. can be shared without worrying about copyright issues.

What is under copyright?

Answering whether a specific work is covered by copyright is a bit harder, because the law has changed several times. There are also different timelines for published works and unpublished ones.

In general, though, anything that was put in a fixed form after 1976 is probably protected by copyright law unless it is specifically exempted.

Material created between 1923 and 1976 might be protected, but it’s often complicated to figure out. During this time, there were a number of more substantial restrictions for how you had to publish materials to get copyright protection, and the copyright had to be renewed.

However, since it’s hard to tell, a best practice is to assume a given work in this time frame is protected unless you can determine it isn’t.

Almost all works before 1923 are now in the public domain (no longer protected by copyright), but there are some occasional odd exceptions.

One of the best known is Peter Pan. J.M. Barrie, the creator, gave the copyright to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Parliament passed an act giving it specific extended protection. This article explains the whole long complicated story. There are also sometimes differences between countries: this has affected publications like Sherlock Holmes.

Large gray area

Finally, there’s a large gray area. Copyright law was originally designed to create a balance protecting creators and encouraging innovation.

It’s important to protect creators and make it possible for them to benefit from the time, energy, and materials involved in creating things. Otherwise, many people wouldn’t put that kind of time into it. But it’s also important to allow people to share creations, riff off them (transformative works, we call that now), and use other people’s work to encourage, inspire, or support new innovation and creativity.

For example, what happens when you take a work by a particular artist, and use it in a meme (i.e. as part of a new creation, with added content or context or commentary)?

The case of Pepe the Frog is a very current example, and it’s also a good highlight of some of the issues between US (and UK and Commonwealth countries) approach to copyright law, and continental European approaches to copyright law, which often include more focus on the artist or author’s ‘moral rights’. Here’s an article about Pepe that goes into some of the details.

Copyright law (as I mentioned in early parts) can take a long time to catch up to new technology and new transformative uses that technology allows.

I’ll be digging into more specific examples (and some common confusions) in part 5. Next up, part 4, which will talk about fair use. (Because those examples will make more sense if we talk about fair use first.)

Copyright for Pagans : An introduction

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The Pagan community has recently had another round of commentary on people posting PDFs of books. These discussions often make it clear that a lot of people are confused both about copyright in general, and about how it specifically applies to some common uses in the Pagan community

That makes it time for me to do a series of posts on how copyright works, and some specific applications for the Pagan community and for common things that come up online. This first post explains why copyright is so complicated, and then will describe my background.

(Pssst. Posting complete copies of books or other works that are under copyright is not one of the complicated bits. It is against copyright unless you have permission to do so from the copyright holder. Period. End of statement.)

This series

I expect this will be a series of seven posts (it’s possible I might split one or more if they get very long.) Topics I’ll be covering include:

Copyright for Pagans: Why is copyright so complicated?

Why is copyright so complicated?

Copyright – especially in our current technological age – is exceedingly complicated. It’s no wonder people get really confused about parts of it.

On the other hand, some parts of it are really straightforward. You might not agree with them, but the lines are clear.

This series of posts will help sort out which parts are which, and what you should know about them for common Pagan uses.

History:

Copyright law in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some other countries with close legal ties to those places got its start in what is called “common law”

Copyright law in other places – like much of Western Europe – started from a different body of law, called “civil law”.

While there are places these two agree, there are also lots of places they disagree, or put different priorities on different things. The concept of “moral rights” is a common example here. Moral rights are the idea that an artist has some say over how their work is used after it’s made public (i.e. they sell it, put it on display, etc.) Common law mostly doesn’t consider moral rights in its decisions, but civil law countries often do.

Based on case law:

While there are legal statutes that define the laws, most of the actual details of how copyright law works have been decided as parts of specific cases brought before judges. If no one’s brought a suit about that specific combination of things yet, we don’t actually know how judges will rule.

This is why there’s no absolute list of how much it’s okay to share of a written work. What we have are a collection of cases where people have quoted segments, and different court decisions about whether that’s okay or not.  There are patterns, but no clear lines or boxes.

Most commonly, in the US, significant cases are decided by the circuit courts of appeals: there are eleven regional circuit courts in the US, plus one for the District of Columbia, and one for federal cases. This also makes things complicated because sometimes you have a case decided in one circuit court of appeal, and a very similar case decided differently in another circuit.

Third, because the details are often sorted out only when there’s a specific case that requires it, it can take a long time for some kinds of issues to be resolved. Someone has to do something that seems to be a violation, the copyright holder has to decide to bring suit, the suit has to work its way through the courts, the court has to make a decision, the decision gets appealed, and so on…

This makes things especially tangled when you’re talking about new technologies, particularly ones that involve copying, sharing, or distributing files in new ways.

Decisions and values:

One challenge in copyright law is that a lot of the pieces involve individual decisions, and reasonable, well-informed people can make different ones, especially about edge cases.

In some places, we’ve decided as a community that judges shouldn’t make particular kinds of judgement – for example, copyright law doesn’t generally consider if something is art, or what the specific artistic values are. At least not anymore. (There was a case right around 1900 about circus posters that established this.)

This makes some sense – judges are highly trained in the law, but not generally nearly so much in art theory, art history, philosophy, cultural theory, or other relevant topics. (And whether something’s art is something a lot of artists, scholars, philosophers, and people who enjoy artistic things can’t agree on either!)

Sometimes judges do have to learn new things, or judges with previous related experience may make different choices than someone without that experience. There are, for example, judges out there who also have experience as computer programmers: they’re going to bring different things to their decision-making about copyright cases involving computer code than someone who doesn’t have significant experience as a programmer.

Treaties:

One of the reasons that copyright is so complicated is that some of it is international law. Various countries have entered into a series of treaties to agree on what’s covered by copyright, and what countries need to do about that. The actual agreements involved are really complex, and there are some distinctly different approaches in different countries.

I’ll talk about a couple of them as we go on, but the one many people have heard of is the Berne Convention.

Like a lot of international law (or any kind of law where there are people with rather different ideas about what’s most important) a lot of copyright treaties are a series of compromises, and sorting out those compromises gets very confusing.

Along with the fundamental differences in the laws I mentioned above (in the section on complicated history), different countries want to reward or discourage different kinds of behaviour. Countries use laws to do this, so obviously coming up with treaties can get complicated, because they’ll have different laws.

Laws get changed:

Some of why copyright is complicated is that the laws get changed. Often this is for good reason – to make things more clear, to bring us into alignment with treaties, to deal with issues that keep coming up.

But it can also be really confusing.

One thing I’ll talk about more in the third post in this series, about what is under copyright, is that it depends when something was created.

Roughly speaking, almost everything before 1923 is in the public domain (no longer under copyright), and everything since 1976, you should assume it is unless you can determine differently.

But what about the fifty years in the middle? In that gap, it depends on a lot of different things – if there was a copyright notice when it was published or put in a fixed form, if it was published, if someone registered the copyright, if someone renewed that registration.

My professor for CopyrightX said that probably at least 80% of the things in this time period are no longer under copyright (because they didn’t do a step that was required under the laws at that time) but in many cases, we can’t tell, so it’s risky to assume something is no longer under copyright. Only a fraction of works were correctly registered, and many of those were not properly renewed.

Here’s the problem. There’s no universal database you can go to look up whether something is under copyright, or who holds the copyright currently if someone does. (I mentioned registration: you’d think that would help, but it helps much less than you’d think it should.)

So, if it’s a work that looks like it should be copyrighted, it’s often safer to treat it as if it were. Especially if you’re talking about books, musical performances, or movies where there’s ongoing commercial interest.

Where I learned what I know

I am not a lawyer. (I am also not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.) However, I am pretty well informed about copyright.

In various of my library jobs, I’ve been responsible for helping educate teachers, students, and colleagues about it, and about specific applications or situations. I’m aware of a wide range of sites that can be very helpful, some of which I’ll be linking to in these posts.

In spring of 2017, I wanted to deepen my knowledge, so I applied for and took the CopyrightX class offered by Harvard Law. It’s offered as an online course to a limited number of students (about 500) with an application process. We watched the same lectures as Harvard Law students in the equivalent course, answered many of the same questions on the final exam, and covered a lot of the same material. (They covered more case studies and had some additional expectations about the exam. Because, well, they were in law school.)

You can view the videos and other materials for the course yourself, they’re all made available online. The one thing you don’t have access to without applying to, being accepted in, and taking the course, are the sectional discussions (which I found very useful, but the public material also has lots of great helpful info in it.)

I did very well in the class – in the top 20% of the exams – but more importantly, it gave me a really good grounding in how copyright law in the United States (and a bunch of other countries, but we focused on the US) got like it is, the different theories that have been used to develop it, and I got to discuss key cases in depth.

At other times, I’ve also helped design an employer’s process for dealing with DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) violations, and been one of the people handling them for a large online site.

I’ve taught classes in the Pagan community (both one-shot workshops and ongoing classes). I create transformative works that combine elements of copyrighted works with new takes or new directions for various reasons. I also use sites where transformative works get shared, read fanfic, watch fanvids, etc. All of which is to say, I’m pretty familiar with a wide range of possible situations.

I did a presentation at Paganicon in 2013, just before this came up in the Pagan community in one of the periodic flares, and wrote up many of my notes about copyright at that time on my blog. I’ll be revisiting many of the ideas there in more detail in this series of posts.