Intimacy Gone Awry: Copyright and Special Collections

Copyright and special collections share an intimate relationship gone awry. This article explores copyright principles, their underpinnings and origins in the United States, and contemporary applications of them. The contemporary limits impose unreasonable barriers to the widespread sharing of special collections and reflect unnecessarily broad protections of and limits on an enormous range of creative works regardless of the social consequences of that protection or any demonstrable inherent or remaining economic value in those works. Copyright interpretation requires highly fact specific analysis. For many special collections, much of that factual predicate has simply drifted from the historical record.