The Durationator™ seeks to make the past usable one query at a time by providing legal information regarding the copyright term of any given cultural work in any jurisidiction around the world. We are currently in our final summer of intense research/coding and we will begin the testing phase in the late summer/early fall 2010.

The Tulane Law School Usable Past Copyright Project, and the Durationator(R) software tool have been funded by a Tulane University Research Enhancement Grant and IDEA grant from the Technology Transfer Office.

The Durationator™ stems from my own questions when I used letters, diaries, photographs and other cultural texts in my doctoral dissertation in the 1990s. In order to legally use someone else's cultural work-there are three legal paths. First, one can ask permission from the copyright holder, but sometimes, as in the case of criticism or parody, it would be unlikely that a copyright holder would permit such use. Fair use is another possibility for users of cultural works. A third possibility is that the work is in the public domain.

Once a works passes into the public domain, that work can be used without permission or restriction by copyright-but when does the copyright term of any given work end? Was the law different if the works, as in my case, concerned foreign authors? What could I do with these newly discovered public domain works-that is, were the laws the same if I used the work in the U.S., Canada, or the UK-as my work concerned a British author whose archive materials were housed in Canada, and I was writing in the U.S. After completing my Ph.D. in European Cultural and Intellectual history at UCLA, I went on to law school to better understand the law surrounding the daily work of a historian. I am now an Associate Professor of Law at Tulane University Law School, and it is here that I found a place to work on the research questions I came to find most important as a historian-the law surrounding the culture of our world.

As it turns out, my questions-about fair use, using materials on the Internet, the copyright status of any given work, and of course, the public domain-were questions that other users also asked. The questions did not change for artists, filmmakers, teachers, librarians, or others using materials. We all struggled to find the answers. I often say that my current self-a law professor specializing in Intellectual Property law-is building the Durationator™ for my old self-a European history doctoral student who just wanted to know if there were works she could use without restrictions or asking permissions.

The idea for the Durationator™ came about in the Summer 2007, when a then-rising 2L, Matt Miller, contacted me. He had seen my work on property law and Second Life, and wanted to know if I needed a research assistant. He mentioned that he had been a software engineer prior to entering law school. At the same time, someone emailed me to ask a question about the term of copyright on a set of poems, a question that should have been easy to answer, as it concerned the poems written by my dissertation subject. The research took many months, and I vowed that there had to be an easier way. I approached Matt about trying to make a software tool that would incorporate all the law necessary to determine when a work comes into the public domain. He said he could do that. Nearly two years later, we are releasing the beta version of The Durationator™.

The project has grown in scope and in size. We have (I think) over 200 "questions" with -and that is just the U.S. law. That doesn't include the nearly two hundred countries and dependencies we have included as part of the software tool (and plan to expand to many others), or the other questions we will be working on this summer that will hopefully open up new exciting spaces of the public domain.

Finally, the Durationator™ had unexpected benefits. As a new professor at TLS, the project gave me the opportunity to meet and work with so many people-it brought added community. For, the Durationator™ is really a Tulane product. I have had the opportunity to chat with people in different parts of the university, employed nearly two dozen students at the law school, and a few from main campus, and of course, my colleagues at the law school have been incredibly supportive-former Dean Ponoroff, of course, but also Interim Dean Stephen Griffin, Brooke Overby, Jancy Hoeffel, Oliver Houck, Tania Tetlow, Catherine Hancock, Cindy Samuels, Claire Dickerson, Paul Barron, Vernon Palmer, Sandra Queiroz, Joel Friedman, Martin Davies, Keith Werhan, and of course, Glynn Lunney, who has been incredibly kind and supportive of his junior colleague. This has been true of my colleagues in the larger IP community as well, especially Kenneth Crews and Peter Hirtle, who have answered my questions and played my "what if" games for the last year. But also thanks to Diane Zimmerman, Peter Jaszi, Graeme Dinwoodie, Bobbi Kwall, Pamela Samuelson, Tony Reese, Jamie Boyle, Mark Rose, Tyler Ochoa, and many others, who have contributed thoughts and comments to the project. Also, to David Nimmer and Bill Patry who both willingly let me demonstrate the Durationator(tm), and both provided encouraging words of support.

Thanks to Tulane University Associate Senior Vice President for Research, Laura Levy, for seeing value in the Usable Past Project and the Durationator™ in the award of the two-year Research Enhancement Grant, and to Yvette Jones, Senor Vice President for External Affiars, Tulane University for her continued support of the project. And more thanks to John Christie (and team at the Technology Transfer Office), and attorneys C.G. Moore and Warner J. Delaune for all of support as well. Andy Romero, Christine Hoffman, and Tim Williamson have also been incredibly supportive and kind. The Tulane Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property did the final editing and proofing. But it was the TLS students who have really helped to create the Durationator™-it is both my vision and theirs.

The project could not have been completed without Matt Miller-or many other students who contributed their time, energy, creativity, kindness, and perseverance. The design and front-end code was the inspiration of Ben Varadi. Evan Dicharry has taken the lead in the International section. Wendy Hadfield and Stavros Panagoulopoulos conquered the CCE records. Justin Levy has always been our legal engineer. Many have helped with the research including Jeffery Pastorek, Daniel Beuke, Michael Aisen, Wesley Garten, Jeremy Johnson, Neil Mikeska, Katherine Quander, Charles Smith, Franscisco Besosa, Jessica DeNisi, Eric Arnold, Ben Turpen, Patricia Guzman, John McNew and Benjamin Feldman), Severen Roberts) Ryan Kelley, Amiel Provosty, Tina Hua, Hilary Adams, Kimba Hart, Brendon Creekbaum, Blake Simon, Elizabeth Dufour, to name just a few. Even the artwork-that is not artwork from the public domain-comes from the TLS community and also my daughter, K.

Portions of the research underlying the software was presented at the Works in Progress IP Colloquium, 2008 (American University) and 2009 (Tulane University), and the first presentation of the idea of the Durationator™ took place in the supportive environment of a TLS faculty "Brown Bag" lunch in the Fall 2008. We have benefited from early beta testing from materials and support at the Jazz Archive and Amistad Collection at Tulane University Law School, and the Fair Use Project at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society. We were also greatly benefited by the loan from the New Orleans Public Library of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, since Tulane's copy was unfortunately destroyed during Katrina. And there are so many more. As we continue our beta process, I will continue the thank you list. But we also found great guidance from TLS alumni as well, especially Robert C. Hinckley.

Many, including Peter Jaszi, the American University's Center for Social Media and Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project at the Center for Internet and Society, have gone far to make fair use more usable for works still under copyright. Creative Commons have made contemporary copyrighted works more accessible through legal documents creating licensing and dedication to the public domain. The Durationator™ hopes to join those efforts by providing legal information of when cultural works from our past become usable, "free as the air to common use." Int'l News Serv. v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215, 250 (1918) (Brandeis, J., dissent). This is a famous phrase used to describe the public domain. The Durationator™ hopes to help more of our past become usable, and therefore available for common use.

So, the Durationator™ began as a quest to make my own legal questions and research more available and accessible for others. I hope the tool helps others, like my old self (and actually current self), wondering the copyright status of a particular advertisement, postcard, sound recording, or manuscript.

Dr. Elizabeth Townsend Gard,
Associate Professor, Tulane University Law School

Special Thanks

A great deal of people have helped us on this project, in big ways and small. Again, to Dean Lawrence Ponoroff, who encouraged me from the beginning to "Dream big." His support has been extremely appreciated. And of course, to Glynn Lunney. But also thanks to Diane Zimmerman, Peter Jaszi, Graeme Dinwoodie, Bobbi Kwall, Pamela Samuelson, Tony Reese, Jamie Boyle, Mark Rose, Tyler Ochoa, David Levine, David Olson, Colette Vogele, Larry Lessig, Lauren, Gelman, Michael Carroll, Paul Heald, Graeme Dinwoodie, Diane Zimmerman, Graeme Austin, Larry Lessig, Jon Philips, Bill Carney and many others, who have contributed thoughts and comments to the project. Thanks also to the Leverhulme Trust postdoctoral grant, for the 2005-06 year at the London School of Economics, and Queen Mary, where a talk I gave there began a quest for understanding the differences and distinctions in copyright law within a comparative and international context. And thanks to Cathy Dunn, Kimberly Glorioso, Carla Pritchett, Sharon Stevenson, Andrea Brigalia, Janice Sayas, Todd Stamps, Patrick Dunn, and everyone at Tulane Law School that have been so supportive on the project. And thanks to Cathy Dunn, Kimberly Glorioso, Carla Pritchett, Sharon Stevenson, Andrea Brigalia, Todd Stamps, Patrick Dunn, and all of the others at Tulane Law School that have been so supportive on the project.