Users are no longer required to seek permission to copy and use public domain material digitized by Cornell University Library and posted on Cornell's Web sites.

The new rules also apply to materials Cornell supplies to such sites as the Internet Archive and to public domain documents digitized in response to individual requests to the library.

For several years Cornell Library has been scanning books and other documents from its shelves, many of them rare and out of print. A recent grant from Microsoft Corp. greatly expanded the effort -- more than 100,000 items are now in digital form as PDF reproductions of the original pages and as searchable text. Contents include agriculture and engineering texts, illustrated natural history guides, census reports, personal memoirs of historical figures and other documents of interest to scholars who would otherwise have to travel to Ithaca and search through library stacks to use them.

Although most of the original materials are in the public domain, Cornell, like many other institutions, had required that users seek permission to use in their own publications digitized versions of materials from some special Cornell collections. This has been a common practice with rare and unusual materials, said Peter Hirtle, intellectual policy adviser for the library, who led the drafting of the new policy. For example, he said, the Louvre will ask a payment for the use of an image it supplies of the Mona Lisa, even though the work itself is clearly in the public domain.

But "it interfered with our mission," Hirtle said. "We want people to build upon [these materials] and use them to create interesting new works."

"The threat of legal action does little to stop bad actors while at the same time limits the good uses that can be made of digital surrogates," added Anne Kenney, Carl A. Kroch University Librarian. "We decided it was more important to encourage the use of the public domain materials in our holdings than to impose roadblocks."