U of Arkansas’ ‘intellectual property rights’ to Clinton recordings wholly imaginary

By Dan Greenberg | The Arkansas Project

You might recall our story last week about the intemperate letter that University of Arkansas library dean Carolyn Henderson Allen sent to the Washington Free Beacon. That letter told the Beacon: you must “cease and desist your ongoing violation of the intellectual property rights of the University of Arkansas.” Allen didn’t like the fact that the Beacon had quoted some materials from the archives without filling out the proper “Permission to Publish Request Form”; she therefore demanded that the Beacon take down the information that it had received from the university’s archives and surrender all copies of the materials it held.

Allen’s demands were overheated enough that the PR experts at the U of A followed up with some more temperate language. The subsequent unsigned statement the university issued (it’s credited to “University Libraries”) explains that “the bottom line” is that the Beacon’s research privileges were suspended because it “failed to obtain permission to publish copyrighted material.”

at The Arkansas Project.