DigitalKoans

The University of Michigan Libraries have made over 100,000 metadata records from its MBooks collection available for OAI-PMH harvesting. The records are for digitized books in the public domain.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The University of Michigan Library is pleased to announce that records from our MBooks collection are available for OAI harvesting. The MBooks collection consists of materials digitized by Google in partnership with the University of Michigan.

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=Identify

Only records for MBooks available in the public domain are exposed. We have split these into sets containing public domain items according to U.S. copyright law, and public domain items worldwide. There are currently over 100,000 records available for harvesting. We anticipate having 1 million records available when the entire U-M collection has been digitized by Google.

Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice didn't introduce a DMCA-style copyright bill yesterday, and there is speculation that this due to increasing protests against the bill.

According to "Industry Canada Holds Off on Copyright Reform Bill," Prentice said that the: "bill would not be tabled [introduced] in the House until such time as myself and the minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Office Languages are satisfied."

Read more about it at "'Canadian DMCA' Delayed, Protestors Cautiously Optimistic," "Canadian Netroots Rise Up Against Tory Copyright Plans," "CBC on the Canadian DMCA Delay," and "Prentice's Moment."

The University of Michigan Libraries have released the UMich OAI Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This toolkit contains both harvester and data provider, both written in Perl. . . .

UMHarvester is a robust tool using LWP for harvesting nigh on every OAI data provider available. It allows for incremental harvesting, has multiple re-try options, and a batch harvest tool (Batch_UMHarvest) that can automatically perform incremental harvesting.

UMProvider relies heavily on libxml (XML::LibXML) and will store the data in nearly any relational database. It functions by harvesting from a database of records, making rights determinations from a separate database, and providing the resulting set of records.

Originally, only the UMHarvester was available from UM's DLXS software site. The UMProvider tool is newly developed and takes the place of our DLXS data provider tool.

The Library of Congress will be rolling out new on-site interactive exhibits starting with "Exploring the Early Americas" on December 13th. Web versions will be available at a future time. Check out an online example

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Noted copyright lawyer William Patry, who is Google's Senior Copyright Counsel and who is the author of the seven-volume Patry on Copyright, has published a trenchant analysis of the PRO IP bill ("What Does It Mean to Be Pro-IP?"). (Note that Patry indicates in his blog that:"The views in this blog are strictly mine and should not be attributed to Google Inc.")

Here's an excerpt:

This provision [SEC. 104. COMPUTATION OF STATUTORY DAMAGES IN COPYRIGHT CASES] is one of the most gluttonous in the whole bill. It seeks to expand radically the amount of statutory damages that can be recovered, and in cases where there are zero actual damages. The provision is intended to benefit the record industry but will have terrible consequences for many others; the provision has nothing to do with piracy and counterfeiting; instead it seeks to undo rulings in the 2000 MP3.com litigation, a decidedly non-piracy or counterfeiting case, instead involving the use of digital storage lockers. Under the original MP3.com decision, where a CD had twelve tracks, there was only one award of statutory damages possible. Under the bill, there may be 25: there would be 12 for each track on the sound recording, 1 for the sound recording as a whole, and 12 for each musical composition. Under this approach, for one CD the minimum award for non-innocent infringement must be $18,750, for a CD that sells in some stores at an inflated price of $18.99 and may be had for much less from amazon.com or iTunes. The maximum amount of $150,000 then becomes three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars per CD. Now multiple that times a mere ten albums, and one gets a glimpse at the staggering amount that will be routinely sought, not just in suits filed, but more importantly in thousands for cease and desist letters, where grandmothers and parents are shaken down for the acts of their wayward offspring. These private non-negotiable demands don’t see the light of day, but they have resulted in "settlements" wherein ordinary people have paid abnormal amounts of money rather than be hauled into court and thereby incur costs that will bankrupt them. One only wishes Congress would hold a hearing on this practice.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industries has sent a letter to European ISPs asking them to filter unlicensed audio files based on digital fingerprints, to block "objectionable" peer-to-peer downloading services, and to block "infringing" Websites.

Read more about it at "IFPI's European Christmas List: Content Filtering and P2P Blocking" and "Music Industry Pressures EU Politicians for Filtered Internet."

Rice University has released the Travelers in the Middle East Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic License.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

IMEA provides access to:

• Nearly 1,000 images, including stereocards, postcards and book illustrations
• More than 150 historical maps representing the Middle East as it was in the 19th and early 20th centuries
• Interactive geographical information systems (GIS) maps that serve as an interface to the collection and present detailed information about features such as waterways, elevation and populated places
• Successive editions of classic travel guides and major museum collection catalogues
• Convenient educational modules that set materials from the collection in historical and geographic context and explore the research process

TIMEA is able to offer seamless access for researchers by providing a common user interface to digital objects housed in three repositories. Texts, historical maps and images reside in DSpace, an open-source digital repository system. Educational research modules are presented within Connexions, an open-content commons and publishing platform for educational materials. TIMEA also uses Google Maps and ESRI’s ArcIMS map server.

The rapid passage of the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act of 2007 (SAFE Act) in the U.S. House of Representatives has left confusion and controversy in its wake about whether the owners of public Wi-Fi access points must report digital child pornography that they are aware of to the CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children or face massive fines. It appears that this was not the intent of the bill's authors, but the wording of the bill could be interpreted by courts to include libraries and other public Wi-Fi access point owners: "Whoever, while engaged in providing an electronic communication service or a remote computing service to the public through a facility or means of interstate or foreign commerce . . ."

Read more about it at "House Vote on Illegal Images Sweeps in Wi-Fi, Web Sites"; "SAFE Act Won't Turn Mom-and-Pop Shops into WiFi Cops"; and "Wi-Fi 'Illegal Images' Politician Defends Legislation."

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has approved Adobe PDF (Portable Document Format) 1.7 as the ISO 32000 standard (DIS). Comments about the new standard will be addressed early next year, and they will either be resolved, followed by the publication of a revision of the standard, or the DIS standard will become a Final Draft International Standard (FDIS), subject to a two-month vote.

Read more about it at: "Adobe's PDF Now an ISO Standard" and "PDF Approved as International Standard."