David Kravets has published "A Spiritual Successor to Aaron Swartz Is Angering Publishers All Over Again" in Ars Technica.
Here's an excerpt:
Meet Alexandra Elbakyan, the developer of Sci-Hub, a Pirate Bay-like site for the science nerd. It's a portal that offers free and searchable access "to most publishers, especially well-known ones."
Kevin Smith has published "Here We Go Again: Latest GSU Ruling an Odd Victory for Libraries" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.
Here's an excerpt:
So this ruling, like each ruling in the case, is clearly a disaster for the plaintiff publishers. Once again it establishes that there is significant space for fair use in higher education, even when that use is not transformative. Nevertheless, it is a difficult victory for libraries, in the sense that the analysis it uses is not one we can replicate; we simply do not have access to the extensive data about revenue, of which Judge Evans makes such complex use.
The Center for Internet and Society has released "Digital Piracy Debunked: A Short Note on Digital Threats and Intermediary Liability."
Here's an excerpt:
This short paper shows that the "digital threat" discourse is based on shaky grounds. Two related arguments might run against this approach. First, market conditions might incentivise piracy. Additionally, there are raising doubts over the argument that piracy is a threat to creativity, especially in the digital environment.
According to an article by Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly, the Authors Guild vs. Google case is on the Supreme Court's calendar for its April 1 conference.
See also: "After Latest Filings, Google Case Now in Supreme Court's Hands."
Ernesto Van der Sar has published "Google Asked to Remove 100,000 'Pirate Links' Every Hour" in TorrentFreak.
Here's an excerpt:
Copyright holders are continuing to increase the number of pirate links they want Google to remove from its search results, which have now reached a record-breaking 100,000 reported URLs per hour. This remarkable milestone is more than double the number of pirated links that were reported around the same time last year.
The Department Of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force has released White Paper on Remixes, First Sale, and Statutory Damages.
Here's an excerpt:
The U.S. Department of Commerce has played a key role in addressing Internet policy-related issues since it launched the Internet Policy Task Force in April 2010. Two years ago, the Task Force published a Green Paper on Copyright Policy, Creativity and Innovation in the Digital Economy—the most comprehensive assessment of digital copyright policy issued by any Administration since 1995. The review process that culminated in this White Paper serves as a testament to the importance the Administration has placed on the development of updated and balanced copyright law in the digital environment.
Read more about it at "The Commerce Department Has Good Recommendations for Fixing Copyright Law —But More Is Needed."
The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at the American University Washington College of Law has released a digital video of Judge Pierre N. Leval's "Fair Use in the Digital Age: Reflections on the Fair Use Doctrine in Copyright Law" lecture.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
At the Fourth Annual Peter A. Jaszi Distinguished Lecture in Intellectual Property, Judge Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will present a lecture on the role of the fair use doctrine within the structure of copyright law. Judge Leval is responsible for introducing the concept of transformative use to United States fair use jurisprudence and will discuss the development of the doctrine to date. He is the author of the court's opinion in Authors Guild Inc., et al. v. Google, Inc. (October 16, 2015) in which the court held that Google's digitization of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. Judge Leval also authored Toward a Fair Use Standard, 103 HARV. L. REV. 1105 (1990).
The EFF has released "Trade Officials Announce Conclusion of TPP—Now the Real Fight Begins" by Maira Sutton.
Here's an excerpt:
Trade officials have announced today that they have reached a final deal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Their announcement came after a drawn out round of negotiation in Atlanta, Georgia, which was mainly held up around disagreements over medicine patent rules and tariffs over autos and dairy.
We have no reason to believe that the TPP has improved much at all from the last leaked version released in August, and we won't know until the U.S. Trade Representative releases the text. So as long as it contains a retroactive 20-year copyright term extension, bans on circumventing DRM, massively disproportionate punishments for copyright infringement, and rules that criminalize investigative journalists and whistleblowers, we have to do everything we can to stop this agreement from getting signed, ratified, and put into force.
The DPLA has published "Help the Copyright Office Understand How to Address Mass Digitization" in the DPLA Blog.
Here's an excerpt:
The U.S. Copyright Office recently issued a report and a request for comments on its proposal for a new licensing system intended to overcome copyright obstacles to mass digitization. While the goal is laudable, the Office's proposal is troubling and vague in key respects.
The overarching problem is that the Office's proposal doesn't fully consider how libraries and archives currently go about digitization projects, and so it misidentifies how the law should be improved to allow for better digital access. It's important that libraries and archives submit comments to help the Office better understand how to make recommendations for improvements.
The EFF has released "Important Win for Fair Use in 'Dancing Baby' Lawsuit."
Here's an excerpt:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents Stephanie Lenz, who-back in 2007-posted a 29-second video to YouTube of her children dancing in her kitchen. The Prince song "Let's Go Crazy" was playing on a stereo in the background of the short clip. Universal Music Group sent YouTube a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), claiming that the family video infringed the copyright in Prince's song. EFF sued Universal on Lenz's behalf, arguing that Universal abused the DMCA by improperly targeting a lawful fair use.
Today [September 14, 2015], the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that copyright holders like Universal must consider fair use before trying to remove content from the Internet. It also rejected Universal's claim that a victim of takedown abuse cannot vindicate her rights if she cannot show actual monetary loss.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association, has released Copyright Reform for a Digital Economy.
Here's an excerpt:
Congress can accommodate new technology innovation by:
(a) ensuring that fair use, which is integral to the fabric of the Copyright Act, remains a central consideration in any legislative effort;
(b) preserving the first sale doctrine to ensure that contractual restrictions do not limit the free movement of goods in the economy as more products increasingly incorporate digital components; and
(c) reforming the licensing landscape to ensure greater transparency as to copyright ownership and to better police against anticompetitive conduct, particularly where rights ownership is highly concentrated, and reforming Copyright Office functions to improve the quality and public availability of data about copyrighted works.
Maira Sutton has published "TPP Undermines User Control and That's Disastrous for Accessibility" in Deeplinks.
Here's an excerpt:
The passage of the Marrakesh Treaty led to a change in the TPP's Limitations and Exceptions section of the Intellectual Property chapter, expanding the definition of a legitimate use as one that is "facilitating access to works for persons who are blind, visually impaired, or otherwise print disabled" (some of this wording is still contested, but on the whole is included in the most recent leak of the agreement). This was of course a welcome change to see in the TPP.
What's worrying however, is that in order to pass a new international exception for other kinds of disabilities, such as for the deaf, it will require another agonizing, years-long process. While Marrakesh was intended to set a lower limit on the number of potential exceptions for accessibility, the wording of trade agreements like the TPP could turn the same language into an upper limit. This is due to its approach to copyright exceptions, exemplified by its "three-step test" provision. It's a set of criteria that governments must follow in order to pass any new exception (like say, allowing works to be used for educational or even accessibility purposes). In practice, the three-step test can embolden restrictions against using copyrighted works, rather than being more permissive like fair use.
So instead of providing only a narrow right to people with visual impairments, the TPP could include an exception that would help anyone who has difficulty accessing work due to a disability. But unlike at Marrakesh there are no representatives of the disabled to make that argument in the closed negotiating rooms of the TPP.
Jacqueline D. Lipton and John Tehranian have published "Derivative Works 2.0: Reconsidering Transformative Use in the Age of Crowdsourced Creation" in the Northwestern University Law Review.
Here's an excerpt:
As such, this Article reflects on the particular problems raised by the growth of crowdsourced projects and how our copyright regime can best address them. We conclude that future legal developments will require a thoughtful and sophisticated balance to facilitate free speech, artistic expression, and commercial profit. To this end, we suggest a number of options for legal reform, including: (1) reworking the strict liability basis of copyright infringement for noncommercial works, (2) tempering damages awards for noncommercial or innocent infringement, (3) creating an "intermediate liability" regime that gives courts a middle ground between infringement and fair use, (4) developing clearer ex ante guidelines for fair use, and (5) reworking the statutory definition of "derivative work" to exclude noncommercial remixing activities.
The House Judiciary Committee has released the 4/29/15 written testimony of Maria A. Pallante, United States Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office.
Here's an excerpt:
Related to the problem of orphan works, the Office is completing its analysis of copyright issues inherent to mass digitization projects. In our study, witnesses have described some of the difficulties presented by mass digitization projects under current copyright law, and proposed specific statutory solutions.
As hearing testimony indicated, the problem with respect to mass digitization is not so much a lack of information as a lack of efficiency in the licensing marketplace. For a digitization project involving hundreds, thousands, or millions of copyrighted works, the costs of securing ex ante permissions from every rightsholder individually often will exceed the value of the use to the user. Thus, even where a library or other repository agrees that a use requires permission and would be willing to pay for a license (e.g., to offer online access to a particular collection of copyrighted works), the burdens of rights clearance may effectively prevent it from doing so. To the extent that providing such access could serve valuable informational or educational purposes, this outcome is difficult to reconcile with the public interest.
While fair use may provide some support for limited mass digitization projects—up to a point—the complexity of the issue and the variety of factual circumstances that may arise compel a legislative solution. In the Office's view, the legitimate goals of mass digitization cannot be accomplished or reconciled under existing law other than in extremely narrow circumstances. For example, access to copyrighted works, something many view as a fundamental benefit of such projects, will likely be extremely circumscribed or wholly unavailable. For this reason, as part of its orphan works and mass digitization report, the Office will recommend a voluntary "pilot program" in the form of extended collective licensing ("ECL") that would enable full-text access to certain works for research and education purposes under a specific framework set forth by the Copyright Office, with further conditions to be developed through additional stakeholder dialogue and discussion. Such input is critical, we believe, because ECL is a market-based system intended to facilitate licensing negotiations between prospective users and collective management organizations representing copyright owners. Thus, the success of such a system depends on the voluntary participation of stakeholders.
ARL has signed The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
More than 50 organizations around the world—including ARL—have signed the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age, which calls for immediate changes to intellectual property (IP) law and the removal of other barriers preventing widened and more equal access to data. . . .
The declaration asserts that copyright was never designed to regulate the sharing of facts, data, and ideas—nor should it. The right to receive and impart information and ideas is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but the modern application of IP law often limits this right, even when these most simple building blocks of knowledge are used.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has released its 2015 Special 301 Report.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
The "Special 301" Report is an annual review of the global state of IPR protection and enforcement. USTR conducts this review pursuant to Section 182 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended by the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 and the Uruguay Round Agreements Act.
USTR reviewed seventy-two (72) trading partners for this year's Special 301 Report, and placed thirty-seven (37) of them on the Priority Watch List or Watch List.
In this year's Report, trading partners on the Priority Watch List present the most significant concerns this year regarding insufficient IPR protection or enforcement or actions that otherwise limited market access for persons relying on intellectual property protection. Thirteen countries—Algeria, Argentina, Chile, China, Ecuador, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, and Venezuela—are on the Priority Watch List. These countries will be the subject of particularly intense bilateral engagement during the coming year.
See also “Error: Copyright Balance Not Found in United States’ Special 301 Report” from the EFF.
The EFF has released Aaron's Law Reintroduced: CFAA Didn't Fix Itself by Cindy Cohn.
Here's an excerpt:
Aaron's law, the proposed law named in honor of Internet hero Aaron Swartz was reintroduced last week by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Senator Wyden (D-Ore.), with new co-sponsor Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.). This bill is the same as the one introduced in 2013 and we call upon Congress to move it forward.
The CFAA is one of the laws that is misused by prosecutors, piling on potential jail time to relatively minor charges in order to ratchet up pressure on defendants and get them to plead guilty rather than risk trial. In the time since Aaron's tragic death, EFF has continued to see misuses of the CFAA in prosecutions across the country. While this bill wouldn't fix everything that is wrong with the law, it would ensure that people won't face criminal liability for violating a terms of service agreement or other solely contractual agreements. It would also rein in some of the potential for prosecutorial discretion by limiting penalties and stop some of the game playing with duplicate charges that we continue to see. More specifics on our website, along with links to EFF's ongoing work in the courts can be found on our CFAA Issue page.
ARL has released "ARL Joins New Re:Create Coalition to Promote Balanced Copyright."
Here's an excerpt:
Today, April 28, 2015, ARL joined US technology companies, trade associations, and civil society organizations in the launch of Re:Create, a coalition that promotes balanced copyright policy. A balanced copyright system depends on limitations and exceptions, such as fair use. As technology advances, it is imperative that the copyright law is responsive to these changes, balancing the interests of creators of copyrighted information and products with the interests of users of those products.
Re:Create promotes and defends the important balance of copyright. ARL's member institutions, as well as the general public, depend on balanced copyright that includes robust limitations and exceptions. A balanced system ensures that copyright does not limit or impede new and valuable technologies and uses.
Kevin Smith has published "Steps toward a New GSU Ruling" in Scholarly Communication @ Duke University.
Here's an excerpt:
It appears that once again the publishers have failed in an effort to broaden the scope of the case beyond the item-by-item fair use analysis that has already been done and to possibly reintroduce some of the broad principles that they really want, which have so far been rejected at every stage. Now Judge Evans has explicitly told them, in her scheduling order, that what is required is "consideration and reevaluation of each of the individual claims" in order to redetermine "in each instance… whether defendants' use was a fair use under 17 U.S.C. section 107." Her schedule for the briefs is tight, with an end of the briefing now scheduled just two and a half months from now. Presumably we would still have a long wait while Judge Evans applies revised reasoning about fair use to each of the individual excerpts, but it looks a bit more like that is what is going to happen.
The EFF has released "Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act' Targets Many of DMCA Section 1201's Problems" by Mitch Stoltz.
Here's an excerpt:
On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Jared Polis introduced a new bill to fix many of the problems that Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act causes for free speech, privacy, security research, and innovation. Called the "Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act," the bill would make it a little easier to get three-year exemptions to the DMCA's ban on circumventing digital restrictions. It also expands and clarifies the exemptions for encryption research, security testing, strengthening privacy, and reverse engineering. . . .
There's another bill that strikes at the root of the problem. Just a few weeks ago, Representative Zoe Lofgren, along with Representatives Massie, Polis, and Eshoo, re-introduced the Unlocking Technology Act. It makes a simple and straightforward change to Section 1201 of the DMCA: circumventing DRM would only be illegal if a person intends to infringe copyright. With that change, extracting video clips from digital media to make fair uses, as well as modifying our own digital devices and making work more accessible would all be free from legal threats under the DMCA.
EFF has released "The Blurred Lines Copyright Verdict Is Bad News for Music."
Here's an excerpt:
Artists evoke elements of common culture all the time, to make their point or simply to entertain by putting their own twist on what has come before. This is what makes culture a conversation and not a series of disjointed soliloquies. Copyright law, though, is dangerously disconnected with the way culture gets made, and as a result it pushes entire genres and communities to the margins, such as those that involve sampling, remix, and other adaptations. A staggering amount of such work is generated noncommercially and available online, but the broad sweep of copyright exclusivity, the risk of disproportionate statutory damages, and the uneven application of the fair use doctrine mean that such authors are typically excluded from commercial opportunities. Far from being incentivized by copyright, such authors typically create in spite of the threats posed by copyright law.
According to "Publishers' Move Could Mean 'Whole New Trial' in GSU Copyright Case," the plaintiffs have filed a motion to "reopen the trial record, and have asked that new evidence be used to determine whether some of the university's online e-reserve course readings are infringing copyright."
The article also mentions a recent e-print by Brandon Butler, "Transformative Teaching and Educational Fair Use after Georgia State."
Here's an excerpt from the e-print:
The latest installment in the history of educational fair use, the 11th Circuit's opinion in the Georgia State e-reserves case, may be the last judicial word on the subject for years to come, and I argue that its import is primarily in its rejection of outdated guidelines and case law, rather than any affirmative vision of fair use (which the court studiously avoids). Because of the unique factual context of the case, it stops short of bridging the gap between educational fair use and modern transformative use jurisprudence. With help from recent scholarship on broad patterns in fair use caselaw, I pick up where the GSU court left off, describing a variety of common educational uses that are categorizable as transformative, and therefore entitled to broad deference under contemporary fair use doctrine. In the process, I show a way forward for vindicating fair use rights, and first amendment rights, by applying the transformative use concept at lower levels of abstraction to help practice communities make sense of the doctrine.
The UK has launched a new licensing program for orphan works that will cover around 91 million works.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
A new licensing scheme launched today (29 October 2014) could give wider access to at least 91 million culturally valuable creative works-including diaries, photographs, oral history recordings and documentary films.
These works are covered by copyright, but rights holders cannot be found by those who need to seek permission to reproduce them. Under the new scheme, a licence can be granted by the Intellectual Property Office so that these works can be reproduced on websites, in books and on TV without breaking the law, while protecting the rights of owners so they can be remunerated if they come forward.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
Kevin Smith has published "A Reversal for Georgia State" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.
Here's an excerpt:
The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has issued its ruling in the publisher appeal of a district court decision that found most instances of electronic reserve copying at Georgia State to be fair use. The appellate court ruling is 129 pages long, and I will have much more to say after I read it carefully. But the hot news right now is that the Court of Appeals has reversed the District Court's judgment and remanded the case back for proceedings consistent with the new opinion. The injunction issued by the District Court and the order awarding costs and attorney's fees to GSU have been vacated.
Read more about it at "Publishers Win Reversal of Court Ruling That Favored 'E-Reserves' at Georgia State U." and "A Win for Publishers."
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
Nicholas Ruiz has self-archived "Copyright's Paradox: The Public Interest and Private Monopoly."
Here's an excerpt:
Copyright in its current state presents two major concerns: 1) The broad scope of the derivative right undermines the idea/expression dichotomy and adds doubt in the minds of the secondary users; and 2) The custom of extending durations of "existing" copyrights is unconstitutional and is causing a stagnate public domain. As a consequence of these problems, the free flow of ideas and dissemination of information has been thwarted. In response to these problems, I have researched possible remedies, looking to copyright systems abroad, other legal scholars, our history, and other developed areas of law.
There must be some kind of mechanism to limit Congress' ability of extending existing copyright terms; otherwise the Constitutional mandate of a "limited" term will have no consequence. This comment suggests reinstating requisite formalities, the two-term copyright regime, and a new formulation of the derivative works right.
Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"
