Category: Author Rights

"The AI Copyright Hype: Legal Claims That Didn’t Hold Up"


Over the past year, two dozen AI-related lawsuits and their myriad infringement claims have been winding their way through the court system. None have yet reached a jury trial. While we all anxiously await court rulings that can inform our future interaction with generative AI models, in the past few weeks, we are suddenly flooded by news reports with titles such as “US Artists Score Victory in Landmark AI Copyright Case,” “Artists Land a Win in Class Action Lawsuit Against A.I. Companies,” “Artists Score Major Win in Copyright Case Against AI Art Generators”—and the list goes on. The exuberant mood in these headlines mirror the enthusiasm of people actually involved in this particular case (Andersen v. Stability AI). The plaintiffs’ lawyer calls the court’s decision “a significant step forward for the case.” “We won BIG,” writes the plaintiff on X.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the reality behind these headlines and statements. The “BIG” win in fact describes a portion of the plaintiffs’ claims surviving a pretrial motion to dismiss. If you are already familiar with the motion to dismiss per Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 12(b)(6), please refer to Part II to find out what types of claims have been dismissed early on in the AI lawsuits.

https://tinyurl.com/rhmzkr8y

| Artificial Intelligence |
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"Summary of User Rights Network Symposium: Protecting Copyright User Rights from Contractual Override "


In this paper, Benson, Blumenthal, and Klosek summarize the proceedings of the public symposium on the “Protection of Copyright User Rights from Contractual Override.” The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL)—together, the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA)—sponsored the symposium in partnership with the American University Washington College of Law Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP). The paper includes summaries of each panel, questions that were discussed, and takeaways for the library community to consider.

https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v7i2.20856

| Artificial Intelligence |
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| Digital Scholarship |

"Judge Will Toss Part of Authors’ AI Copyright Lawsuit "


According to Reuters, judge Vince Chhabria said the authors’ allegations that text generated by Llama infringes their copyrights simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. "When I make a query of Llama, I’m not asking for a copy of Sarah Silverman’s book—I’m not even asking for an excerpt," Chhabria observed, noting that, under the authors’ theory, a side-by-side comparison of text generated by the AI application and Silverman’s book would have to show they are similar.

However, the judge said he will not dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning the authors will be allowed to amend and refile their claims.

https://tinyurl.com/sd4wbba4

| Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography | Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography | Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Supporting Open Access for 20 Years: Five Issues That Have Slowed the Transition to Full and Immediate OA"


Current estimates suggest that more than 50% of the world’s research articles are published open access and that there are around 20,000 fully OA journals. Data also indicates that publishing OA is, on average, cheaper than publishing in subscription journals. For example, an analysis by Delta Think shows that around 45% of all scholarly articles were published as paid-for open access in 2021, but this accounted for just under 15% of the total journal publishing revenue.

However, after two decades of discussions, advocacy, policy development and strategy, can this level of OA be considered a success, particularly when half of all research articles published today is hidden behind a paywall? I think not.

https://tinyurl.com/2s396wh7

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"Open Access and University IP Policies in the United States"


Although the existing, somewhat messy, maze of institutional IP policies, publishing agreements, and OA policies can seem daunting, understanding their terms is important for authors who want to see their works made openly available. I’ll leave for another day to explore whether it’s a good thing that the rights situation is so complex. In many situations, rights thickets like these can be a real detriment to authors and access to their works. In this case the situation is at least nuanced such that authors are able to leverage pre-existing licenses to avoid negotiating away the bundle of rights they need to see their works made available openly.

https://tinyurl.com/3ttpd7my

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"The Rights of UC Authors Are at Stake. Here’s What We Are Doing about It."


"We have learned that many publishers are requiring UC authors to sign misleading License to Publish agreements, which undermine the spirit and intent of [UC’s open access policies]," wrote Susan Cochran, Chair of the faculty Academic Senate PDF.

By purporting to restrict an author’s abilities to reuse their own work, "these agreements essentially turn faculty authors into readers, as opposed to creators and owners of their own work," the Academic Senate chair concludes.

The team that leads negotiations with scholarly publishers on behalf of the university, including representatives from UC’s California Digital Library, the 10 campus libraries, and the Academic Senate, is now taking up the charge, making author rights the next frontier in advocating for the UC research community.

https://tinyurl.com/mry3hczw

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| Digital Scholarship |

"Authors Join the Brewing Legal Battle over AI"


Neither Meta nor OpenAI has yet responded to the author suits. But multiple copyright lawyers told PW on background that the claims likely face an uphill battle in court. Even if the suits get past the threshold issues associated with the alleged copying at issue and how AI training actually works—which is no sure thing—lawyers say there is ample case law to suggest fair use. For example, a recent case against plagiarism detector TurnItIn.com held that works could be ingested to create a database used to expose plagiarism by students. The landmark Kelly v. Arriba Soft case held that the reproduction and display of photos as thumbnails was fair use.

https://tinyurl.com/bddvrykh

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"Read Your Open Access Publishing Agreements, Or: How You Might Accidentally Give Elsevier or Wiley the Exclusive Right to Profit from Your OA Article"


Those publishing agreements do provide what many authors want in OA publishing—free online access and broad reuse rights to users. But, if authors select the wrong option, they are also giving away their own residual rights while granting Elsevier or Wiley the exclusive right to commercially exploit their work. That includes the right for those publishers to exclude the author herself from making or authorizing even the most basic of commercial uses, such as posting the article to a for-profit repository like Researchgate or even SSRN. This is not a result I think most authors intend, but it’s hard to spot the problem unless you read these publication agreements carefully.

https://tinyurl.com/mrytecfk

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| Digital Scholarship |

"Open Access Author Contracts and Alignment with the Open Ethos: A Global Study"


Author contracts in scholarly publishing serve to outline the rights and permissions for each party in the use and redistribution of a work throughout the life of its copyright term. Although rights and licensing expectations for open access publishing—the “open access ethos”—have been detailed in the Budapest Declaration, Plan S Principles, and other documentation, studies that explore the implementation of these ideals in contracts between authors and publishers have been limited in focus and scope. This study seeks to initiate a holistic approach toward evaluating open access journal agreements that is not limited by region or discipline, with the aim of discerning best practices as well as delineating common points of deviation. The authors distributed a survey to contacts from journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), including both journals with and without a DOAJ Seal. The results suggest that DOAJ Seal status is central to alignment with the open access ethos and that there is more misunderstanding about the importance of copyright and licensing terms than shown in previous research. This research contributes to discussions pursuing a future of open access publishing that supports authors’ rights as a central tenet.

https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.84.4.605

| Research Data Curation and Management Works |
| Digital Curation and Digital Preservation Works |
| Open Access Works |
| Digital Scholarship |

Opening Knowledge: Retaining Rights and Open Licensing in Europe


This report investigates the current landscape of non-legislative policy practices affecting researchers and authors in the authors’ rights and licensing domain. It is an outcome of research conducted by Project Retain led by SPARC Europe, as part of the Knowledge Rights 21 programme. The report concludes with a set of recommendations for institutional policymakers, funders and legislators, and publishers. It is accompanied by the study dataset.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8084050

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| Digital Scholarship |

"When We Say We Demand a Better Deal, We Mean More Than a Good Price.": "NERL Demands a Better Deal"

https://cutt.ly/el6AL5M

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Now 41 Members: "UT System Joins Texas Library Coalition to Improve Access to Scientific Journals"

https://tinyurl.com/y65nea4a

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"The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access"

Julie Baldwin and Stephen Pinfield have published "The UK Scholarly Communication Licence: Attempting to Cut through the Gordian Knot of the Complexities of Funder Mandates, Publisher Embargoes and Researcher Caution in Achieving Open Access" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

Whilst take-up of open access (OA) in the UK is growing rapidly due partly to a number of funder mandates, managing the complexities of balancing compliance with these mandates against restrictive publisher policies and ingrained academic priorities, has resulted in UK higher education institutions (HEIs) often struggling with confused researchers, complex workflows, and rising costs. In order to try to address this situation, the UK Scholarly Communication Licence (UK-SCL) was formulated to bypass the root causes of many of these challenges by implementing a licensing mechanism for multiple-mandate compliance in one single policy. This is the first empirical study to focus on the genesis of the UK-SCL and how its implementation has been conceived thus far. A qualitative research method was used, taking the form of 14 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from the initiative across the UK. The results indicate that those working within UK HEIs are concerned with the complexity of the current OA policy landscape and are frustrated with the inertia within the current system, which has resulted in higher costs, further publisher restrictions, and has not addressed the underlying tensions in academic culture. The UK-SCL is seen by its initiators as a way to achieve further transition towards OA and take back some element of control of the content produced at their institutions. The study concludes by modelling the ways in which the UK-SCL is intended to impact relationships between key stakeholders, and discussing possible implementation futures.

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Entire Editorial Board of Journal of Library Administration Resigns

There have been several reports stating that the editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration has resigned. The Journal of Library Administration is published by Taylor & Francis, which publishes a number of library and information science journals.

Here's an excerpt from Brian Mathews's "So I'm Editing This Journal Issue and . . ." in which he quotes an e-mail from Damon Jaggars:

"The Board believes that the licensing terms in the Taylor & Francis author agreement are too restrictive and out-of-step with the expectations of authors in the LIS community."

"A large and growing number of current and potential authors to JLA have pushed back on the licensing terms included in the Taylor & Francis author agreement. Several authors have refused to publish with the journal under the current licensing terms."

"Authors find the author agreement unclear and too restrictive and have repeatedly requested some form of Creative Commons license in its place."

"After much discussion, the only alternative presented by Taylor & Francis tied a less restrictive license to a $2995 per article fee to be paid by the author. As you know, this is not a viable licensing option for authors from the LIS community who are generally not conducting research under large grants."

"Thus, the Board came to the conclusion that it is not possible to produce a quality journal under the current licensing terms offered by Taylor & Francis and chose to collectively resign."

The Editorial Board members are:

Damon Jaggars (Editor)
Kristin Antelman
Chris Bourg
Lisa German
Fred M. Heath
Paula T. Kaufman
Deanna B. Marcum
Sarah C. Michalak
James G. Neal
Ann J. Wolpert
Makoto Nakamoto
Stephen Town

Read more about it at "Editorial Board Resigns from T&F Journal to Protest Restrictive Licensing," "The Journal of Library Administration," and "My Short Stint on the JLA Editorial Board."

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"Licensing Revisited: Open Access Clauses in Practice"

Birgit Schmidt and Kathleen Shearer have published "Licensing Revisited: Open Access Clauses in Practice" in the Future Issue section of LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access increases the visibility and use of research outputs and promises to maximize the return on our public investment in research. However, only a minority of researchers will "spontaneously" deposit their articles into an open access repository. Even with the growing number of institutional and funding agency mandates requiring the deposit of papers into the university repository, deposit rates have remained stubbornly low. As a result, the responsibility for populating repositories often falls onto the shoulders of library staff and/or repository managers. Populating repositories in this way—which involves obtaining the articles, checking the rights, and depositing articles into the repository—is time consuming and resource intensive work.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), a global association of repository initiatives and networks, is promoting a new strategy for addressing some of the barriers to populating repositories, involving the use of open access archiving clauses in publisher licenses. These types of clauses are being considered by consortia and licensing agencies around the world as a way of ensuring that all the papers published by a given publisher are cleared for deposit into the institutional repository. This paper presents some use cases of open access archiving clauses, discusses the major barriers to implementing archiving language into licenses, and describes some strategies that organizations can adopt in order to include such clauses into publisher licenses.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography: "This work gives an outstanding overview of scholarship relating to the growing Open Access movement." — George Machovec, The Charleston Advisor 12, no. 2 (2010): 3. | Digital Scholarship |

Good Practices For University Open-Access Policies

The Harvard Open Access Project has released Good Practices For University Open-Access Policies.

Here's an excerpt:

This is a guide to good practices for university open-access (OA) policies. It’s based on the type of policy adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, U of Kansas, U of Oregon, Trinity, Oberlin, Rollins, Wake Forest, Duke, U of Puerto Rico, Hawaii-Manoa, Columbia, Strathmore U, Emory, Princeton, Jomo Kenyatta, Utah State, Bifrõst, Miami, California-San Francisco, and the U Massachusetts Medical School (listing some but not all, and in chronological order). However, it includes recommendations that should be useful to institutions with other sorts of OA policy as well.

The guide is designed to evolve. No early version will cover every point on which good practices would be desirable or might be discernible. We plan to revise and enlarge it over time, building on our own experience and the experience of colleagues elsewhere. We welcome suggestions.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

"Understanding and Making Use of Academic Authors’ Open Access Rights"

David R. Hansen has published "Understanding and Making Use of Academic Authors' Open Access Rights" in the latest issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

METHODS To understand the scope of author-retained rights (including the right to purchase hybrid or other open access options) at some sample universities, author-rights data through the SHERPA/RoMEO API was combined with individual article citations (from Thomson Reuters' Web of Science) for works published over a one-year period (2011) and authored by individuals affiliated with five major U.S. research universities. RESULTS Authors retain significant rights in the articles that they create. Of the 29,322 unique articles authored over the one year period at the five universities, 28.83 percent could be archived in final PDF form and 87.95 percent could be archived as the post-print version. Nearly 43.47 percent also provided authors the choice of purchasing a hybrid paid open access option. DISCUSSION A significant percentage of current published output could be archived with little or no author intervention. With prior approval through an open access policy or otherwise, article manuscripts or final PDFs can be obtained and archived by library staff, and hybrid paid-OA options could be negotiated and exploited by library administrators.

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography | Digital Scholarship |

Scholarly Communication Program Case Study: "Relational Communications: Developing Key Connections"

Micah Vandegrift and Gloria Colvin have published "Relational Communications: Developing Key Connections" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Two years ago use of the terms scholarly communication and open access on the Florida State University (FSU) campus was limited primarily to library administrators and a few library and teaching faculty. But, in a relatively short time, we have dramatically increased awareness of these topics on our campus and accomplished many of our goals. Our focus has been on promoting authors' rights, the option to archive publications in open access repositories, and the evolution of scholarly publication in a digital environment, rather than a focus on the serials crisis facing libraries. Looking back over these past two years, the relationships that we developed along the way have been foundational to our success. Here, we discuss development of the FSU program and key steps we took, which we hope are instructive to others in developing a scholarly communication program.

| Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals | Digital Scholarship |

MIT Establishes Open Access Working Group in Response to Elsevier’s New Article Posting Policies

MIT has established an Open Access Working Group in response to Elsevier's new article posting policies.

Here's an excerpt from the "New Open Access Working Group Formed: Formulating Response to Elsevier's Policy Change":

The wording [of the Elsevier posting policy] is very unclear; no one is quite sure what a "systematic posting mandate" is. Duke, for one, who has an open access policy very much like ours, has concluded that such policies aren't "mandates" since they allow people to opt out, and hence that they are not covered by the new Elsevier posting policy. But it is clear that Elsevier is trying to do what it can to undermine such policies, and to confuse faculty about what they are and are not allowed to do. Certainly that is the interpretation of the Coalition for Open Access Repositories, who, in their response, "strongly oppose the changes made by Elsevier to its article posting policies" and "join the research community in condemning Elsevier for its recent business practices and lobbying that undermine policies and activities promoting open access to scholarly literature."

| Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography| Digital Scholarship |