Category: Copyright

"The New Music Modernization Act (Mostly) (Finally) Gets It Right"

Meredith Filak Rose has published "The New Music Modernization Act (Mostly) (Finally) Gets It Right" in the Public Knowledge Blog.

Here's an excerpt:

The new Music Modernization Act sweeps away this old system and replaces it with full federal protection. The terms are still much longer than ideal: the earliest recordings won't hit the public domain until January 2022, while many others will be locked away for a total of 110 years. But the bill also creates, for the first time, a true public domain in sound recordings. . . .

The other important function of the bill is that, for the first time, users will now have a process by which they can use sound recordings, even when the rights holder cannot be found. Anyone wishing to make a noncommercial use of a recording that is no longer commercially available can submit a notice of use at the U.S. Copyright Office.

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Biill Changes Will “Foster a Robust Public Domain”: "Public Knowledge Welcomes House Passage of Revised Music Modernization Act"

https://www.publicknowledge.org/press-release/public-knowledge-welcomes-house-passage-of-revised-music-modernization-act

See also: "Public Knowledge Welcomes Senate Passage of Revised Music Modernization Act"

https://www.publicknowledge.org/press-release/public-knowledge-welcomes-senate-passage-of-revised-music-modernization-act

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Software Preservation

ARL has released the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Software Preservation.

Here's an excerpt:

This Code was made by and for the software preservation community, with the help of legal and technical experts. It provides librarians, archivists, curators, and others who work to preserve software with a tool to guide their reasoning about when and how to employ fair use, in the most common situations they currently face. It does not provide shortcuts in the form of prescriptive "guidelines" or rules of thumb. Nor does it seek to address all the possible situations in which software preservation professionals might employ fair use, now or in the future.

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"Can Beethoven Send Takedown Requests? A First-Hand Account of One German Professor’s Experience with Overly Broad Upload Filters"

Ulrich Kaiser has published "Can Beethoven Send Takedown Requests? A First-Hand Account of One German Professor's Experience with Overly Broad Upload Filters" in Wikimedia Foundation News.

Here's an excerpt:

The first video I uploaded to YouTube promoted the website where my digitized copies of public domain recordings are available to download. In this video, I explained my project, while examples of the music played in the background. Less than three minutes after uploading, I received a notification that there was a ContentID claim against my video. ContentID is a system, developed by YouTube, which checks user uploaded videos against databases of copyrighted content in order to curb copyright infringement. . . .

I decided to open a different YouTube account "Labeltest" to share additional excerpts of copyright-free music. I quickly received ContentID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini and Wagner. Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain. I appealed each of these decisions, explaining that 1) the composers of these works had been dead for more than 70 years, 2) the recordings were first published before 1963, and 3) these takedown request did not provide justification in their property rights under the German Copyright Act.

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AI Copyright?: "Authors and Machines"

Jane C. Ginsburg and Luke Ali Budiardjo have self-archived "Authors and Machines."

Here's an excerpt:

Today, developments in computer science have created a new form of machine—the "artificially intelligent" system apparently endowed with "computational creativity"—that introduces challenging variations on the perennial question of what makes one an "author" in copyright law: Is the creator of a generative program automatically the author of the works her process begets, even if she cannot anticipate the contents of those works?

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Creative Markets and Copyright in the Fourth Industrial Era: Reconfiguring the Public Benefit for a Digital Trade Economy

The International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Developmen thas released Creative Markets and Copyright in the Fourth Industrial Era: Reconfiguring the Public Benefit for a Digital Trade Economy.

Here's an excerpt:

A rapid succession of technological advances—big data, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence—is steadily changing how firms engage in productive activity, how consumers interact, and how knowledge goods are acquired, shared, and governed. The rise of big data and the increasingly widespread adoption of artificial intelligence across many industries have complicated our understanding of the values of twentieth-century intellectual property rules. . . . This paper explores the fundamental questions facing the copyright system in the new industrial and digital era. It considers a broad range of issues including the evolving concept of authorship, originality, exhaustion issues, and the fair use or fair dealing doctrine in the new global context. It concludes with recommendations on how to redesign global copyright for innovation, competition, and inclusion.

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"Creative Commons Awarded $800,000 from Arcadia to Support Discovery and Collaboration in the Global Commons"

The Creative Commons has released "Creative Commons Awarded $800,000 from Arcadia to Support Discovery and Collaboration in the Global Commons."

Here's an excerpt:

CC Search—together with the Commons Metadata Library and the Commons API—will form the Commons Collaborative Archive and Library, a suite of tools for discovery and collaboration. CC aims through the development of this suite of tools to make the global commons of openly licensed content more searchable, usable, and resilient, and to provide essential infrastructure for collaborative online communities. The project elements will feature an index of every openly licensed and public domain work on the web (the Library); an API allowing developers to query the metadata library and to develop services and integrations for content in the Commons; and CC Search, a search engine that harnesses the power of open repositories and allows users to search across a variety of open content through a single interface.

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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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