Copyright – Page 22 – DigitalKoans

White Paper on Remixes, First Sale, and Statutory Damages

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.

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"NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What ‘Public Domain’ Means"

Rick Anderson has published "NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What ‘Public Domain’ Means" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

In far too many libraries, public-domain documents and images are treated as if they were under copyright—and, even worse, in many cases the policies in question are written as if the holding libraries were themselves the copyright holders. Sometimes this is because the librarians who control access to those images genuinely don't understand copyright law: they believe that simply digitizing an image results in a copyrightable document (it doesn't), or that owning the physical item gives one legal say over how its intellectual content can be used (also untrue). The result is that in many academic libraries, intellectual content that the public has a right to access, copy, adapt, and generally reuse in any way we wish is being locked down and restricted by—ironically enough—librarians.

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Harvard Launches State Copyright Resource Center

Harvard's Office for Scholarly Communication has launched the State Copyright Resource Center.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The State Copyright Resource Center aims to clarify the ambiguity around the copyright status of state-produced works. . . .

In brief, while the U.S. Copyright Act affirms that works produced by the U.S. federal government are ineligible for copyright protection (17 U.S.C. § 105), this law does not assert the same status for works created by state governments. As a result, many states assert a copyright interest in the surveys, reports, and other documents they produce, and many more lack clear legal guidance on the issue. This resource aims to gather the sources of law in each state to provide assistance to those seeking to make use of state-created works.

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Strategic Plan 2016-2020: Positioning the United States Copyright Office for the Future

The United States Copyright Office has released Strategic Plan 2016-2020: Positioning the United States Copyright Office for the Future.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante today released the Copyright Office's Strategic Plan, setting forth the Office's performance objectives for the next five years. This release follows a thirty-day comment period, during which the Office solicited feedback from stakeholders and the public on a draft of the plan. The Register is grateful for the comments received by the Office, which are reflected in the final Strategic Plan.

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"Fair Use in the Digital Age: Reflections on the Fair Use Doctrine in Copyright Law"

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).

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Requirements for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements

International Rights Statements Working Group has released Requirements for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Over the past fifteen months, representatives from the Europeana and DPLA networks, in partnership with Creative Commons, have been developing a collaborative approach to internationally interoperable rights statements that can be used to communicate the copyright status of cultural objects published via the DPLA and Europeana platforms.

The purpose of these rights statements is to provide end users of our platforms with easy to understand information on what they can and cannot do with digital items that they encounter via these platforms. Having standardized interoperable rights statements will also make it easier for application developers and other third parties to automatically identify items that can be re-used.

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"Trade Officials Announce Conclusion of TPP—Now the Real Fight Begins"

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.

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"Help the Copyright Office Understand How to Address Mass Digitization"

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.

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"Important Win for Fair Use in ‘Dancing Baby’ Lawsuit"

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.

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"Sharing Research Data and Intellectual Property Law: A Primer"

Michael W. Carroll has published "Sharing Research Data and Intellectual Property Law: A Primer" in PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

Sharing research data by depositing it in connection with a published article or otherwise making data publicly available sometimes raises intellectual property questions in the minds of depositing researchers, their employers, their funders, and other researchers who seek to reuse research data. In this context or in the drafting of data management plans, common questions are (1) what are the legal rights in data; (2) who has these rights; and (3) how does one with these rights use them to share data in a way that permits or encourages productive downstream uses? Leaving to the side privacy and national security laws that regulate sharing certain types of data, this Perspective explains how to work through the general intellectual property and contractual issues for all research data.

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Enquiries Into Intellectual Property’s Economic Impact

OECD has released Enquiries Into Intellectual Property's Economic Impact.

Here's an excerpt from "Chapter 7: Legal Aspects of Open Access to Publicly Funded Research":

To explain the interplay between open access and IP laws, this chapter provides an overview of the IP regimes that protect research outputs in a sample of OECD jurisdictions. It then reviews the open access policies that are in place in some of those jurisdictions and examines two contexts in which IP questions can arise when open access principles are applied: public/private partnerships and text and data mining.

Also of interest: "Chapter 5: Copyright in the Digital Era: Country Studies."

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Copyright Reform for a Digital Economy

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.

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Creative Commons License Court Decision: "Defining Derivatives"

Kevin Smith has published "Defining Derivatives" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke in which he discusses the Drauglis V. Kappa Map Group decision. In this case, a photographer sued a publisher who used his CC BY-SA licensed photo on Flickr without permission.

Here's an excerpt:

One thing that is clear, and this is my second point, is that a Share Alike provision does not require that the second work be made available for free, as long as a derivative is not created. The compilation atlas containing Drauglis' photo was sold, of course, and the court said that was OK because there was no non-commercial restriction on the license and the commercial work was not a derivative (which would activate the share alike restriction).

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"TPP Undermines User Control and That’s Disastrous for Accessibility"

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.

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"Developing and Implementing a Technical Framework for Interoperable Rights Statements"

Mark Matienzo has published "Developing and Implementing a Technical Framework for Interoperable Rights Statements" in DPLA Updates.

Here's an excerpt:

Within the Technical Working Group of the International Rights Statements Working Group, we have been focusing our efforts on identifying a set of requirements and a technically sound and sustainable plan to implement the rights statements under development. Now that two of the Working Group's white papers have been released, we realized it was a good time to build on the introductory blog post by our Co-Chairs, Emily Gore and Paul Keller. Accordingly, we hope this post provides a good introduction to our technical white paper, Recommendations for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements, and more generally, how our thinking has changed throughout the activities of the working group.

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"Derivative Works 2.0: Reconsidering Transformative Use in the Age of Crowdsourced Creation"

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.

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Written Testimony of Maria A. Pallante, US Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office

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.

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ARL Signs The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age

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.

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USTR Releases 2015 Special 301 Report on Intellectual Property Rights

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.

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"Aaron’s Law Reintroduced: CFAA Didn’t Fix Itself"

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.

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"ARL Joins New Re:Create Coalition to Promote Balanced Copyright"

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.

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"Steps toward a New GSU Ruling"

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.

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"New ‘Breaking Down Barriers to Innovation Act’ Targets Many of DMCA Section 1201’s Problems"

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.

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Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available

The Authors Alliance has released Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This guide is the product of extensive outreach to the publishing industry. In the process, we interviewed authors, publishers, and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of a major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses, editorial assistants, novelists, and academic authors.

We were happily surprised by the consistency of publishers' responses: across the board, publishers told us that they want to work together with their authors and that they are often willing to give authors their rights back if its in the books' best interests.

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"Justifications for Copyright Limitations & Exceptions"

Pamela Samuelson has self-archived "Justifications for Copyright Limitations & Exceptions."

Here's an excerpt:

The essay traces the historical development of L&Es in U.S. copyright law. . . .

The essay then considers nine justifications for the existence of these L&Es. One set promotes ongoing authorship. A second recognizes both authorial and broader public interests in dissemination of news, freedom of expression, and access to information. A third protects privacy, personal autonomy, and ownership interests of consumers. A fourth aims to fulfill certain cultural and social policy goals. A fifth enables public institutions, such as courts and legislatures, to function more effectively. A sixth fosters competition and ongoing innovation. A seventh exempts incidental uses lacking in economic significance. An eighth addresses market failure problems. A ninth encompasses L&Es adopted for politically expedient reasons.

It also discusses a tenth type of L&E, those designed to enable copyright law to be flexible and adaptable over time.

The essay concludes that the optimal policy for L&Es may well be to have specific exceptions for categories of justified uses that are relatively stable over time and for which predictability is more important than flexibility and to have an open-ended exception such as fair use to allow the law to adapt to new uses not contemplated by the legislature.

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