Copyright – Page 23 – DigitalKoans

"The Blurred Lines Copyright Verdict Is Bad News for Music"

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.

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"Fair Use Week 2015 Highlights"

ARL has released "Fair Use Week 2015 Highlights."

Here's an excerpt:

Each day, new blog posts and resource materials were produced. Daily recaps are available for each day of Fair Use Week and additional resources are available on the website. Over the course of the week, more than 90 blog posts, 13 videos, 2 podcasts, a comic book, an infographic, and several other great resources were released. Below are some highlights from the week.

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You Didn’t Think It Was Over, Did You? New Motion in GSU Copyright Case

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the last judicial word on the subject for years to come, and I argue that its import is primarily in its rejection of outdated guidelines and case law, rather than any affirmative vision of fair use (which the court studiously avoids).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.

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"Fair Use Rising: Full-Text Access and Repurposing in Recent Case Law"

Brandon Butler, has published "Fair Use Rising: Full-Text Access and Repurposing in Recent Case Law" in a special issue on copyright of Research Library Issues.

Here's an excerpt from the issue introduction:

In "Fair Use Rising: Full-Text Access and Repurposing in Recent Case Law," Brandon Butler, practitionerin- residence at the American University Washington College of Law, reviews six recent fair use decisions that cut across many socially important and beneficial purposes. He highlights the trend of courts finding in favor of allowing "the broad redistribution of unaltered, full-text documents for new purposes." Butler explains how this trend presents new opportunities for research libraries to use and re-purpose the full text of copyrighted works in their collections.

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"The Valuation of Unprotected Works: A Case Study of Public Domain Photographs on Wikipedia"

Paul J. Heald et al. have self-archived "The Valuation of Unprotected Works: A Case Study of Public Domain Photographs on Wikipedia."

Here's an excerpt:

We study the biographical Wikipedia pages of a large data set of authors, composers, and lyricists to determine whether the public domain status of available images leads to a higher rate of inclusion of illustrated supplementary material and whether such inclusion increases visitorship to individual pages. We attempt to objectively place a value on the body of public domain photographs and illustrations which are used in this global resource. . . . We find that the large majority of photos and illustrations used on subject pages were obtained from the public domain, and we estimate their value in terms of costs saved to Wikipedia page builders and in terms of increased traffic corresponding to the inclusion of an image. Then, extrapolating from the characteristics of a random sample of a further 300 Wikipedia pages, we estimate a total value of public domain photographs on Wikipedia of between $246 to $270 million dollars per year.

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Public Domain: "Negotiators Burn Their Last Opportunity to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Term Extension "

Maira Sutton has published "Negotiators Burn Their Last Opportunity to Salvage the TPP by Caving on Copyright Term Extension" in DeepLinks.

Here's an excerpt:

New reports indicate that Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiators have agreed to language that would bind its 12 signatory nations to extend copyright terms to match the United States' already excessive length of copyright. This provision expands the reach of the controversial US Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (or the "Mickey Mouse Act" as it was called due to Disney's heavy lobbying) to countries of the Pacific region. Nations including Japan, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Canada would all be required to extend their terms and grant Big Content companies lengthy exclusive rights to works for no empirical reason. This means that all of the TPP's extreme enforcement provisions would apply to creative works for upwards of 100 years.

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"Let’s Make It Easier to Expand the Public Domain"

John Bergmayer has published "Let's Make It Easier to Expand the Public Domain" in Copyright Reform.

Here's an excerpt:

The fact that a license is "perpetual" doesn't require the copyright holder to keep offering the license; it just means the license, once granted, can't be revoked.

Except it can be. Copyright termination means that any license, including a perpetual public license, can be revoked. This means, for example, that contributors to projects like Wikipedia (where an original contributor continues to own the copyright to her work, but licenses that copyright under a liberal license) can revoke that license. It also means that people who transfer actual ownership of their copyrights to stewards like the Free Software Foundation can claw back that ownership.

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"Creative Commons Confusion Continues to Confound Content Creators"

David Crotty has published "Creative Commons Confusion Continues to Confound Content Creators" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Yahoo!, owners of the photo sharing site Flickr, recently caused a storm of controversy by announcing plans to sell prints of photos that users had uploaded. Yahoo!'s plans included sharing 51% of revenue with users who had retained copyright on their photos. For those who voluntarily selected a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) for their works, no compensation was offered. Despite the fact that Yahoo! was explicitly following the terms of the license, and doing exactly what the license was designed to promote, users were up in arms over seeing a large corporation taking advantage of their labors.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Owning and Using Scholarship: An IP Handbook for Teachers and Researchers

ACRL has released Owning and Using Scholarship: An IP Handbook for Teachers and Researchers by Kevin L. Smith. It is available in print and digital formats, including an open access PDF.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Copyright and other types of laws regulating intellectual property create an increasing concern for contemporary scholarship. The digital environment has created exciting new opportunities and possibilities for scholars to work and distribute their work. But these new opportunities also create issues that did not arise in the analog world. Owning and Using Scholarship demystifies intellectual property, and especially copyright law, for academic authors and independent scholars who face these dilemmas. It also serves as a comprehensive resource for librarians who are asked to assist with these new and challenging decisions.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

State of the Commons

The Creative Commons has released State of the Commons.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, we're releasing a new report that we think you will want to see. State of the Commons covers the impact and success of free and open content worldwide, and it contains the most revealing account we've ever published, including new data on what's shared with a CC license.

We found nearly 900 million Creative Commons-licensed works, dramatically up from our last report of 400 million in 2010. Creators are now choosing less restrictive CC licenses more than ever before – over half allow both commercial use and adaptations.

We're also celebrating the success of open policy worldwide. Fourteen countries have now adopted national open education policies, and open textbooks have saved students more than 100 million dollars. These are big moves making big impacts.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Sustainable Free: Lessons Learned from the Launch of a Free Service Supporting Publishing in Art History"

James Shulman has published "Sustainable Free: Lessons Learned from the Launch of a Free Service Supporting Publishing in Art History" in LIBER Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

Hilary Ballon and Mariet Westermann, writing about the struggles of publishing in art history noted that "It is a paradox of the digital revolution that it has never been easier to produce and circulate a reproductive image, and never harder to publish one." If publishing in general is in crisis because of the seismic re-ordering in a digital world, the field of art history is the extreme tail of the spectrum; rights holders are accustomed to licensing image content for limited edition print runs. Given this particularly challenging corner of the publishing work, a project initiated by the Metropolitan Museum offers some hope of a collaborative way forward. What sociological re-engineering enabled progress on this problem? It is possible that there are other lessons here too, that might throw at least streaks of light on other process re-engineering provoked by digital innovation in publishing?

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Social, Political and Legal Aspects of Text and Data Mining (TDM)"

Michelle Brook, Peter Murray-Rust, and Charles Oppenheim have published "The Social, Political and Legal Aspects of Text and Data Mining (TDM)" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

The ideas of textual or data mining (TDM) and subsequent analysis go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Originally carried out manually, textual and data analysis has long been a tool which has enabled new insights to be drawn from text corpora. However, for the potential benefits of TDM to be unlocked, a number of non-technological barriers need to be overcome. These include legal uncertainty resulting from complicated copyright, database rights and licensing, the fact that some publishers are not currently embracing the opportunities TDM offers the academic community, and a lack of awareness of TDM among many academics, alongside a skills gap.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Copyright Incentives in the GSU Appeals Court Ruling"

Kevin L. Smith has published "Copyright Incentives in the GSU Appeals Court Ruling" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The word "incentive" appears ten times in the ruling issued last month by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the Georgia State University (GSU) copyright infringement case, but it is slightly unclear in this rather odd opinion just who is the object of the incentive created by copyright.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

UK Launches New Licensing Program for 91 Million Orphan Works

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"

Fair-Use and E-Reserves: "A Reversal for Georgia State"

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.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Bill Introduced in Congress to Let You Actually Own Things, Even if They Contain Software"

Kit Walsh has published "Bill Introduced in Congress to Let You Actually Own Things, Even if They Contain Software in Deeplinks."

Here's an excerpt:

At last, someone in Congress has noticed how "intellectual property rights" are showing up in unexpected places and undermining our settled rights and expectation about the things we buy. Today, Representative Farenthold announced the introduction of the You Own Devices Act (YODA). If a computer program enables a device to operate, YODA would let you transfer ownership of a copy of that computer program along with the device. The law would override any agreement to the contrary (like the one-sided and abusive End-User License Agreements commonly included with such software). Also, if you have a right to receive security or bug fixes, that right passes to the person who received the device from you.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Copyright’s Paradox: The Public Interest and Private Monopoly"

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"

"The Public Domain vs. The Museum: The Limits of Copyright and Reproductions of Two-Dimensional Works of Art"

Grischka Petri has self-archived "The Public Domain vs. The Museum: The Limits of Copyright And Reproductions of Two-Dimensional Works of Art."

Here's an excerpt:

The problem of museums and public institutions handling reproductions of works in their collections is not only a legal question but also one of museum ethics. Public museums are committed to spreading knowledge and to making their collections accessible. When it comes to images of their holdings, however, they often follow a restrictive policy. Even for works in the public domain they claim copyright for their reproductive photographs. This paper offers an analysis of the different interests at stake, a short survey of important cases, and practical recommendations.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Google Settles American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. et al. v. Google Inc.

Google has settled the American Society of Media Photographers, Inc. et al. v. Google Inc. lawsuit. The agreement is confidential.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The agreement resolves a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google in April, 2010, bringing to an end more than four years of litigation. It does not involve any admission of liability by Google. As the settlement is between the parties to the litigation, the court is not required to approve its terms.

This settlement does not affect Google's current litigation with the Authors Guild or otherwise address the underlying questions in that suit.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society—Cases and Materials

Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain has released Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society—Cases and Materials. Also available in paperback.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

This book is an introduction to intellectual property law, the set of private legal rights that allows individuals and corporations to control intangible creations and marks-from logos to novels to drug formulae-and the exceptions and limitations that define those rights. It focuses on the three main forms of US federal intellectual property-trademark, copyright and patent-but many of the ideas discussed here apply far beyond those legal areas and far beyond the law of the United States.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Terms of Service on Social Media Sites"

Corinne Hui Yun Tan has self-archived "Terms of Service on Social Media Sites".

Here's an excerpt:

This article considers the provisions within the terms of service ('TOS') of the social media behemoths of today—Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the Wikimedia Foundation. In particular, it examines the main provisions that purport to regulate, from a copyright perspective, generative activities on social media sites. This empirical work is undertaken so that the article can shed light on the relationship between the contractual and copyright regimes. To do so, the article identifies the instances where the contractual regime is to some extent aligned with the copyright regime, and further, where there are potential incompatibilities between the two regimes.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Rise, Fall, and Rise of ACTA?"

Peter (Jay) Smith has published "The Rise, Fall, and Rise of ACTA?" in Digital Studies.

Here's an excerpt:

In July 2012 the European Parliament defeated the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). Supposedly the attempt to impose global norms on intellectual property rights and thereby restrict digital copyright was dead. Or was it? This paper argues that the spirit of ACTA may live on in a host of other trade agreements currently being negotiated. That is, ACTA, or even more restrictive versions of it, could be imposed through the back door at least upon weaker states through bilateral agreements with the United States and the European Union. The result could be a spaghetti bowl of rules on digital copyright with some countries enjoying more digital rights, online freedom, and privacy than others.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"STM’s New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards"

Ariel Katz has published "STM's New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

For antitrust purposes, when a group of publishers adopts a set of uniform licenses, or when it recommends that its members adopt them, they tread in the area of antitrust law's core concern: "price fixing". In antitrust lingo the term price fixing is not limited to coordinating on price, but applies to any coordination that affects the quantity, quality, or any other feature of the product. Indeed, "[t]erms of use are no less a part of 'the product,'"[1] and competition between publishers is supposed to ensure optimal license terms just as it is expected to guarantee competitive prices. Therefore, when a group of publishers coordinates license terms, their concerted action is not conceptually different for antitrust purposes from a decision to coordinate subscription fees (downstream) or submission fees (upstream), and when the group represents the leading publishers and affects the majority of publications, antitrust concerns are further heightened.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"How Streaming Media Could Threaten the Mission of Libraries"

Steve Kolowich has published "How Streaming Media Could Threaten the Mission of Libraries" in Wired Campus.

Here's an excerpt:

Welcome to content licensing, a great source of anxiety for librarians in the digital era. In previous decades, the university librarians might have bought a CD of the Dudamel album for $25 and kept it in circulation it for as long as the disc remained viable. Here they were asked to pay the publisher 10 times that amount (plus a licensing fee that would probably exceed the processing fee) for access to a quarter of the album for two years.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Digital Legal Deposit, An IPA Special Report

The International Publishers Association has released Digital Legal Deposit, An IPA Special Report.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A new IPA report reveals how policies and processes are being developed and implemented which allow digital content, whether in the form of e-books, journals, blogs or website content, to be collected and archived. It contains in-depth analysis of schemes in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France and Italy, as well as details from Japan, China, Brazil, the United States, Australia and Canada.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"