Category: Copyright

Maria A. Pallante, Register of Copyrights, has announced the U.S. Copyright Office's priorities and special projects through October 2013.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The paper articulates 17 priorities in the areas of copyright policy and administrative practice, as well as 10 new projects designed to improve the quality and efficiency of the U.S. Copyright Office's services in the 21st century. . . .

Rogue websites, illegal streaming, small claims, orphan works and library preservation are among the issues the Copyright Office will focus on through research and legislative support for Congress. The document also summarizes the work of the office in global policy, including U.S. trade negotiations, anti-piracy efforts and international discussions of exceptions and limitations.

The administrative practice of the Copyright Office will be particularly active during the next two years. The office has launched the fifth triennial rulemaking involving the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and will spend significant time considering and resolving regulatory issues affecting the copyrightability and registration of websites and other forms of digital authorship.

Maximizing the technical operation of the registration system is one of 10 new projects Pallante announced to help steer the office's future path. Other projects include a study of the office's costs and fees for public services, a major revision of the "Compendium of Copyright Office Practices," increased accessibility to historic copyright records, dialogues and roundtables with members of the copyright marketplace, and research partnerships with the academic community. In addition, the office will bolster its role in educational undertakings, focusing on core principles of copyright law and finding innovative ways to address the growing copyright education needs of the public.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog | Digital Scholarship |

Digital Scholarship |

The WAC Clearinghouse has released Copy(write): Intellectual Property in the Writing Classroom as an open access book under a under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Here's an excerpt:

The book is divided into three topic areas: Part I focuses on the law and legal landscape; Part II focuses on the tools and resources available to researchers and teachers; and Part III focuses on pedagogical practices and approaches for addressing intellectual property in the writing classroom. Each part concludes with a response by a notable scholar who helps highlight connections among the chapters and identifies enduring questions and future directions for scholarship and action.

| Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 | Digital Scholarship |

Brandon Butler has published "Copyfraud and Classroom Performance Rights: Two Common Bogus Copyright Claims" in the latest issue of Research Library Issues.

Here's an excerpt:

Negotiating copyright law can be challenging even when basic facts are not in doubt. It becomes unnecessarily difficult when publishers, distributors, and even some libraries misrepresent basic facts: which works are under copyright, and which rights a library must purchase to support teaching and learning. Unfortunately such misrepresentations are widespread. This article will describe two common misrepresentations about copyright law: "copyfraud" and "public performance rights" for classroom uses.

| New: Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 | Digital Scholarship |

Cornell University, Duke University, Emory University, and Johns Hopkins University have joined the Orphan Works Project.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Leaders at Cornell, Duke, Emory and Johns Hopkins universities jointly announced today that they would begin making the full text of thousands of "orphan works" in their library collections digitally accessible to students, faculty and researchers at their own institutions. . . .

With the announcement, the four institutions formally join the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Florida in a collaborative Orphan Works Project, which aims to identify orphan works that have been scanned and archived in the HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust is a partnership of more than 50 major research institutions working to share, archive and preserve their combined collections of digitized books and journals.

Currently, more than 9 million digitized volumes are held by the HathiTrust. No one knows exactly how many of those are orphans, but HathiTrust executive director John Wilkin has estimated that it could be as many as half. Of those, most are unlikely to have any surviving person or entity who can claim them. . . .

Only books that are identified as orphans through a careful process and also held in print format by the individual institutions will be accessible through the HathiTrust website, and they will only be accessible to members of their respective communities. Just as most academic libraries only allow authorized patrons to check out books from their print collections, so will online access be restricted to users who can authenticate with their university ID and password. However, if a university library is open to the public, visitors will have access through library computers.

The University of California Libraries have also joined the project.

| Digital Scholarship |

The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled in John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Supap Kirtsaeng that the first sale doctrine is limited to works manufactured in the US.

Here's an excerpt from the ruling:

Appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Donald C. Pogue, Judge of the United States Court of International Trade, sitting by designation), following a jury trial, awarding statutory damages to plaintiff publisher for copyright infringement. Defendant claims on appeal that the District Court denied him a defense under the "first sale doctrine," 17 U.S.C. § 109(a), and erred in evidentiary rulings which, he alleges, led to the award of unduly high damages. In a case of first impression in our Court, we hold (1) that the first sale doctrine, which allows a person who buys a legally produced copyrighted work to sell or otherwise dispose of the work as he sees fit, does not apply to works manufactured outside of the United States, and (2) that the District Court did not err in its evidentiary rulings.

Commenting on this ruling in ARL Policy Notes, Jonathan Band said:

Accordingly, a library in the Second Circuit that wants to lend foreign manufactured copies must rely on fair use or the ambiguous exception in 17 USC 602(a)(2)(C) that allows a library to import 5 copies (except audiovisual works) for lending purposes, but doesn't specifically allow the library to actually lend those copies.

| New: Google Books Bibliography, Version 7 | Digital Scholarship |