Legislation and Government Regulation

"ISPs Tell Supreme Court They Don’t Want to Disconnect Users Accused of Piracy"

The Altice/Frontier/Lumen/Verizon brief [https://tinyurl.com/58yzp4z4]said the 4th Circuit ruling “imperils the future of the Internet” by “expos[ing] Internet service providers to massive liability if they do not carry out mass Internet evictions.” Cutting off a subscriber’s service would hurt other residents in a home “who did not infringe and may have no connection to the infringer,” they wrote.

The automated processes used by copyright holders to find infringement on peer-to-peer networks are “famously flawed,” ISPs wrote. Despite that, the appeals court’s “view of contributory infringement would force Internet service providers to cut off any subscriber after receiving allegations that some unknown person used the subscriber’s connection for copyright infringement,” the brief said.

https://tinyurl.com/2b5yw3m2

"Lawmakers Raise New Licensing Concerns over White House Open Access Mandate"

While Republican appropriators in the House have previously tried to entirely block the White House’s open access policy, now appropriators in both chambers of Congress have advanced legislation that would block federal agencies from limiting authors’ ability to choose how to license their work. . . .

This language used in the House report and Senate report regarding researcher choice is identical, though the House goes further by advising federal agencies not to “exert broad ‘federal purpose’ authority over peer reviewed articles” or “otherwise force use of an open license.”

House Republicans also propose that the White House be prohibited from using any funding to implement the policy, as they attempted in last year’s legislation.

https://tinyurl.com/46y42ecr

"Court Blocks Net Neutrality, Says ISPs Are Likely to Win Case against FCC"

Net neutrality, the judges wrote, “is likely a major question requiring clear congressional authorization,” and the “Communications Act likely does not plainly authorize the Commission to resolve this signal question. Nowhere does Congress clearly grant the Commission the discretion to classify broadband providers as common carriers. To the contrary, Congress specifically empowered the Commission to define certain categories of communications services—and never did so with respect to broadband providers specifically or the Internet more generally.” . . .

Even if the FCC loses, each US state would be allowed to regulate net neutrality because the Trump-era FCC lost its attempt to preempt state laws.

https://tinyurl.com/msjabp2n

"European Artificial Intelligence Act Comes into Force"

The AI Act introduces a forward-looking definition of AI, based on a product safety and risk-based approach in the EU:

Minimal risk: Most AI systems, such as AI-enabled recommender systems and spam filters, fall into this category. These systems face no obligations under the AI Act due to their minimal risk to citizens’ rights and safety. Companies can voluntarily adopt additional codes of conduct.

Specific transparency risk: AI systems like chatbots must clearly disclose to users that they are interacting with a machine. Certain AI-generated content, including deep fakes, must be labelled as such, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used. In addition, providers will have to design systems in a way that synthetic audio, video, text and images content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.

High risk: AI systems identified as high-risk will be required to comply with strict requirements, including risk-mitigation systems, high quality of data sets, logging of activity, detailed documentation, clear user information, human oversight, and a high level of robustness, accuracy, and cybersecurity. Regulatory sandboxes will facilitate responsible innovation and the development of compliant AI systems. Such high-risk AI systems include for example AI systems used for recruitment, or to assess whether somebody is entitled to get a loan, or to run autonomous robots.

Unacceptable risk: AI systems considered a clear threat to the fundamental rights of people will be banned. This includes AI systems or applications that manipulate human behaviour to circumvent users’ free will, such as toys using voice assistance encouraging dangerous behaviour of minors, systems that allow ‘social scoring’ by governments or companies, and certain applications of predictive policing. In addition, some uses of biometric systems will be prohibited, for example emotion recognition systems used at the workplace and some systems for categorising people or real time remote biometric identification for law enforcement purposes in publicly accessible spaces (with narrow exceptions).

https://tinyurl.com/32jy9pat

"Tell Congress: Don’t Let Anyone Own the Law"

A large portion of the regulations we all live by (such as fire safety codes, or the national electrical code) are initially written—by industry experts, government officials, and other volunteers—under the auspices of standards development organizations (SDOs). Federal, state, or municipal policymakers then review the codes and decide whether the standard is good broad rule. The Pro Codes Act effectively endorses the claim that SDOs can "retain" copyright in codes, even after they are made law, as long as they make the codes available through a "publicly accessible" website — which means read-only, and subject to licensing limits.

https://tinyurl.com/bdrdfnr3

Updated Report to the U.S. Congress on Financing Mechanisms for Open Access Publishing of Federally Funded Research

This current report elaborates on:

Implementation to advance federal public access policies. Updated agency public access policies will go into effect by December 31, 2025, in accordance with the 2022 Memorandum.

Trends in scholarly publishing since the release of the November 2023 Report, including further discussion of business models to enable public access to federally funded research, as well as domestic and global developments in advancing public access to research results.

An expansion of the analysis of estimated article processing charges paid to publish federally funded research from 2016 to 2022, with further discussion of limitations associated with calculating these charges.

Efforts to advance research integrity, including through implementation of federal public access policies and open science practices.

Continuing trends in peer review as they relate to research integrity, equity, and sustainability.

https://tinyurl.com/yryw9ejv

"Towards an All-Ireland Diamond Open Access Publishing Platform: The PublishOA.ie Project—2022–2024quot;

The Government of Ireland has set a target of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications by 2030. As a key element of achieving this objective, the PublishOA.ie project was established to evaluate the feasibility of establishing an all-island [Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland] digital publishing platform for Diamond Open Access journals and monographs designed to advance best practice and meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers, and research funding organisations in Irish scholarly publishing. It should be noted in this context that there is substantial "north–south " cooperation between public bodies in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, some of whom operate on what is commonly termed an "all-island " basis. The project commenced in November 2022 and will run until November 2024, with the submission of a Final Report. This article originated as an interim project report presented in September 2023 at the PubMet2023 conference in Zadar, Croatia. The project is unique in its mandate to report on the feasibility of a shared platform that will encompass scholarly publishing across the two jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, which are now, post-Brexit, inside and outside the European Union (EU): the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom. The project is co-led by the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), Ireland’s leading body of experts in the Sciences and Humanities, and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute of Trinity College Dublin. There are sixteen partners and affiliates from universities and organisations from the island of Ireland. The feasibility study will be based on a review of the publishing practices in the island of Ireland, with gap analysis on standards, technology, processes, copyright practices, and funding models for Diamond OA, benchmarking against other national platforms, and specifications of the requirements, leading to the delivery of a pilot national publishing platform. A set of demonstrator journals and monographs will be published using the platform, which will be actively trialled by the partner publishers and authors. PublishOA.ie aims to deliver an evidence-based understanding of Irish scholarly publishing and of the requirements of publishers to transition in whole or in part to Diamond OA. This paper provides an interim report on progress on the project as of September 2023, ten months after its commencement.

https://doi.org/10.3390/publications12030019

"Web and Mobile App Accessibility Regulations"

On April 24, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) published its final regulation on web and mobile application accessibility in the Federal Register. . . . The final regulation, promulgated under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), marks the first time that DOJ has issued formal regulations for accessibility in the digital realm. Title II of the ADA protects individuals with disabilities from being excluded from participating in or receiving the benefits of services or programs provided by state or local government entities. As such, the April 24 regulation applies only to public higher education institutions.

https://tinyurl.com/5ef3whn9

"Lawmakers Debate Ending Section 230 in Order to Save It"

E&C [House Energy and Commerce Committee] Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) want to give Congress 18 months to come up with a new framework to replace Section 230 or risk losing it entirely. The idea is to force their colleagues to do something to change the law that’s been the subject of bipartisan ire for years. . . .

Republicans and Democrats often have very different ideas of how exactly the law should change. Republicans who support Section 230 reform often want platforms to have fewer protections for their content moderation decisions to combat what they see as censorship of conservative views, while Democrats who support reform tend to want platforms to moderate or remove more content, such as disinformation.

https://tinyurl.com/ykcf57ha

UC and Authors Alliance: "Outcomes, Questions, and Answers: ‘The Right to Deposit (r2d) Uniform Guidance to Ensure Author Compliance and Public Access’"

The United States Office of Management and Budget uniform guidance for grants and agreements contains the following language in 2 CFR §200.315(b):

To the extent permitted by law, the recipient or subrecipient may copyright any work that is subject to copyright and was developed, or for which ownership was acquired, The Right to Deposit (R2D)under a Federal award. The Federal agency reserves a royalty-free, nonexclusive, and irrevocable right to reproduce, publish, or otherwise use the work for Federal purposes and to authorize others to do so. This includes the right to require recipients and subrecipients to make such works available through agency-designated public access repositories.¹

This provision, the Federal purpose license, has existed in some form since at least 1976. Some federal agencies, including the Department of Energy (DOE), have already been relying on it in the implementation of their public access plans. The Federal purpose license applies upon creation of an article, overriding all subsequent terms and licenses. It provides a highly effective, non-disruptive, elegant and familiar solution for accomplishing the ends of the Nelson memo without having to rely on individual authors and institutions to protect this right or navigate differing institutional approaches. Leveraging the Federal purpose license could also provide consistency for articles and authors subject to policies from multiple granting agencies. . . .

If the Federal purpose license has already existed for a long time, and has new language clarifying that it can be used this way, does that solve the problem for authors?

It depends on the author’s funder. Agencies have rights in federally funded research publications, but they are not uniformly using them. Only some agencies are telling their grantees in agency guidance that the Federal purpose license covers sharing publications in agency-designated repositories. Other agencies aren’t relying on their own rights from the license, and instead advising grantees to work with their publisher and secure the rights to post their publications independently. The Federal purpose license does not help authors if they don’t know about it.

https://tinyurl.com/bdfks8pu

Paywall: "FCC Reinstates Net Neutrality, but It’s Not as Easy as It Once Was"

The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 Thursday to put the internet back under “net neutrality” regulation, reprising Obama-era rules that prohibit internet service providers from discriminating against certain websites by throttling or blocking them. . . .

As the internet has proliferated, the question of precisely where it begins and ends has become murkier. Now, some mobile executives are arguing that an emerging 5G technology called "network slicing" should be considered to lie in the hazy realm beyond the internet’s borders, unconstrained by net neutrality.

The proposal has sparked controversy because these 5G "slices" are not just a small side show and may well be core to what the internet becomes in its next phase.

https://tinyurl.com/rheaejzk

"Even If You Hate Both AI and Section 230, You Should Be Concerned about the Hawley/Blumenthal Bill to Remove 230 Protections from AI"

Considering that AI is currently being built into basically everything, this "exemption" [from Section 230] will basically eat the entire law, because increasingly all content produced online will involve "the use or provision" of generative AI, even if the content itself has nothing to do with the service provider.

In short, this bill doesn’t just strip 230 protections from AI output, in effect it strips 230 from any company that offers AI in its products. Which is basically a set of internet companies rapidly approaching "all of them."

https://tinyurl.com/ykjx8v4t

"The Impact of Open Access Mandates on Scientific Research and Technological Development in the U.S."

Scientific articles subject to the mandate were utilized on average 42% more in patents
Articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic papers
Small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased knowledge diffusion
Scientific articles subject to the mandate were utilized on average 42% more in patents
Articles subject to the mandate were not cited more frequently by other academic papers
Small firms were the primary beneficiaries of the increased knowledge diffusion

https://tinyurl.com/bdekuf2j

Paywall: "AI Policies across the Globe: Implications and Recommendations for Libraries"

This article examines the proposed artificial intelligence policies of the USA, UK, European Union, Canada, and China, and their implications for libraries. . . . The article highlights key themes in these policies, including ethics, transparency, the balance between innovation and regulation, and data privacy. It also identifies areas for improvement, such as the need for specific guidelines on mitigating biases in artificial intelligence systems and navigating data privacy issues. The article further provides practical recommendations for libraries to engage with these policies and develop best practices for artificial intelligence use.

https://doi.org/10.1177/03400352231196172

"New at Dryad: Support for NIH-funded researchers"

Dryad provides a simple submission process that makes it easy for researchers to upload your datasets, apply metadata that makes them discoverable and reusable, and get a persistent identifier (DOI) you can use in grant reporting. Once submitted, datasets are made publicly accessible so they can be reused by others in order to advance scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplines. Dryad also provides an extensive library of existing datasets from various sources, including those funded by NIH grants, that are completely free to access and reuse.

https://tinyurl.com/4uu9tz2r

SPARC: "Oppose Section 552 That Will Block Taxpayer Access to Research"

The U.S. House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science (CJS) has released an appropriations bill containing language that would block implementation of the 2022 updated OSTP policy guidance (the Nelson Memo) that would ensure immediate, free access to taxpayer-funded research. If enacted, this will prevent American taxpayers from seeing the benefits of the more than $90 billion in scientific research that the U.S. government funds each year. . . .

Write to Congress

Look up contact details for your Representatives and Senators, then customize the text in this template letter.

Call Congress

Look up contact details for your Representatives and Senators, then call the office and tell them to remove Section 552 of the House CJS bill.

https://tinyurl.com/3mbbmwxw

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

"Diamonds in the Rough: Societies Shine under Pressure"

Overall, 18% of fully open journals appear to be sponsored [diamond], but their proportion and number have been decreasing. . . . Among society-run journals, sponsored titles account for more than double the market average, for non-society (commercial) journals they account for just under half. Societies’ greater proportion of sponsored titles and their not-for-profit status could therefore place them in a stronger position than their commercial competitors if we see a large scale move by funders to require publication in journals without publisher fees and — as some noises from European funders suggest — which are not for profit.

https://tinyurl.com/yc4k2j9m

"European Lawmakers Vote to Adopt EU AI Act"

European Union lawmakers have passed the EU AI Act that will govern use and deployment of artificial intelligence technology within the EU. . . . Changes introduced by MEPs to the original commission draft act include some top-level regulation of general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT. These foundation models will require mandatory labelling for AI-generated content and the forced disclosure of training data covered by copyright. . . . . Other changes include a fine-tuned list of prohibited practices, extended to include subliminal techniques, biometric categorisation, predictive policing, and internet-scraped facial recognition databases.

https://tinyurl.com/nhet5ckd

Congressional Research Service: Generative Artificial Intelligence: Overview, Issues, and Questions for Congress

The recent public release of many GenAI tools, and the race by companies to develop ever-more powerful models, have generated widespread discussion of their capabilities, potential concerns with their use, and debates about their governance and regulation. This CRS InFocus describes the development and uses of GenAI, concerns raised by the use of GenAI tools, and considerations for Congress. For additional considerations related to data privacy, see CRS Report R47569, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Data Privacy: A Primer, by Kristen E. Busch.

https://tinyurl.com/bdrpkzcj

"An Effort to Ban Faculty Tenure in Public Universities Has Failed in the Texas Legislature"

On Saturday, in a surprise move, senators backed off their position and accepted the House’s counterproposal, which solidifies tenure in state law and places more power to make future changes to tenure in the hands of state lawmakers rather that individual university system boards.

https://cutt.ly/TwqKXVNj

Council of the European Union: "Council Calls for Transparent, Equitable, and Open Access to Scholarly Publications"

In its conclusions, the Council calls on the Commission and the member states to support policies towards a scholarly publishing model that is not-for-profit, open access and multi-format, with no costs for authors or readers. Some Member States have introduced secondary publication rights into their national copyright legislation, enabling open access to scholarly publications which involve public funds. The Council encourages national open access policies and guidelines to make scholarly publications immediately openly accessible under open licences. The conclusions acknowledge positive developments in terms of monitoring progress, like within the framework of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and suggest including open science monitoring in the European Research Area monitoring mechanism. The Council conclusions also encourage Member States to support the pilot programme Open Research Europe (to create a large-scale open access research publishing service), the use of open-source software and standards, to recognise and reward peer review activities in the assessment of researchers as well as to support the training of researchers on peer-review skills and on intellectual property rights.

https://bit.ly/3MS2leY

"EU’s New AI Law Targets Big Tech Companies but Is Probably Only Going to Harm the Smallest Ones"

In a bold stroke, the EU’s amended AI Act would ban American companies such as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, and IBM from providing API access to generative AI models. The amended act, voted out of committee on Thursday, would sanction American open-source developers and software distributors, such as GitHub, if unlicensed generative models became available in Europe. While the act includes open source exceptions for traditional machine learning models, it expressly forbids safe-harbor provisions for open source generative systems.

Any model made available in the EU, without first passing extensive, and expensive, licensing, would subject companies to massive fines of the greater of €20,000,000 or 4% of worldwide revenue.

(Quote from Technomancers.ai.)

https://bit.ly/3ociZwo

"Supreme Court Rules against Reexamining Section 230"

The Supreme Court has declined to consider reinterpreting foundational internet law Section 230, saying it wasn’t necessary for deciding the terrorism-related case Gonzalez v. Google. The ruling came alongside a separate but related ruling in Twitter v. Taamneh, where the court concluded that Twitter had not aided and abetted terrorism.

https://cutt.ly/Z6BKtx6

"Spain Adopts National Open Access Strategy"

Spain has approved a four-year national strategy for open science, under which all outputs of publicly financed research will made available free upon publication.

Under the strategy open access will become the default mode for all research funded directly or indirectly, with public funds. . . .

A budget of €23.8 million in 2023 will be maintained annually until 2027.

https://bit.ly/414w2gY

Class E Felony: "Tennessee Bill Would Punish Publishers for Selling ‘Obscene’ Material"

It is currently awaiting Governor Bill Lee’s approval to become law. Under this bill, violations would be considered a Class E felony, and publishers or distributers could be fined between $10,000 and $100,000.

https://bit.ly/40m7lfl