Goliath Just Got Smaller: Free Software Foundation Establishes Expert Witness Defense Fund to Fight RIAA Lawsuits

The Free Software Foundation has established an Expert Witness Defense Fund to "help provide computer expert witnesses to combat RIAA's ongoing lawsuits, and to defend against the RIAA's attempt to redefine copyright law." Ray Beckerman and a group of selected attorneys will advise the fund. You can make tax deductible contributions to the fund, which is a registered 501(c)3 organization.

Infringement Nation: Does Typical Digital Technology Use Made Us All Infringers?

John Tehranian, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, has written a paper for the Utah Law Review titled "Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap."

Here's an excerpt from the paper where Tehranian summarizes the infringement activity of a hypothetical U.S. law professor during a single day:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges).

If copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, he would be indisputably liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing. Such an outcome flies in the face of our basic sense of justice. Indeed, one must either irrationally conclude that John is a criminal infringer—a veritable grand larcenist—or blithely surmise that copyright law must not mean what it appears to say. Something is clearly amiss. Moreover, the troublesome gap between copyright law and norms has grown only wider in recent years.

Reed Elsevier Says It Will Have at Least 10% Earnings Growth in 2007

Reed Elsevier has issued a press release saying that its adjusted earnings per share at constant currencies will grow by at least 10% in 2007.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Elsevier: Subscription renewals are very strong and there is good demand for our expanding online services. The second half medical publishing programme is going well with good growth in particular in the nursing and health professional sectors. Pharma advertising markets remain weak, but represent a relatively small part of the business.

Light My Fire? Amazon's Kindle E-Book Reader Launched

Amazon has launched Kindle, its e-book reader.

Here's a selection of articles and postings:

Center for History and New Media Launches ScholarPress: WordPress Plugins for Education

The Center for History and New Media has launched ScholarPress, which provides WordPress plugins tailored for educational use.

The first two plugins are:

  • Courseware: "Courseware enables you to manage a class with a WordPress blog, including a schedule, bibliography, assignments, and other course information."
  • WPBook: "WPBook works with the Facebook Development platform to create a Facebook Application (addable by users within the site) using a WordPress blog."

Eduserv Releases Study about the Use of Open Content Licenses By UK Heritage Organizations

The Eduserv Foundation has released Snapshot Study on the Use of Open Content Licences in the UK Cultural Heritage Sector (Appendices).

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

This study investigates the awareness and use of open content licences in the UK cultural heritage community by way of a survey. Open content licensing generally grants a wide range of permission in copyright for use and re-use of works such as images, sounds, video, and text, whilst retaining a relatively small set of rights: often described as a ‘some rights reserved’ approach to copyright. For those wishing to share content using this model, Creative Archive (CA) and Creative Commons (CC) represent the two main sets of open content licences available for use in the United Kingdom.

The year of this survey, 2007, marks five years from the launch of the Creative Commons licences, two years since the launch of the UK-specific CC licences and two years as well since the launch of the UK-only Creative Archive licence.

This survey targeted UK cultural heritage organisations—primarily museums, libraries, galleries, archives, and those in the media community that conduct heritage activities (such as TV and radio broadcasters and film societies). In particular, this community produces trusted and highly valued content greatly desired by the general public and the research and education sectors. They are therefore a critical source of high-demand content and thus the focus for this project. The key objective has been to get a snapshot of current licensing practices in this area in 2007 for use by the sector and funding bodies wishing to do more work in this area.

Over 100 organisations responded to this web-based survey. Of these respondents:

  • Only 4 respondents out of 107 indicated that they held content but were not making it available online nor had plans to make it available online;
  • Images and text are the two content types most likely to be made available online;
  • Sound appears to be the most held content type not currently available online and with no plans to make it available in the future;
  • Many make some part of their collection available online without having done any formal analysis of the impact this may have;
  • 59 respondents were aware of Creative Archive or Creative Commons;
  • 10 use a CA or CC licence for some of their content; and
  • 12 have plans to use a CA or CC licence in the future.

House Doesn't Override Presidential Veto of Labor-HHS Bill Which Contains NIH OA Mandate

By two votes, the House failed to override President Bush's veto of the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2008, which contained the NIH open access mandate (the vote was 277-141). Bloomberg reports that Senate Democrats have a new strategy:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Democrats will combine the 11 unfinished appropriations bills still needed to fund the federal government into one measure that exceeds the administration's request by $11 billion—half the $22 billion Democrats initially supported.

However, CQPolitics reports that:

The White House brushed off Reid’s proposal Thursday, as administration officials have done previously when Democrats have said they are willing to negotiate on funding levels.

"The president has been clear that Congress should adhere to the budgetary process and pass individual funding bills at reasonable and responsible spending levels," said Sean Kevelighan, a spokesman for the White House budget office. "Perhaps [the] Democratic leadership in Congress. . . should concern itself less with capturing political news cycles and more on their fundamental responsibility to fund the federal government."

Peter Suber had this to say about the override failure:

OK, on to Plan B.  The OA mandate for the NIH is a small part of a big bill to pay for about one-thirteenth of the federal government.  Some version of the appropriation will certainly pass and get the President's signature.  You can already see the jockeying between Congressional leaders and the White House about the contours of that version.  There are four grounds for optimism:

  1. The OA mandate was approved by both houses of Congress.  The easiest provisions to delete are those approved by just one chamber and kept by the House-Senate conference committee.
  2. The OA mandate has bipartisan support in Congress and Republican friends in the Executive Branch.
  3. The President has expressed strong objection to some of the policy provisions of the bill, but his stated concern about the OA provision is very mild by comparison.  If Congress deletes some of the more sensitive provisions in the spirit of compromise, it needn't touch the OA mandate.  In fact, deleting the OA provision would do virtually nothing to ingratiate the President.
  4. To reduce overall spending levels in the bill, Congress will cut some of the appropriations.   But the OA mandate is a policy change, not an appropriation.  There's no need to cut it to satisfy the President's fiscal objections to the current bill.   Stay tuned.

In a Win for the MPAA and RIAA, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 Is Approved by the House Education and Labor Committee

Despite the opposition of higher education officials, the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007 was approved by the House Education and Labor Committee with an illegal file sharing provision intact.

Read more about the provision and its approval at "Campus Copyright Mandates Threaten Financial Aid Funds and Campus Networks," "House Antipiracy Measure Passes through Committee," "House Committee on Education and Labor Puts out 'Supporters of Intellectual Property Theft' Propaganda," "Politicos Near Vote on Anti-P2P Rules for Universities," and "Swiftboating Higher Education on P2P."

Preprints on University Publishing from a Special Double Issue of ARL: A Bimonthly Report

Preprints on university publishing from a special double issue of ARL: A Bimonthly Report on Research Library Issues and Actions from ARL, CNI, and SPARC are now available.

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet

Noted scholar Christine L. Borgman’s (Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA's Department of Information Studies) new book, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet, has been published by MIT Press.

Inside Higher Ed has interviewed her about the book and her views on the changing nature of scholarship.

ALA Urgent Call for Action about the Presidential Veto of the Labor-HHS Bill

The American Library Association has issued an urgent call for action about the presidential veto of the FY 2008 Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill, which includes the NIH Public Access Policy mandate and essential funding for library programs.

You can easily contact your senators using the ALA Action Alert Web form.

I've created a cut-and-paste version of prior ALA/Alliance for Taxpayer Access text about the NIH open access mandate and added brief information about key library programs funded by the bill. You can use this text to simplify the process of sending an e-mail via the ALA Action Alert Web form, but personalizing this text with an added sentence or two is recommended.

National Science Digital Library Releases Initial Fedora-based NCore Components

The National Science Digital Library Core Integration team at Cornell University has released a partial version of NCore, a "general platform for building semantic and virtual digital libraries united by a common data model and interoperable applications," which is built upon Fedora.

Here's an excerpt from the NSDL posting:

The NCore platform consists of a central repository built on top of Fedora, a data model, an API, and a number of fundamental services such as full-text search or OAI-PMH. Innovative NSDL services and tools that empower users as content creators are now built on, or transitioning to, the NCore platform. These include: the Expert Voices blogging system (http://expertvoices.nsdl.org/);the NSDL Wiki (http://wiki.nsdl.org/index.php/NSDL_Wiki); the NSDL OAI-PMH metadata ingest aggregation system; the OAI-PMH service for distributing public NSDL metadata; the NSDL Collection System (NCS), derived from the DLESE Collection system (DCS); the NSDL Search service, and the OnRamp content management and distribution system (http://onramp.nsdl.org).

Because NCore is a general Fedora-based open source platform useful beyond NSDL, Core Integration developers at Cornell University have made the repository and API code components of NCore available for download at the NCore project on Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/nsdl-core). Over the next six months, NSDL will release the code for major tools and services that comprise the full NCore suite on SourceForge.

For further information, see the NCore presentation.

Perseus Digital Library Code and Content Now Freely Available

The Perseus Digital Library Project has released both the source code for Perseus 4.0 and a significant amount of the project's digital content. The Perseus Java Hopper code is open source; the content is under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license.

Here's a description of the Perseus Digital Library from the About page:

Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. . . .

Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.

We collect texts, images, datasets and other primary materials. We assemble and carefully structure encyclopedias, maps, grammars, dictionaries and other reference works. At present, 1.1 million manually created and 30 million automatically generated links connect the 100 million words and 75,000 images in the core Perseus collections. 850,000 reference articles provide background on 450,000 people, places, organizations, dictionary definitions, grammatical functions and other topics.

President Bush Vetoes Bill Containing NIH Open Access Mandate

President Bush has vetoed the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill, which contained the NIH open access mandate.

Here's the open access mandate in the bill:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law

Here's Peter Suber's analysis of the President's veto:

  • First, don't panic.  This has been expected for months and the fight is not over.  Here's a reminder from my November newsletter:  "There are two reasons not to despair if President Bush vetoes the LHHS appropriations bill later this month.  If Congress overrides the veto, then the OA mandate language will become law.  Just like that.  If Congress fails to override the veto, and modifies the LHHS appropriation instead, then the OA mandate is likely to survive intact."  (See the rest of the newsletter for details on both possibilities.)
  • Also expected:  Bush vetoed the bill for spending more than he wants to spend, not for its OA provision.
  • Second, it's time for US citizens to contact their Congressional delegations again.  This time around, contact your Representative in the House as well as your two Senators.  The message is:  vote yes on an override of the President's veto of the LHHS appropriations bill.  (Note that the LHHS appropriations bill contains much more than the provision mandating OA at the NIH.)
  • The override votes—one in each chamber—haven't yet been scheduled.  They may come this week or they may be delayed until after Thanksgiving.  But they will come and it's not too early to contact your Congressional delegation.  For the contact info for your representatives (phone, email, fax, local offices), see CongressMerge.
  • Please spread the word!

Towards the Australian Data Commons: A Proposal for an Australian National Data Service

The Australian eResearch Infrastructure Council has released Towards the Australian Data Commons: A Proposal for an Australian National Data Service.

Here's an excerpt from the "Overview":

This paper is designed to encourage, inform and ultimately summarise the discussions around the appropriate strategic and technical descriptions of the Australian National Data Service; to fill in the outline in the Platforms for Collaboration investment plan.

To do so, the paper:

  • introduces the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) and the driving forces behind its creation;
  • provides a rationale for the services that ANDS will provide, and the programs through which the services will be offered; and
  • describes in detail the ANDS programs.

Part One (Background) provides a brief summary of the reasons to focus on data management, as well as an overview of ANDS, and identifies some issues associated with implementation.

Part Two (Rationale) sets out the systemic issues associated with achieving a research data commons, and provides the resultant rationale for the services that ANDS will offer the programs that they will be delivered through.

Part Three (Detailed Descriptions of ANDS Programs) sets out in detail the Aim, Focus, Service Beneficiaries, Products and Community Engagement activities for each of the ANDS Programs.

Fedora Meets Web 2.0: Repository Redux Presentation from Access 2007

A digital video of Mark Leggott's (University Librarian, University of Prince Edward Island) presentation from Access 2007 is now available.

Here's an excerpt from the program that describes the talk:

The University of Prince Edward Island has embarked on a substantial project to support the institutions Administrative, Learning and Research communities using a Web 2.0/3.0 framework and the Fedora/Drupal/Moodle systems as the foundation. The session will describe the architecture and demo some of the core systems, such as Learn@UPEI, UPEI VRE (Virtual Research Environment) and some sample digital library collections.

Urgent EDUCAUSE Call to Action on Illegal File Sharing Provision

EDUCAUSE has issued an urgent call to action regarding an illegal file sharing provision in the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007.

Here's the text of the provision:

Section 494: Campus Based Digital Theft Prevention

(a) IN GENERAL—Each eligible institution participating in any program under this title shall to the extent practicable—

(2) develop a plan for offering alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property as well as a plan to explore technology-based deterrents to prevent such illegal activity

For further information, see EDUCAUSE's P2P or File Sharing page, especially the talking points and the suggested templates for calls and letters. You can use Congress Merge to find contact information for your Congressional representatives.

Digital Preservation Report from RAND Europe

RAND Europe has released Addressing the Uncertain Future of Preserving the Past. Towards a Robust Strategy for Digital Archiving and Preservation. The report "examines key determinants of the sustainable digital preservation of scholarly records, with specific reference to developing a robust approach to the archiving of such records at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Netherlands."

Sara Lowman Named Vice Provost and University Librarian at Rice University

Rice University has named Sara Lowman, former Director of Fondren Library and Interim Vice Provost and University Librarian, as Vice Provost and University Librarian.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As vice provost and university librarian, Lowman will be responsible for providing the overall leadership, strategy, policymaking and fundraising for Fondren Library and its related departments, including Woodson Research Center, Digital Library Initiative, Digital Media Center, Fondren Library Information Technology and Friends of Fondren Library. She will oversee a staff of 120.

"Sara brings deep knowledge, experience and insight of Fondren Library, of Rice and of Rice's extended community, as well as long managerial and leadership experience within Fondren," said Provost Eugene Levy. "These are all attributes that will help Sara, working with her colleagues, move the library and the university forward through the important evolutionary changes that libraries confront in the 21st century." . . .

"The primary role of a university library is to acquire and preserve information and make it available to its user community," said Lowman. "Although technology will change many of the ways that libraries function, this fundamental principle of acquisition, access and preservation remains." . . .

The Digital Library Initiative will play an increasingly important role at Fondren as Rice pursues the V2C goal of becoming a major research university. "We need to digitally preserve the research papers by our faculty and students so that they will be available to future generations," Lowman said. "This is challenging, due to rapidly changing formats." . . .

Lowman came to Rice in 1985 after receiving a master's degree with distinction in library and information science from the University of Iowa.

Starting out as a science reference/collection development librarian at Fondren, Lowman served as coordinator of collection development and online search services, interim co-director of reader services, head of reference, assistant university librarian for public services and associate university librarian before becoming director of Fondren Library in 2000. She has been interim university librarian since Chuck Henry left Rice this past March. . . .

Lowman, who also has a bachelor's in biology with a concentration in Russian studies from Carleton College, has been involved with a number of professional library associations, including serving as president of board of trustees of both the Houston Area Research Libraries and of Amigos Library Services, a library resources consortium. She was a coordinating council member for TexShare, the Texas library resource-sharing network, and served on the ZLOT Project Advisory Board, which focused on developing requirements and planning for a common search and retrieval interface application for the Library of Texas Project through the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.

She has held a number of positions with the American Library Association, where she currently serves on the LAMA Building and Equipment Section Committee.

This year Lowman received the Shapiro Award, which recognizes Fondren Library staff members who have developed an innovative library service at Rice or have shown exemplary service to the university.

In addition to acknowledging her work on the recent renovation of Fondren and the library customer service survey, the award committee cited her contributions to the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic project. Lowman provided a room in Fondren Library to the Graduate Student Association to store and use recording equipment that allows volunteers to read sections of textbooks for the benefit of people who are blind or have a reading disability like dyslexia. Lowman also helped organize and train the circulation staff to monitor access to the room, and she encouraged library staff to volunteer to read for the project.

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