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Tag Archives: Copyright
Lunchtime listen: “Good Copy Bad Copy”
Happy Friday! Please check out GOOD COPY BAD COPY - a documentary out of Denmark about the current state of copyright and culture. Our good friend Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party makes some extremely valid points about the need to balance individual privacy rights with copyright; right now, content owners like the RIAA and MPAA are stomping on individual privacy rights which is unacceptable to him and to many others. Many others on both sides of the argument make appearances on the film -- like Laurence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Dan Glickman (CEO of MPAA). We'd love to hear your ideas and perspective about file sharing and copyright.
Malamud takes on LC Copyright Database
Carl Malamud, FGI's open govt hero, has done it again! In a recent letter to Marybeth Peters, the United States Register of Copyrights, Malamud and others have asked Peters to provide bulk access to a "vital public database" -- the copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials. The letter recognizes that "sales of the database may be a significant source of revenue for the Copyright Office" and that "budgetary requirements or the assent of congressional oversight committees" might make it difficult to make the data available right away and offers an short term alternative of "...we would like to offer to set up a collective fund for purchase of a single copy of the database, making it available for anyone to use. This would provide a public distribution channel...." The letter also says, "We ask only that you help us clarify that there is no copyright on the database so that we may freely redistribute it." The letter was signed by the Digital Library Federation, Harvard University Library, Public Knowledge, Stanford University Library, the Association of Research Libraries, the Internet Archive and others. For more see:
The copyright catalog of monographs, documents, and serials is not a product, it is fuel that makes the copyright system work. Anybody should be able to download the entire database to their desktop, write a better search application, or use this public domain information to research copyright questions. A price tag of $86,625 places this database beyond the reach of university libraries, small businesses that wish to provide a better copyright search service, and academics or citizens wishing to analyze the copyright registration process. Additionally, setting copyright restrictions on the copyright database, a “work of the United States Government,†runs directly counter to the well-established principle that such works shall be in the public domain.I hope LC and the Copyright Office take this letter seriously and releases the database to the original owner, the public. However, I am not sure whether Ms. Peters will be amenable considering the post about her on BoingBoing a few days ago. Continue reading
Aaarrrr! Pirate talk now available
You may or may not remember that I posted a couple of weeks ago about Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate party giving a talk at Stanford. For those who missed the talk, the video is now available as well as several other talks that Rick did while traveling to the Open Source Convention and the Bay area.
Many thanks to Stanford Libraries and the Center for Internet and Society for co-sponsoring the talk and for Henrik Bennetsen and Galen Davis of the Stanford Humanities Lab for videotaping the well-attended and interesting event!
Leave us comments and let us know what you think about Rick's ideas for reforming international copyright.
Continue readingHR 3155 Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal Enforcement Act of 2007
Put this in your "picture is worth 1000 words" file. Can you guess the effect of HR 3155, the Intellectual Property Enhanced Criminal Enforcement Act of 2007? Thought so... But if you'd prefer to read about analysis of the proposed law, see "Copycrime Bill Raises its Ugly Head, Again" from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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Creative Commons for Education
Today Creative Commons -- a non-profit organization founded by Laurence Lessig devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others through copyright reform and the Creative Commons license -- announced ccLearn, a new division devoted to promoting the use of freely copyable materials for classrooms and education. The idea is that in order for Web technologies to truly have a revolutionary impact on education, there needs to be the development of "open educational resources (OER), which in their fullest form should be free, accessible, authoritative, and derivable." Makes perfect sense, no?
Our mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.[Thanks BoingBoing!] Continue reading
- With legal barriers, we advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. We also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
- With technical barriers, we promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
- With social barriers, we encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.
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