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Tag Archives: Copyright
Free E-Book on Copyright
Cory Doctorow, co-editor at boingboing.net, Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and contributor to Wired, Popular Science, the New York Times, etc., has published a book called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future and it's available for download on his website...for free! Cory is an advocate of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his own books. Here is an excerpt:
Back in 1985, the Senate was ready to clobber the music industry for exposing America’s impressionable youngsters to sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Today, the Attorney General is proposing to give the RIAA legal tools to attack people who attempt infringement. Through most of America’s history, the U.S. government has been at odds with the entertainment giants, treating them as purveyors of filth. But not anymore: today, the U.S. Trade Rep is using America’s political clout to force Russia to institute police inspections of its CD presses. (Savor the irony: post-Soviet Russia forgoes its hard-won freedom of the press to protect Disney and Universal!) How did entertainment go from trenchcoat pervert to top trade priority? I blame the “Information Economy.” No one really knows what “Information Economy” means, but by the early ’90s, we knew it was coming...Continue reading
McCain and Lessig on Fair Use
Recently John McCain was in the news for advocating Fair Use for his campaign videos on YouTube (Update: McCain protests YouTube's removal of his campaign videos, Heather Havenstein, Computerworld, October 15, 2008). It is an interesting story and now Lawrence Lessig puts it all in perspective for us:
- Copyright and Politics Don’t Mix, by Lawrence Lessig, Op-Ed, The New York Times, October 21, 2008.
It would be far better if copyright law were narrowed to those contexts in which it serves its essential creative function -- encouraging innovation and ensuring that artists get paid for their work -- and left alone the battles of what criticisms candidates for office, and their supporters, are allowed to make.While a lot of government information is free of copyright, or is supposed to be, strict interpretation and aggressive use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has led to restrictions on access to government information. Perhaps the most visible example is in Google Books, which blocks full text access to its scans of government publications because they "might" be covered by copyright. (See, for example, Oversight of U.S. Government Intelligence Functions: Hearings Before the Committee on Government Operations, United States Senate, Ninety-fourth Congress, Second Session, Published by U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1976.) But copyright is only part of the problem that limits access to what should be free, open, re-usable, government information. Even if we get reasonable changes to the Copyright law, we will need more. Governments will have want to make their content freely usable. They will have to apply aggressive open-access policies to their own content. This will mean avoiding technological locks (DRM), eschewing contractual and licensing restrictions on content, actively promoting and using open formats for digital materials, and actively labeling content as open and freely usable and re-usable. Continue reading
Hearing on bill that would block NIH Public Access policy
The Bill: Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (HR 6845)
The Hearings: Hearing on: H.R. 6845, the "Fair Copyright in Research Works Act" Thursday 09/11/2008 - 1:00 PM House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. [streaming RealPlayer video]
News Reports:- New Bill Would Forbid Copyright Transfer as a Condition for Federal Funding Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 11, 2008. "If passed, measures like the recently enacted NIH public access policy, which requires investigators who accept taxpayer funds to deposit their final papers in the PubMed Central repository and give the agency a non-exclusive right to offer free access within a year, would be prohibited."
- At Hearing, Witness Says NIH Policy Will “Destroy” Commercial Scientific Publishing Library Journal Academic Newswire, September 11, 2008. "Not only was the legislation motivating the hearing barely discussed, the testimony and the questions asked by committee members looked far more to the economic future of science publishing than to public access to taxpayer funded research." Former Register of Copyrights Ralph Oman bluntly told lawmakers that in his opinion, the NIH mandate would “destroy the market” for commercial scientific journals, and cause a “dilution” of copyright.
- Congressional Hearing Over Public Access Filled With High Drama By Jennifer Howard , The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 12, 2008 [subscription required, but freely available here for a short time.] A life-and-death battle is going on over public access to federally financed research—life for taxpayers and many scientists, and death for publishers. Or so each side claims. That battle, whose outcome will affect many university researchers, kicked into high gear on Capitol Hill yesterday, as the combatants debated the merits of a bill that would curtail the National Institutes of Health's public-access policy.
Carl Malamud: government information copyfighter
[Update: HA! StanfordLawLibrarians cross-posted a similar story almost at the same exact moment on FGI and over at LegalResearchPlus. So I deleted their post and include this link to their story as well!] Carl Malamud is itching for a copyfight, and when he wins(!), the American public will be better informed due to better access to state, county and federal regulations, building codes, plumbing standards, criminal laws etc. Code city is now open and the readme file is a graphic novel (view it as a Flickr slideshow here!) explaining the travesty of state and local codes being copyrighted rather than in the public domain and freely available online. Code city included full-text scans of 43 state codes -- including the entire California Title 24 Safety Codes! -- and several city codes (Little Rock, Denver, Phoenix, Wilmington, Honolulu, St Louis, Las Vegas). The goal of the project is to get as many city, county and state safety and building codes and regulations out on the open Web in a standardized digital format (YAY open standards!!) so that others can use the documents to design Web sites with more modern search and presentation features, "social Web sites where, for instance, plumbers could provide useful annotations to building codes -- perhaps blending Wikipedia with Facebook for a more useful law site." If/when he's successful, citizens (not to mention libraries!) will no longer be forced to shell out hundreds of dollars (CA code is $1,556 for a digital copy, or $2,315 for a printed version!). And that's a very good thing!!
California's building codes, plumbing standards and criminal laws can be found online. But if you want to download and save those laws to your computer, forget it. The state claims copyright to those laws. It dictates how you can access and distribute them -- and therefore how much you'll have to pay for print or digital copies. It forbids people from storing or distributing its laws without consent. That doesn't sit well with Carl Malamud, a Sebastopol resident with an impressive track record of pushing for digital access to public information. He wants California -- and every other federal, state and local agency -- to drop their copyright claims on law, contending it will pave the way for innovators to create new ways of searching and presenting laws. "When it comes to the law, the courts have always said there can be no copyright because people are obligated to know what it says," Malamud said. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse in court." Malamud is spoiling for a major legal fight. He has begun publishing copies of federal, state and county codes online -- in direct violation of claimed copyright. --Nathan Halverson, Press Democrat, Wednesday, September 3, 2008Continue reading
Kris Tells Us Why We Should Care
In the Summer 2008 issue of Dttp: Documents to the People, Kris Kasianovitz has a thoughtful overview of copyright of state and local documents and how that interacts with efforts to digitize such documents. The article: Why Care About Copyright? by Chris Kasianovitz. Dttp, v.36, no. 2, Summer 2008, p. 12 Gives a history of state/local copyright and argues that for history's sake and on the principle of free access to government information, copyright law ought to be amended to give state and local gov't documents the same public domain status as federal documents. We at FGI are in hearty agreement with that! As far as I can tell, Kris' article is not freely available on line, but some of the history she covers is also available on our government copyright page at http://freegovinfo.info/copyright. The whole Summer 2008 Dttp is well worth the read. There is also a freely available web supplement that you should check out at http://wikis.ala.org/godort/index.php/DttP_Supplements_v36_n2 if for no other reason than that FGI's own James Jacobs has an article on using del.icio.us for government documents. Continue reading
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