Copyfraud
- There is a good article in Searcher Magazine that documents specialists and other interested in public domain materials should read:
- Title: 'Copyfraud' and Public Domain Works.
- Author: Ebbinghouse, Carol
- Source: Searcher; Jan2008, Vol. 16 Issue 1, p40-52, 9p
- Ms. Ebbinghouse does a good job of explaining how some try to usurp the public domain through fraudulent notices and/or slight alterations of materials. Her opening gives a good flavor of what's to come:
You find a PDF version of the Federalist Papers on the internet that is just what you need, but it carries a copyright date of 2001. Now that's odd, considering that the last Federalist paper was written and published in 1788. Cautious, you find an ASCII text version, but it has a copyright date of 1999. Can you download this one? Does the fact that one is an image and the other plain text make any difference? And how the heck does anything written in the 18th century end up with post-1923 copyright dates?
Can someone legitimately move public domain text into copyright? What about when you go to an archive, only to find open source and nonpublic domain titles mixed in with public domain items, but the archive seems to put restrictions on your subsequent use of everything (no copying without permission; no commercial re-use, etc.)?
- What leads some vendors to attempt to convince people that public domain materials are really under copyright? In part, because there's little legal cost to doing so, According to Ms. Ebbinghouse:
- As Jason Mazzone points out, "Copyright law suffers from a basic defect: The law's strong protections for copyrights are not balanced by explicit protections for the public domain. Accordingly, copyright law itself creates strong incentives for copyfraud. The limited penalties for copyfraud under the Copyright Act, coupled with weak enforcement … give publishers an incentive to claim ownership, however spurious, in everything. Although falsely claiming copyright is technically a criminal offense under the Act [17 U.S.C. §506(c)] prosecutions are extremely rare. Moreover, the Copyright Act provides no civil penalty for claiming copyrights in public domain materials. … [and] no federal agency is specially charged with safeguarding the public domain."
- Reading this paragraph gives rise to an interesting idea. What if there were substantial fines for removing works from the public domain and the fines were used to run an orphan copyright registry that people could use without fear of prosecution. What if the American Library Association could get together with large foundations and start suing corporations for violations of the public domain? Would it lead to a world where if you weren't certain of a work's, you presumed it was public domain for fear of the consequences of an illegal claim of copyright? We could live with that.
- Waking up from that daydream, I want edto point out this articles to readers of FGI because so much government information is both public domain and often repackaged as being in copyright. And occaisionally like the first edition of the Iraq Study Group report, government documents have copyrighted materials embeded into them. Ms. Ebbinghouse's article can help you navigate these difficult issues and help you deal with the copyfrauds out there.
Tag cloud of 2008 State of the Union address
Some of you may remember that we've been interested in visualization tools like tag cloud generating services (i.e., Tag Crowd). We haven't done one of these for a while, but watching tonight's State of the Union address, I thought it'd be interesting to visualize that text (courtesy of the NY Times). Let us know what you think.
Global Village or Global slums?
Seeing two news reports so close together got me thinking about the eternal connections (perhaps affinities is a better word) between government information and urban development. It strikes me that the myriad issues of information haves and have nots extends not only in terms of economics, but also in terms of population density. In other words, for the great many of the poor around the world live in essentially dense urban wastelands with little access to services or facilities that are quite commonplace in most developed cities. In America, this discussion often plays out along rural versus city lines, but even in most cities, there are still tens of thousands of people equally isolated from much of the broadbend and robust aspects of the web many middle-income families take for granted at home, work, and in school.
A recent UN report shows that the issue of housing and the poor is only going to become more difficult. World’s Cities Report 2006/7 points out that it --
"...comes at a time when the world is entering a historic urban transition; in 2007, for the first time in history, the world’s urban population will exceed the rural population. Most of the world’s urban growth – 95 per cent – in the next two decades will be absorbed by cities of the developing world, which are least equipped to deal with rapid urbanization. The majority of migrants will be moving to small towns and cities of less than one million inhabitants. Already, more than half of the world’s urban population lives in cities of fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, and almost one-fifth lives in cities of between 1 and 5 million inhabitants."
At the same, from another source, zdnet, is mention of an initiative called the Open Architecture Network (http://www.openarchitecturenetwork.org) a program designed to use open source software to facilitate more affordable housing. Strikes me that these reports are just further indication that the importance of other kinds of public information (state, local, international, regional, non-profit) will likely dominate in our near futures.
Continue readingFreeing Thomas
A good overview of the need for open availability of government information and the current status of making Thomas more open:
- Lawmakers Favor Outside Access To Legislative Data, by Aliya Sternstein, National Journal's Technology Daily, January 23, 2008 PM edition [subscription required] [The article is available without a subcription here and here ]
Excerpts:
Continue readingThe legislative process could become a lot more exciting if lawmakers get their way in freeing the data inside the Library of Congress' legislative Internet database so that independent Web sites can repackage the information....
The data is important because no single view into the workings of Congress is best for everyone...
But the change likely would affect paid-subscription sites that charge for legislative updates. Their "business model will need to evolve to compete with citizen technologists," Sunlight Foundation Program Director John Wonderlich said.
There also may be resistance from congressional administrators, who "are often wary of taking on new departmental responsibilities if they are not accompanied by statutory justification or appropriations," Wonderlich said.
US censors Arctic scientists’ findings
US censors Arctic scientists' findings as it prepares for oil and gas auction, By Daniel Howden, The Independent, January 22, 2008.
The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear.
Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was "huge frustration" that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic.
The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world's energy reserves.
Speaking yesterday from Tromso, one of the report's lead authors, who asked not to be named, said: "They [the US] have blocked it. We have no executive summary and no plain language conclusions."...
Continue reading