Text mining: what do publishers have against this hi-tech research tool? | The Guardian

Inside the Georgia State Opinion | The Laboratorium

Pull quote: "The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that application programming interfaces (APIs) and other functional characteristics of computer software are not eligible for copyright protection. Users have the right to examine computer software in order to clone its functionality—and vendors cannot override these user rights with a license agreement, the court said."

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by E-mailby RSSDelivered by FeedBurner Thursday Threads has been a back-burner activity for quite a while now. Blame it on too many interesting things happening at home and at work (to say nothing of the early arriv

We are the provosts of 11 large research universities that engage in over $5.6 billion of funded research each year. That research is directed at serving the public good through medical advances, improved defense systems, enhanced agricultural and industrial productivity, technological innovation, and reasoned social policy. In the aggregate, the outcomes of this research fuel America’s global leadership, improve the quality of life in our communities, and enrich the educational experience of our students.

Court Declares Newspaper Excerpt on Online Forum is a Non-Infringing Fair Use [Righthaven loses again] | Electronic...

There are oodles of meaty copyright issues in the case — including many that one would not think would still be unresolved at this late date. ReDigi is arguing that what it’s doing is protected by first sale: just as with physical CDs, resale of legally purchased copies is legal. Capitol’s counter is that no physical “copy” changes hands when a ReDigi user uploads a file and another user downloads it. This disagreement cuts to the heart of what first sale means and is for in this digital age. ReDigi is also making a quiver’s worth of arguments about fair use (when users upload files that they then stream back to themselves), public performance (too painfuly technical to get into on a general-interest blog), and the responsibility of intermediaries for infringements initiated by users.

IEEE blows it on the Security & Privacy copyright agreement [for conference papers] | Freedom to Tinker

Pull quote: "The recent Department of Justice decision to indict Megaupload for copyright infringement and related offenses raises some very thorny questions from a criminal law perspective. A few preliminaries: I’m responsible for the musings below, but I thank Robert Weisberg of Stanford Law School for taking the time to talk through the issues and giving me pointers to some relevant cases. Also, an indictment contains unproven allegations, and the facts may well turn out to be different, or to imply different things in full context."

Digital media: can’t give it away [on first-sale rights of digital music] | Peter Brantley on Publishers Weekly blog

Pull quote: "The new code is one of a series published with the help of Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, a pair of American University scholars known for pushing back against the restrictions of copyright law. The duo has helped several professional communities develop similar codes. Brandon Butler, director of public-policy initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries, said this guide is different than early fair-use guidelines for libraries, which he described as narrowly crafted “safe harbors” that had the unintended effect of making it more difficult for librarians to do their jobs. Mr. Butler said this version gives librarians a collective voice that they haven’t enjoyed in the past."

Toledo schools sued by publisher [with claims of copyright piracy] | The Columbus Dispatch

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by E-mailby RSSDelivered by FeedBurner<br />
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Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by&nbsp;E-mailby&nbsp;RSSDelivered by FeedBurner It might have been the week of the annual American Library Association meeting with all the news and announcements and programming that came from it -- as well as getting into t

New blog post: Thursday Threads: RDA Test Results, Author's Rights Denied, Future Copyright Scenario

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by E-mailby RSSDelivered by FeedBurner It is another e-books issue of DLTJ Thursday Threads with updates on three significant efforts: HarperCollins, Google Book Search Settlement, Digital Public Library of America. And, jus

[caption id="attachment_2743" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Wordle of the Opinion Rejecting the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement"][/caption]This afternoon, Judge Denny Chin released the opinion of the court rejecting the proposed settlemen

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This week's DLTJ Thursday Threads has just two pointers. First, a new volunteer web service to report problems with websites, which may be useful for not only our own sites bu

Spotted in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online this morning is mention of two lectures by Wendy Seltzer that will happen today on the topic of copyright and fair-use doctrine. Here are the summaries and hCalendar events (the latter being useful if yo

Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University demonstrates principles of fair use to give an overview of U.S. copyright principles in A Fair(y) Use Tale -- a 10-minute video in five acts. Using clips from dozens of Disney films, Faden gives the historical p

Here is something to keep an eye on. Via the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wendy Seltzer, a visiting assistant professor at Brooklyn Law School and Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet &amp; Society at Harvard Law School, is demonstrating the concep

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by&nbsp;E-mailby&nbsp;RSSDelivered by FeedBurnerThe turn of the year brings commentary on the past 12 months and thoughts on the future. This edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads looks at the relationship between libraries and el

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by&nbsp;E-mailby&nbsp;RSSDelivered by FeedBurner When I say "&lt;blank&gt; is a question answering system. A question can be posed in natural language and ... &lt;blank&gt; can come up with a very precise answer to that ques

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads:by&nbsp;E-mailby&nbsp;RSSDelivered by FeedBurner This week's Thursday Threads highlights includes two legal cases that bear watching. The first is the case of SkyRiver/Innovative Interfaces versus OCLC (covered on DLTJ previo

Receive DLTJ Thursday Threads by E-mail!Delivered by FeedBurner It has been a long week, so for many of you this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads will actually be read on Friday. The spirit was willing, the topics were certainly out there in the past seve

"What can we learn from Cooks Source Magazine's fiasco?

(1) Open source theory -- that many eyes see all bugs -- is coming to pass in unexpected places.

(2) Not only is it coming to pass, checks like these are getting faster, assuming that they reach the right amplifiers.

(3) Because we have not developed a set of social graces to provide guidance for behavior, some people are saying cruel, ignorant and ugly things. [...]

(4) What will we do when an innocent person gets lynched? When a lynching is manipulated?

(5) How can we channel this energy and fact check fervor towards greater good issues like watchdogging government? [...]

(6) We have a lot of educating to do. Digital technology makes perfect copies perfectly easy to accomplish. Current web software makes it easy for anyone to be a publisher. [...]

(7) Finally, Cooks Source has no monopoly on questionable copying of material, as I documented here last month."

It’s barely 24 hours since the Cooks Source/Judith Griggs saga blew up, but so much has happened in that time that I thought it worth reflecting on how other publishers might handle a similar situation.

Although it’s an extreme example, the story has particular relevance to those publications that rely on Facebook or another web presence to publish material online and communicate with readers, and might at some point face a backlash on that platform.

"For every reproduction that I found, I made efforts to contact the original copyright holder. And the above examples demonstrate unequivocally that nearly the entirety of Cooks Source‘s material has been taken from other sources and that, in at least four instances, Cooks Source did not obtain the necessary permission to reproduce the material. The onus is now on Cooks Source to produce the appropriate paperwork to demonstrate that it secured the release. But since Judith Griggs is uninterested in returning telephone calls, since she has demonstrated a lack of concern for copyright, and not a single writer, publisher, or organization has come forward with proof positive that Griggs has played by the rules, one can conclude from the presented evidence that Cooks Source is a magazine that profits on theft."

At the DMCA 1201 hearings at the Copyright Office at the Library of Congress, representatives from the MPAA showed a video demonstrating how users can videorecord a TV set. They argue this is an acceptable analog alternative to breaking copy protection on a DVD.

The hearings occur every three years to determine whether the Librarian at the Library of Congress (through direction of the Copyright Office) should create exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In 2006, film and media professors were granted an exemption in order to break copy protection on DVDs so that they could utilize high quality video clips in classroom teaching. Up for consideration during the 2009 exemption hearings is whether this exemption should be extended to apply to faculty teaching in all disciplines, and whether the exemption should apply to students.

I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk.

He lives in the Midwest, he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands. We discussed his file sharing activity over the course of a weekend, via email, and in his answers lie a critical challenge facing the publishing industry: how to quash the emerging piracy threat without alienating their most enthusiastic customers. As is typical of anonymous online communities, he has a peculiar handle: “The Real Caterpillar.”

"It's this last part that has the technologically naive excited. They assume that because a downloading client can be designed in such a way that it doesn't save the file, no "copy" is being made. They assume that this is the technical equivalent of "showing" someone a movie instead of "giving them a copy" of it.

But the reason some download clients discards the bits is because the programmer chose not to save them. Designing a competing client that doesn't throw away the bits – one that "makes a copy" – is trivial.

All streaming involves making a copy, and saving the copy just isn't hard."

Analysis from Columbia University Libraries Copyright Advisory Office

"Andrew Magliozzi, who graduated from Harvard College in 2006, runs the FinalsClub.org website. It hosts lecture notes and study groups for Harvard courses. At the moment you can get the nickel precis of Harvard librarian and history professor Robert Darnton’s course on the history of the book, as written up, lecture by lecture, by a pseudonymous note taker.

Problem is, there’s an argument that what professors say in class is their intellectual property. After all, if they just read their own lecture notes, then their words have been “fixed in a tangible medium,” to quote the Copyright Act. So the professor automatically holds the copyright, and Magliozzi, or his note-taking helpers, are violating it. By that logic, it’s the same thing as listening to a song being sung, transcribing it, and posting the notes and lyrics on your web site. Copyright violation."

An interesting thing happened at my place of work (OhioLINK) today. We recently added links to our central catalog pointing to manifestations in Google Books. The way it was decided to set it up, though, was to only point to Google Books if the full text

"At YouTube, we have sophisticated content management tools in place to help rights holders control their content on our site. The rights holders for "Forever" used these tools to claim and monetize the song, as well as to start running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the music track on Amazon and iTunes. As a result, the rights holders were able to capitalize on the massive wave of popularity generated by "JK Wedding Entrance Dance" — in the last week, searches for "Chris Brown Forever" on YouTube have skyrocketed, making it one of the most popular queries on the site"

"The Microsoft-Yahoo search deal was big news this past week, and I took plenty of press calls about it, including from the AP. But to quote what I told the AP, I have to pay them $17.50."

"The Associated Press has become so deranged, so disconnected from reality, that it will sell you a “license” to quote words it didn’t write and doesn’t own."

"The two-hour panel, "Expanding Access to Books: Implications of the Google Books Settlement Agreement,” featured David Drummond, senior v-p of corporate development & chief legal officer at Google; Richard Sarnoff, co-chairman, Bertelsmann, authors Jim Gleick and Peter Petre, and attorney and library legal advisor Jonathan Band, author of A Guide for the Perplexed: Libraries and the Google Library Project Settlement. The panel kicks off a week of events in New York as the settlement enters a critical final month before a September 4 deadline for rightsholders to opt-out or object to the deal."

"The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) urged a federal court Wednesday to reject bogus copyright claims in a ringtone royalty battle that could raise costs for consumers, jeopardize consumer rights, and curtail new technological innovation.

Millions of Americans have bought musical ringtones, often clips from favorite popular songs, for their mobile phones. Mobile phone carriers pay royalties to song owners for the right to sell these snippets to their customers. But as part of a ploy to squeeze more money out of the mobile phone companies, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) has told a federal court that each time a phone rings in a public place, the phone user has violated copyright law. Therefore, ASCAP argues, phone carriers must pay additional royalties or face legal liability for contributing to what they claim is cell phone users' copyright infringement. "

At a focus group in Oxford University Press's offices in New York last month, we heard that in a recent essay assignment for a Columbia University classics class, 70 percent of the undergraduates had cited a book published in 1900, even though it had not been on any reading list and had long been overlooked in the world of classics scholarship. Why so many of the students had suddenly discovered a 109-year-old work and dragged it out of obscurity in preference to the excellent modern works on their reading lists is simple: The full text of the 1900 work is online, available on Google Book Search; the modern works are not.

Presentation slides. Session agenda: "Reduce fear • Increase confidence • Explain the basics • Help you accept ambiguity • Help you know where to start with questions and problems you encounter "

A few weeks ago, a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed Adam Smith, Google's director of product management, about the Google Book Search settlement and posted the interview in audio form. The page isn't dated, but guessing from metad

A controversy is starting to pick up in the business librarian community -- primarily in the U.K. it would seem -- regarding the licensing demands of Harvard Business Press (HBP) for the inclusion of Harvard Business Review articles in EBSCOhost. HBP cont

"The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message “Cannot be sent to selected device”.

“Oh that’s the problem,” he said “if some of the books will download and the others won’t it means that you’ve reached the maximum number of times you can download the book.”

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren’t currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it’s five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here’s the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again."

Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans.

The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies.

"The project seemed in keeping with the guiding principles of the Internet, which assumes a quid pro quo between search engines and Web sites. That is, sites allow themselves to be copied and indexed as long as search engines such as Google lead people back to the original sites.

"But as we learned when the settlement was proposed last October, Google's search tool has become a digital bookstore. The settlement outlines business models for creating and selling electronic editions of books, and selling subscriptions to Google's new exclusive library.

"Whereas the original lawsuit could have helped define fair use in the digital age, the settlement provides a new and unsettling form of media consolidation."

By clicking on the + and - boxes to open and close “branches” of the information “tree” embedded into this page, visitors can learn whether a particular work is covered by copyright in the United States.

The American Library Association (through the Association's Washington Office and the Association of College and Research Libraries Division) and the Association of Research Libraries filed a brief [PDF] with the court in support of the Google Book Search

How many books are in there already?
Can I download or buy old books through Google right now?
What about new books?
How did Google get away with scanning 7 million library books?
Then why did the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sue Google in 2005?
Why did Google settle in 2007 if it has the right to do this?
Why should I care about the settlement at all?
Who manages authors and publishers’ rights if Google is going to be advertising next to book pages and selling books?
What about libraries?
What is an author’s role in all this?
How can Google get a monopoly?
Is the opposition to the settlement all about the so-called orphans?
What’s the problem with orphans?
Could Google end up with the most comprehensive online library in the world?
Why can’t Amazon or Yahoo or Microsoft go to the Book Registry and get an orphans waiver like Google is getting?
Is a lot of money at stake?
Why does the Justice Department getting involved?

"The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service..."

New York Judge Denny Chin recently issued two rulings in the Google Book Search settlement. In the first, he ' the request by the Internet Archive to intervene as a defendant in the lawsuit (and thus, presumably, be on firmer founding to guide aspects of

Comment on "YouTube takes down thousands of fair-use videos" on ZDNet

"Unpublished sound recordings are those created for private use, or even for broadcast, but that have not been distributed to the public in copies with the right holder's consent. Examples include tapes of live musical performances or of interviews conducted as part of field research or news gathering. Such recordings may find their way into library and archive collections through donations or purchase. Some may be the only record of a particular performance or event, and therefore may have considerable cultural and historical significance. The rights for use of unpublished recordings are distinct from those for use of commercial sound recordings, which are made with the authorization of rights holders and are intended for reproduction and sale to the public."

"Sound recordings were not protected by federal copyright law until 1972. A Library of Congress report indicates that the miscellany of state laws protecting pre-1972 sound recordings will extend copyright protection until 2067, creating a situation where some recordings dating to the 19th century are not available in public domain.

The Library announced today the completion of a commissioned report that examines copyright issues associated with unpublished sound recordings. This new report from the Library of Congress and the Council on Library and Information Resources addresses the question of what libraries and archives are legally empowered to do, under current laws, to preserve and make accessible for research their holdings of unpublished sound recordings made before 1972."

Revision history:

* Revised for distribution (March 14, 2009)
* Initial presentation, Google and the Future of Higher Education, Georgetown University Library (February 27, 2009)

I'm reading the notes from the Atlanta OLE Project regional workshop and right up at the top are these two statements that struck me as insightful. The first gets to the heart of how physical items in a library are different from digital items with respec

The blog post title is a serious question -- it is one that I need some help figuring out: What Does the Google Book Settlement Mean for the Online Book Market? There have been stories and speculation about how Google is going to turn the settlement for

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access called out the introduction of proposed legislation that would prohibit the federal government from requiring publication of federally-funded research under open access terms. This would not only reverse the NIH Public Acc

"Why bother about openness and licensing for data? After all they don’t matter in themselves: what we really care about are things like the progress of human knowledge or the freedom to understand and share.

However, open data is crucial to progress on these more fundamental items. It’s crucial because open data is so much easier to break-up and recombine, to use and reuse. We therefore want people to have incentives to make their data open and for open data to be easily usable and reusable — i.e. for open data to form a ‘commons’.

A good definition of openness acts as a standard that ensures different open datasets are ‘interoperable’ and therefore do form a commons. Licensing is important because it reduces uncertainty."

There is a new page in the Record Use Policy area on the OCLC website with an invitation from Jennifer Younger, chair of the Review Board, inviting members of the community to send e-mail to reviewboard@oclc.org or to post public comments on the Review Boa

OCLC announced late yesterday the members of the review board. In addition, they announced the establishment of an e-mail address for communicating with the review board (reviewboard@oclc.org).

Members of the Review Board of Shared Data Creation and St

Nearly a week after it was posted, I came across a posting by Karen Calhoun of OCLC summarizing her impressions of the ALCTS Forum at Midwinter. I thought I had been closely watching the dialog around the policy, so I was surprised when I came across it.

Last week, the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. published a story on the proposed OCLC record use policy and the controversy surrounding the proposal. As the first story on the controversy to reach the mainstream press, it spawned a flurry of discussion in

At ALA Midwinter, ALCTS sponsored a panel discussion about sharing library-created data inside and outside the library community, with a particular focus on cataloging data. I was honored to be ask to speak on the topic from the perspective of a consortial

At ALA Midwinter, ALCTS sponsored a panel discussion about sharing library-created data inside and outside the library community, with a particular focus on cataloging data. I was honored to be ask to speak on the topic from the perspective of a consortia

Santa photoshoots copyrighted

The Associate Press reported on Monday evening that the court has given preliminary approval to the settlement negotiated between Google and book authors and publishers over the use of copyrighted materials in the Google Book Search Library project. In gi

CC HowTo #1: How to Attribute a Creative Commons licensed work;
CC HOWTO #2: How to use a work with a NonCommercial license;
CC HOWTO #3: How to use a work with a Share Alike license;
CC HowTo #4: How to use a work with a No Derivatives license

One of the very relevant aspects of the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement to libraries is the provision that allows for free public access to the full text of books in public and academic libraries. The Notice of Settlement summary says: "Google wi

eby's wiki page of links to texts on OCLC policy change

Update
On the Code4Lib IRC channel Thursday afternoon, Roy Tennant, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Programs and Research, said that there is absolutely no connection between the policy change and the Google Book Search settlement.

The Original Post
Tw

Beyond the public pronouncements of the Google Books Settlement ((See the bottom of this earlier post on DLTJ for a complete list)) are the documents that form the meat of the agreement. The full text of the proposed settlement agreement is 141 pages plus

Announced today was a settlement between Google and the plaintiffs -- the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and individual authors and publishers -- in the class action lawsuit about materials scanned for the Google Book Search applicat

"All signs pointed to a Hollywood ending with Disney and Mickey Mouse living happily ever after -- at least until a grumpy former employee looked closely at fine print long forgotten in company archives. Film credits from the 1920s revealed imprecision in copyright claims that some experts say could invalidate Disney's long-held copyright, though a Disney lawyer dismissed that idea as "frivolous.""

To catch college students trading copyrighted songs online, the RIAA uses the same software that online pirates love, an RIAA representative told The Chronicle at the organization's offices during a private demo of how it catches alleged music pirates.

Larry Lessig

gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this
elegant presentation of "three stories and an argument." The Net's most
adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights,
and the "ASCAP cartel"

Spotted in the Chronicle of Higher Education Online this morning is mention of two lectures by Wendy Seltzer that will happen today on the topic of copyright and fair-use doctrine. Here are the summaries and hCalendar events (the latter being useful if y