via https://twitter.com/#!/GaviaLib/status/201697590692167682 "There was a trial a year ago, and then long silence from the court. Now we know why it was taking so long: the opinion is 350 pages. That number is a little misleading, in that over two thirds of the opinion are dedicated to a highly methodical copyright ownership, infringement, and fair use analysis of seventy-four separate claims of infringement, using standard templates and highly repetitive language. Having now dug through the details, I’d like to offer a few observations.""Other claims dropped out before the fair use stage because they were uploaded to the e-reserves system but never downloaded by students. The court dismisses these from the lawsuit as de minimis, explaining that these uses by the University, while technical implicating the copyright owners’ exclusive rights, don’t affect the incentives for authors to create. This puts more teeth in the de minimis doctrine in copyright: it goes beyond the view that de minimis means “not substantially similar.” It also strengthens the argument that “internal use” copies never used to reach an to an audience that reads them for their content don’t infringe. Think, for example, of the HathiTrust’s archive of scans from Google Books.""When the court did reach fair use, it held across the board that two of the four factors favored Georgia State. The purpose of the use, while not transformative, was nonetheless for highly favored educational purposes by a nonprofit institution. And the nature of the works was consistently informational.

On the third factor, the amount copied, the court repudiated the Classroom Guidlines, calling them “not compatible with the language and intent of § 107.” It noted that the numerical limits in the Guidelines are so stringent that not one of the excerpts at issue in the case would fit within them. It was particularly uninterested in the Guidelines’ position that copying not “be repeated with respect to the same item by the same teacher from term to term,” which the court described as “an impractical, unnecessary limitation.”""Instead, the court fashioned its own quantitative test. For books of nine or fewer chapters, the court set a threshold of 10% of the total page count; for books of ten chapters or more, the threshold was a single complete chapter. (The chapter-based rule creates an odd incentive for publishers to create books with a surfeit of tiny chapters.) Copying of any amount under this threshold, the court held, would be treated as “decidedly small.” In practical terms, this ended up being a one-sided bright-line rule: copying of less than 10% or one chapter always ended in a fair use win for Georgia State.""no digital license meant an instant win for Georgia State. The court repeatedly emphasized that students would not have bought the assigned books as a substitute for the excerpts posted on the e-reserve system.""Only in seven instances did Georgia State use more than 10% or one chapter of a book that was available for digital licensing. When this happened, the court took a more detailed look at the specifics of the book’s licensing market and the portion copied. Generally, this turned on whether the book made significant revenues via licensing: if so, the use was unfair. (In one instance, the court did a “heart of the work” analysis under factor three to find no fair use because the professor had assigned chapters that “essentially sum up the ideas in the book.”)""Thus, the operational bottom line for universities is that it’s likely to be fair use to assign less than 10% of a book, to assign larger portions of a book that is not available for digital licensing, or to assign larger portions of a book that is available for digital licensing but doesn’t make significant revenues through licensing. This third prong is almost never going to be something that professors or librarians can evaluate, so in practice, I expect to see fair-use e-reserves codes that treat under 10% as presumptively okay, and amounts over 10% but less than some ill-defined maximum as presumptively okay if it has been confirmed that a license to make digital copies of excerpts from the book is not available.""The most interesting issue open in the case is the scope of any possible injunction. Given that Georgia State won on sixty-nine out of seventy-four litigated claims, while the publishers won on only five, I expect that the any injunction will need to be rather narrow. But given how amenable the court’s proposed limits are to bright-line treatment, it is likely that the publishers will push to write them in to the injunction.""The big winner is CCC. It gains leverage against universities for coursepack and e-reserve copying with a bright-line rule, and it gains leverage against publishers who will be under much more pressure to participate in its full panoply of licenses."

One of my major complaints when I was in grad school was that almost nobody does interdisciplinary research (which is true — the percentage of research papers that span different disciplines is tiny). Then I actually tried doing it, and came to the obvious-in-retrospect realization that collaborating with people who don’t speak your language is hard.

"Science is not a popularity contest; Pagerank is irrelevant as a peer-review mechanism. Basically, scientific peer review is the only process that exists for systematically separating truths from untruths. Like democracy, it has its problems, but at least it works. Social media is probably the worst analogy — it seems to be better at amplifying falsehoods than facts. Wikipedia-style crowdsourcing has its strengths, but it can hit-or-mis"

"The instrument will make it possible for copyright holders to seek court injunctions against companies whose systems are hosting copyright-infringing material – for example ISPs and social media sites.
Independent TDs Catherine Murphy and Stephen Donnelly raised concerns about the possible impact of the legislation on smaller online enterprises, saying it could expose them to potentially ruinous legal costs.
But Sherlock said that if a site such as Boards.ie complies with procedures and takes down material in breach of copyright after it is notified, there is no risk of a paralysing injunction."

"vidence was adduced by the plaintiffs to justify claims that many thousands of tracks are illegally downloaded. Justin Mason looks at some of those claims and finds that, by the same logic, an album he invented on the spot has been downloaded 24,752 times. This evidence, which appears to be highly flawed, has already been represented as fact in the Seanad."

via http://www.semanticlibrary.net/2012/01/18/sopa-pipa-and-the-business/

"If we do not wish to see poor legislation passed we need to offer better alternatives, both in terms of the law of the net and how we reward and fund the creative industries. Maybe the BBC model is best, high quality entertainment funded by the public purse and then distributed freely. However, I don’t see the US Congress nationalising Hollywood in the near future."

via http://twitter.com/Villavelius/status/152693691109220352

via http://twitter.com/#!/michellegreer/status/148913716468002819

"The funny part of this however, and what the author was going for, is that by posting that image link (copyrighted content of Virtual Shackles, stolen and put on imgur) that the WhiteHouse.gov site is itself in breach of SOPA, as it is now a site linking to infringing content, no matter that it was a random user that posted it. And that’s the whole point."

"If we were starting with a blank sheet of paper to design a mechanism for communicating about research, what would be our requirements? Here is my list:

Repeatability
Reusability
Immediacy
Transparency
Openness
Sustainability
Permanence
Authenticity""Librarians had two concerns about leasing materials:
If they decided to cancel their subscription, they would lose access not just to future materials, but also to the materials for which they had paid. This problem is called post-cancellation access.
If the publisher stopped publishing the materials, future readers would lose access to them entirely. This problem is called preserving the record.""the only national library currently accepting copyright deposit of e-journals (PDF) is the Dutch KB. It has no authority under Dutch law to do so, but has to negotiate the arrangements for deposit with the publishers. Libraries, such as the BL and the DNB, that have a legal mandate have found these negotiations difficult. ""Another problem is that the value of post-cancellation access dominates the value of preserving the record. What librarians want their LOCKSS box to collect is the expensive content from the major publishers. Precisely because it is expensive, it is not at risk of being lost. The content that is at risk of being lost from the record is from the smallest publishers or from government sources. The content is largely open access, and thus generates no post-cancellation access value. Although LOCKSS is being used to preserve open access content, such as government documents, funding this preservation is much harder. Digital preservation resources are thus massively mis-directed. "

""

"Aaron was a participant in Dublin Core working groups at the tender age of 13. I recall finding his posts on contentious DC architecture issues as sensible and well-reasoned. Imagine my surprise when I learned the author's age! His posts were measured and mature, a convincing impersonation of adulthood, and his contributions were always positive.

He went on to other activities -- Reddit, The Open Library Project, and online activism (eg., DemandProgress.org). I confess my recent knowledge of Aaron is scanty at best, but in my limited dealings with him, I found him eager to contribute and to do good things.

Now he is embroiled in a bizzare distortion of the open access movement, accused of unlawfully 'stealing' large numbers of academic journal articles from JSTOR. What does it mean, to 'steal' digital assets, when these assets remain available to others? I suspect, from the murky descriptions of his actions and motives in what passes for news, that Aaron sees himself as liberating assets paid for by citizens and held artificially hostage behind the monetization barriers of corporate greed. JSTOR is hardly an icon of corporate greed, but still, the information -- research results which have the potential for improving lives, are quenched by limitations on access.""t is not theft of assets at issue, nor, I suspect, disruption of computing systems, but rather the disruption of business models which is at the heart of this problem."

"As James Grimmelmann noted at The Laboratorium, Chin also suggested that if settlement talks do not reach fruition and there was a return to litigation, the path would be clearly lit:
Judge Chin suggested that he saw the case, if it were to be litigated, in terms of fairly straightforward cross motions for summary judgment on whether snippet display is a fair use.
""It seems to me that the only benefit Google obtains from a new settlement is clean hands over the past claims of infringement for digitization, but if the only operation they conduct is snippet-view, there is not necessarily a requirement for all-party approval. One could well argue from Google’s perspective that they actually don’t want to establish a precedent for asking permission for a broad class of activities that have been held as Fair Use when they have been litigated. Regardless, the barrier of final class certification still resides in the settlement house."

"I especially enjoy the exchange of letters between Jefferson and Madison. They discussed everything, notably the American Constitution, which Madison was helping to write in Philadelphia while Jefferson was representing the new republic in Paris. They often wrote about books, for Jefferson loved to haunt the bookshops in the capital of the Republic of Letters, and he frequently bought books for his friend. The purchases included Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which Jefferson thought that he had got at a bargain price, although he had mistaken a reprint for a first edition.""If we turned the sociology of knowledge onto the present—as Bourdieu himself did—we would see that we live in a world designed by Mickey Mouse, red in tooth and claw.""But we, too, cannot sit on the sidelines, as if the market forces can be trusted to operate for the public good."

"accused of downloading 4.8 million documents from the academic archive JSTOR" via http://twitter.com/nowviskie/status/93435641228046337

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"Three years ago, a monkey in the Indonesian Tangkoko National Park has made ​​a series of photos of themselves. The pictures were taken, according to the photographer David Slater , the camera mounted on a tripod was not intentional. Thus, there is neither author nor level of creation, ie the images are not subject to copyright. This is for professional photographers and journalists, however, as unthinkable as a tea party supporters, the idea of the human causes of global warming. This is not a God-given human rights of intellectual property, but an artificial monopoly law, the rights holders under certain conditions is allowed ."

""

"First thing Tuesday was a session that I led on fragids, in particular the problems that are arising out of the mime type registration of +xml types (3023bis) clashing with those that are used for, say, images, and what happens when these come together in something like SVG.

The same issues arise whenever you have documents with types that ‘inherit’ fragid semantics from two directions. For example, XHTML documents are XML documents, so constraints on +xml mean you shouldn’t use interpreted fragids (eg hash-bangs) on them, but they are also ‘active content’ which makes interpreted fragids useful. Similarly, in linked data you shouldn’t really use a hash URI to mean a Person with a primary resource that provides as a response an XML document with embedded RDFa, because according to XML fragid semantics, such a URI should point to an XML element.

Basically the use of fragids has grown markedly outside their original scope and these situations aren’t really covered in the specs. I am now tasked to create a document that describes the issues and suggests ways forward. So that will be fun.""Can publication of hyperlinks cause copyright infringment?
The first session on Wednesday was another session that I led, discussing the Publishing and Linking on the Web draft that Dan Appelquist and I have been working on.

The aim of this document is to explain the tensions between terms that are commonly used in legal documents such as “possession”, “adaptation” and “distribution” and the way that publication works on the web, in which multiple servers may have copies of the same document (because they cache copies to make the ‘net go faster), automated agents may make changes to those documents (such as compressing or resizing documents, or merging Javascript) and people may refer others to those documents through linking.

We’re particularly keen to argue that linking to something is not the same thing as distributing it. The web’s power arises through its links, so it’s important that people are able to link to something without being worried about what happens when/if the domain they link to is taken over by something illegal.

Dan and I are going to continue to work on this document in response to various suggestions around organisation and terminology, with a view to getting some ‘friendly legal experts’ to look it over and then seeking wider review. The intention is for it to eventually become a Recommendation as this will give greater weight to it as a document for a legal audience."

"I have been aware of Facebook’s horrific stance on copyright and IPR for pretty much as long as I’ve been on the site. People are notoriously bad at handling areas such as copyright, and the apathy I (and every other active Facebook user!) have felt in this area is symptomatic of that.
I’m also concerned about data mining. It’s at least a few years since I first heard about work showing you can predict people’s sexual orientation, religious and political views from their networks, and such work continues apace. It doesn’t matter what I share on Facebook, my network of contacts implicitly reveals a lot about me."

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"I once took one of those pricey b-school executive education workshops designed to teach leadership skills.  One of the things I learned there was the importance of distinguishing between adversaries and enemies.  In academic administration, in library management, and in the life of a faculty member, one often finds oneself in positions that are adverse to others.""What the plaintiffs are saying is that they are quite willing impose enormous costs on academic performance and academic freedom in exchange for higher profits.""something has gone horribly wrong when entities that were created to serve scholarship employ legal procedures that would hamstring scholars and students who engage in customary and effective behaviors in their teaching and learning."

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" In response, the STM publishers propose a set of rules that would gut section 108, which authorizes ILL, and would once again channel more money to publishers without supporting the creation any new content."

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via http://twitter.com/onetruecathal/status/67949030126272512

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"“Pars Inter­na­tional,” the out­fit that han­dles per­mis­sion for the NYT, wants to charge me $460 to use this image in my book. They call this an “image prepa­ra­tion fee.” Of course, if I found a copy of the NYT from 1910, I could do what­ever I wanted with it, includ­ing reprint it, because it’s out of copyright."

""

"many of the things being pro­posed as utopian pos­si­bil­i­ties in, say, the early 1990s, when I started teach­ing, have sim­ply come true."

via http://twitter.com/#!/DrMicrobiology/status/55694350344134656

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"I think, Yahoo is selling the Flicker community to Getty Images. I wonder if Google could do something analogous with their image search collection."

via http://twitter.com/cboettig/status/25341601379258368

"“The crucial question in many ways is, ‘How do you find a common technical infrastructure that yields interoperability for the scholar, the casual inquirer or the K-12 student?’” Dr. Billington says." "“What’s sort of missing is digitization of the accessible literature,” like the popular novels and biographies readers seek at brick-and-mortar public libraries, she says. A few institutions, like the National Library of Norway, are already venturing into this area, via novel arrangements with copyright holders." -- except in Project Gutenberg -- it's a copyright/rights issue

" In 1998, after years of lobbying by the entertainment industry, the US enacted its own 20-year copyright extension. Thankfully, this extension only froze the public domain instead of rolling it back, but we will wait another 8 years before more publications enter the public domain here due to age. The 1998 extension was just the latest of a series of copyright extensions in the United States. In 1954, US copyrights ran a maximum of 56 years, so all of the works published before 1955 would now in the public domain here were it not for later extensions. (Instead, we still have copyrights in force as far back as 1923.)

There’s no clear end in sight to further extensions. Since 1998 I’ve steadily been seeing country after country extend its terms, often pushed by trade negotiations with Europe or the United States. “Life+50″ may still be the global standard, but bi-lateral and region-specific trade agreements have pushed terms up to “life+70″ in many countries around the world. Some countries have gone even longer — Mexico, for instance, is now “life+100″– making convenient targets for further rounds of copyright extensions in the name of international “harmony”."" a number of digitization projects (most notably Hathi Trust) have been finding post-1922 works with unrenewed copyrights, and making them freely readable online. These works tend not to be the best-sellers or popular backlist titles, but collectively they embody much of the knowledge and culture of the mid-20th century. I’ve also been very happy to list many of these works over the past year.""We’ve even seen at least one entertainment industry spokesman speculate out loud that re-introducing simple formalities to maintain copyright might not be such a bad idea. Such formalities are forbidden by the Berne Convention, so they could not be introduced across the board without re-negotiating that treaty. That would be no easy task."

"Pamela Samuelson in her forthcoming ACM article on the settlement notes that "the settlement would, in effect, give Google the exclusive right to commercially exploit millions of orphan books."" via http://blog.librarylaw.com/librarylaw/2009/04/google-book-settlement-orphan-works-and-foreign-works.html

via http://www.richardbanks.com/trends/?p=14436 “video DNA matching,”"Video DNA matching is reminiscent of a system recently created at the University of Granada, that is able to search videos for footage of people in given poses or performing given actio"

"It’s The Real Book, a col­lec­tion of songs jazz musi­cians have tended to play for years. A lot of them are “stan­dards,” tunes peo­ple learn to play because they’re inter­est­ing or chal­leng­ing or just because other peo­ple already know them. It’s got no author, no pub­li­ca­tion info. It’s ille­gal because no copy­right fees have been paid. And so to buy one you’d have to know some­body who had man­aged to run off a really large bunch of bound pho­to­copies, and because of the ille­gal­ity, and economies of scale, it ended up cost­ing about as much as a legit book would have cost.

But every­body play­ing “jazz” had one. I’ve often played gigs with strangers where I’m told “just bring the Real Book.” It’s a stan­dard start­ing point for begin­ners and a con­stant ref­er­ence: vir­tu­ally any­one aspir­ing to play jazz has a copy some­where, cover torn off and pages miss­ing, cov­ered with penciled-in nota­tions and transpositions.""But I quickly found out that two his­to­ri­ans were already work­ing on it and I let it go: since then Barry Kern­feld has pub­lished The Story of Fake Books, which has a chap­ter on The Real Book and inter­views the two peo­ple who made it, while not reveal­ing their iden­tity. They were stu­dents, and they wanted both to fund their stud­ies and also to give music stu­dents a bet­ter, more sophis­ti­cated, hip­per set of charts. They ran off copies at a copy cen­ter, and it quickly “went viral.”

The Real Book is an inter­est­ing eco­nomic arti­fact. On the one hand it rep­re­sents the free mar­ket at work: on the other it’s an illicit prod­uct. Prob­a­bly “Swal­low, Bur­ton, Carla Bley, Mike Gibbs, Mike Nock and Chick [Corea]” were delighted musi­cians learned and played their tunes, but imag­ine their addi­tional delight if they actu­ally got paid for each copy sold. In Kernfeld’s book, both Metheny and Swal­low say they think the Real Book did them more good than harm.""A few years ago, the Hal Leonard musi­cal pub­lish­ing com­pany saw the writ­ing on the wall and pub­lished its own, legal ver­sion of The Real Book, call­ing it the “sixth edi­tion.” It has exactly the same cover and uses a font that almost exactly mim­ics the hand­writ­ing in the orig­i­nal. It does not include April in Paris, I assume because Boosey & Hawkes wanted too much money.
"

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"Publishers, don’t pave that cow path
What we realized was that the market and the industry are shifting so quickly that trying to focus on the product too much will get you into the “death wobbles,” as we call them in Australia. In traditional publishing we tend to “concrete the cow path” — if the cow is going from the paddock to the waterhole this way, let’s concrete it so the cow goes faster. Then the cow decides there’s actually another way that’s quicker, and you realize that you’ve concreted the cow path for no reason whatsoever. Our instinct in publishing is to say: “What is your new pathway? I’ll concrete that one.”

The lesson is that you don’t want to concrete your cow paths. It is all about how you do things. You need to remain incredibly flexible. You need to intuitively understand your industry and your customer. Focusing on how you do things rather than focusing on exactly what it is that you’re doing is something we learned over the last few years.

As a profession, are librarians paving cow-paths? This metaphor early in an interview article with Gus Balbontin of Lonely Planet resonated with me. I’m also studying how software developers and operations staff can work together in a concept called “Continuous Delivery” — the notion that software in development should always be production-ready. If we can move so nimbly as to not “pave a cow-path” with software release schedules measured in months or years, we will likely be able to better respond to changes in the environment and user expectations."

via http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/technology/03youtube.html

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via http://twitter.com/gbilder/status/26338604058 "A literary agent I know gives would-be full time writers the excellent advice ‘Don’t give up your day job’. The average academic writer, in contrast, has the luxury of writing without relying on anything more than his or her salary. They publish in journals that pay them nothing. They produce monographs without receiving advances, and with royalty levels heavily skewed in the publishers’ favour. The best of them do this because what drives them is the desire to say something meaningful and important about their chosen subject. Publishers have traditionally provided their route to a readership, not a direct contribution to their livelihood, and that relationship was mutually beneficial.""Once anthologies of readings were commonplace, I’ve edited one myself, Philosophy: Basic Readings (Routledge). But many students are now using virtual learning environments (VLEs). These are essentially tailored desktops on their computers with links to the relevant learning materials. Some of these can be links to material sliced and diced from an e-library or specially licensed for this use. But there are at the same time very high quality teaching materials available free online. As financial pressures hit the universities hard, academics will certainly be nudged in this direction. There is not much room for conventional anthologies or readings in this world."

"What fascinates me about this story is the editor’s expectations that the entire internet is “public domain.” Of course, most everyone in the publishing industry should understand copyright, but I wonder how much of the general population shares this belief. The thought is frightening."

" I suggest that the notion of a national collection based on any nation’s “cultural patrimony” is far too narrow.

The collection of the University of Michigan Library, for example, contains works on papyrus and other ancient media that are millennia older than this country. And down the hall from the Papyrus Collection is the Map Library, which contains printed maps from around the world, as well as the global data that is the foundation of modern geospatial information systems. It simply doesn’t make sense to divide this country’s cultural patrimony from that of the rest of the world. (And I have to admit that I’m not wild about the word “patrimony,” either. Many have suggested that “heritage,” would be better, and I believe that Robert Darnton would accept this as a friendly amendment.)"

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"The fact that at least one author was asked for permission suggests that the Archive is being very careful about what it chooses to make available through the lending program. A look at the 187 items in the lending library supports this view. There are
Works by well-known copyright reform advocates such as Brand and Lawrence Lessig.
Obsolete computer books. Example: Microsoft Windows 98 at a glance
Older books likely to be orphan works: example- Alice James: her brothers~her journal, the posthumously published diary of Alice James.
An in-copyright version of an out-of-copyright work: Brace Lineage, a genealogical work apparently based on an older version.
Other genealogic works which might be considered to be data compilations. Example: Twelve generations in America
Spanish language works published in Guatemala. Example: Regimenes agrarios
A collection of stories by anonymous pregnant teens: You look too young to be a mom: teen moms speak out on love, learning, and success
In short, if you wanted to take legal action to stop the digital lending library, each of the books included in the lending library would pose some sort of problem for you.
"

"On a related note, who owns the copyright to a review? This question came up recently when, according to the authors of a paper, the arXiv refused to allow uploading of a paper because it contained reviews for which the authors did not have the copyright. Is it true that a reviewer has sole ownership of the review, or does the receiver of the review also have the right to publish it? If not, how much of a review can an author post on a site like My Review Sucks? Also, if the copyright is retained exclusively by the reviewer, that creates many orphaned works, since the anonymity of most reviews means it is difficult to find the copyright owner to obtain permission to publish."

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"Until recently we would use texts or data by reading, taking notes, making photocopies, and then writing down new insights. We would refer to the originals by citing them. A person making limited copies or taking notes (perhaps quoting the text) does not breach copyright because of the notion of “fair dealing”. Making copies of reasonable portions of a work is explicitly not a violation of copyright. If it were we wouldn’t be able to do any useful work at all.

Today, scholarship and research cannot effectively proceed via manual human processes. There is simply too much for us to handle. On the other hand we have excellent computer systems that can, to some extent at least, take these notes for us. Automated assistants that can read the text for us, that can do text mining, data aggregation and indexing allowing us to cope with the volume of information. As these tools improve we have an opportunity to radically increase the speed of the innovation cycle, using the human brain for what it is best at: insight and creative thinking; and using machines for what they are best at: indexing, checking, collecting."

via http://twitter.com/dweinberger/status/19905130617

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"-the donation model (“please give me money if you like my work”)
-the Kickstarter model (“if I raise $5k I will write this novel”)
-the “ransom” model (“I won’t publish my next chapter until I get donations”)
-the subscription or membership model (pay a fee for yearly access)
-the “perks” model (make a donation and receive a special bonus scene)
-the merchandising model (buy my T-shirts, mugs, action figures)
-the collectibles model (buy my special leatherbound gilt edition)
-the company or support grant model (corporate sponsorship/gov’t grant)
-the voting model (“we don’t pay the Hugo winner, but what if we did?”)
-the hits/pageviews model (traffic=ad revenue)
etc."

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