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Stanford has just come out with a copyright renewal database for books published between 1923 and 1963. One of the problems that people struggle with is trying to determine if a given work is or is not under copyright, since materials published during that timeframe had to have copyright protection renewed (unlike today, when copyright is automatic for the entire term of copyright protection). The database is now available and builds on work undertaken by Project Gutenberg.

Siva posted NYU’s copyright message to it’s members. It starts being confusing early on.

The University’s stance on this issue is simple: downloading copyrighted material without permission is illegal, and you should not do it. You should also not use your computer to distribute copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.

Of course, we know better than. I’m sure the people at NYU know better than that as well, and I sincerely doubt that this message reflects their stance, particularly when it comes to scholarship. There are most certainly situations in which downloading copyrighted material without permission is legal, and using your computer to distribute copyrighted material without permission is legal. I’m doing so right now by posting that snippet. In attempting to get out a message, they’re oversimplifying copyright to the point to absurdity. Many universities do so. In this letter they go on to make analogies to plagiarism and theft, and in the process muddling the message as well as oversimplifying (not that it can’t be done, but it’s not done well here). They also make absolute implications- like sharing material with friends for free is illegal. That’s certainly arguable, and I’m sure they know that as well. These are practices that makes statements like this easy for students that know better to dismiss the views of their university entirely.

Universities need to teach students about copyright. That’s something that a lot of people agree on. One page emails, or a web page on file sharing, or having students sign a statement are not going to do it.

Really, we know that when laws are made and cases brought to court, certain groups of people are more equal than others. When access = money, that’s the kind of thing that’s bound to occur. Jason Fry asks some important questions in the Wall Street Journal,

Who speaks for us when these laws are made and these cases come before judges? Why are we reduced to hoping the interests of a cable company, radio conglomerate or Internet giant temporarily align with our own? How much more of this must we endure before some fairness is restored? And when that day finally arrives — if it does at all — what will we have lost?

And really, how do we know what we lost?

There have been some responses from groups of people getting together in the form of Creative Commons, Public Knowledge, and EFF. What they do is impressive, but it’s not enough by itself. We need people in the legislature and in the courts really critically evaluating the public interest along with the other things they examine.

Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane’s animated series shown on Fox, often uses references from pop culture through the years. Really, that’s an understatement. (Some Favorites: He-man riding off, Apache Chief from Superfriends setting Peter’s dish antenna, Stewie’s “Rocket Man”, “That’s one to grow on,” and Cobra Commander as the FCC Chairman. Truly, a child of the 80s.) Naturally, I was expecting the show to be sued at some point. The question was- who would it be?

The Answer? Carol Burnett.

From the Smoking Gun,  Carol Burnett v. “Family Guy.”

From Boing Boing, MPAA Rips Off Freeware Author. Cory Doctorow writes about someone at the MPAA making them hypocrites by not following software licensing terms. They used the coder’s free blogging tools, but didn’t link back to the author’s site or leave the lines giving him credit, as the terms and conditions required. Doctorow makes some very good observations.

Copyright law is hard. It used to only govern relations between giant industrial players. Copyright didn’t regulate reading an interesting tidbit from the newspaper for a friend. It didn’t regulate watching movies. But now, sharing a newspaper article with a friend (by blogging it) involves copying, and so triggers copyright. Now watching a movie (by downloading it) involves copying, so it triggers copyright. The rules that are supposed to be interpreted by lawyers at Fortune 100 companies now apply to every single kid working on a project for her class’s website.

This is like having to file with the SEC every time you loan a buddy $5 for lunch.

One would hope that the MPAA as an organization would learn from this experience.

From a story found on Slashdot about a professor at Bowling Green who got a visit from a networking and the police for using Tor, a Web anonymizing application. There are some very interesting implications involving academic freedom and privacy.

According to Groklaw, the US Patent and Trademark Office will be examining Blackboard’s e-learning patent and all 44 associated claims, due to requests from the Software Freedom Law Center. The request was filed on behalf of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor, open source educational products.

Here’s the brief Google line: I think that UT’s contract with Google will be available from the University in the near future, I believe online.

In Kahle v. Gonzalez, the head of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle challenged the change of the copyright system from opt-in to opt-out, stating that this change was unconstitutional. Kahle also believed that this change prevented librarians from having digital materials on their shelves, particularly with respect to orphan works. The Ninth Circuit court of appeals disagreed, decided that this case was not very different from Eldred v. Ashcroft, and affirmed the lower court’s decision for Gonzalez. I’ll respectfully disagree slightly with a Scrivener’s Error post from January 22nd, in which the author argues that the opt-in/opt-out terminology is inept.

I agree that once a work is created and fixed that it is in copyright, period. I also agree that the GNU License, Creative Commons License, etc., are basically covenants not to sue rather than opt-out mechanisms, with one caveat- the most popular versions of those licenses meet that description, but there is a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. However, the fact that these licenses aren’t mechanisms to opt-out does not mean that the system itself hasn’t changed to an opt-out system, particularly from the perspective of users of copyrighted materials. Even though a copyright holder must opt in for legal remedies, the work itself is now in copyright as soon as it is created. That automatic existence of copyright requires creators to opt out of the copyright system if they want their work in the public domain, rather than opting in to the copyright system by registration.

Of couse, I guess overall I agree that the terminology could be clearer, so maybe I’m not disagreeing that much.

As reported by the Austin Statesman, UT is apparently joining the Google digitization project (may require registration). I’d heard rumors that this was going to happen for quite awhile, but now it’s confirmed, and it looks like President Powers thinks it’s a good idea. I hope to find out more from people who work there soon. The University Libraries has committed to many digital projects recently. On one hand, it’s good that the University is doing some interesting things with digital preservation and similar projects; on the other, I really don’t think that all print materials can be considered “legacy collections,” as I’ve heard some refer to them. As for the Google participation, we’ll need to see what that means for us…

Update: UT’s Announcement