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Copyright attorney Georgia Harper is now attending the iSchool and has an interesting blog.
http://georgiaharper.blogspot.com/index.html

She’s currently working for the University Libraries, which is a great thing. The libraries have made some interesting decisions recently. One of decisions I’m troubled by is that they no longer public post their Tea with the Vice Provost or Director’s Meeting minutes. They still exist, but they’re now behind the UT EID, staff-only. They’ve also gone and removed all previous notes that were up, so links from previous blog entries here no longer work (although I still have copies). Of course, I could ask to see them, or even make an open records request, but I found them more useful where they were where everyone could see and discuss.

Universal took advantage of Firefly fans as part of its viral marketing campaign to promote Serenity. (Firefly is awesome, by the way). According to Slashdot, Universal is now going after fans demanding licensing fees- so fans are serving Universal marketing invoices. Now, Universal might have some points in there- but when are they going to learn that cease and desists from lawyers are not the best way to convey their ideas?

Sorry for the absence; real life and all that.

But rational discussion about copyright? It can happen.
Cory Doctorow, SF author and Boing Boing blogger has a piece about copyright on Locus Online, an SF/Fantasy magazine.
Author’s lawyer C. Petite has a response on his blog Scrivener’s Error.

Both Doctorow and Petite are excellent sources to read about different views on copyright. I’d like to have our students compare these views in the copyright module in the near future.

Of couse, as chosaq reports not all interested parties appeal to logic. Take a look at chosaq’s coverage of the push for longer copyright protection in Japan, and note the sad expression of someone who’s work is only protected for life+50.

Loriene Roy, ALA’s president-elect, is a faculty member here at the School of Information. I’ve been acquainted with her from some time, first as a student, later as a staff member, and now both. I didn’t really write about her during her campaign for various reasons (although I did leave a few comments here and there), but now that she’s been elected I feel freer to.

Loriene’s a pretty interesting person. Of all the faculty members here, I think she’s the person who most integrates community service in her courses, although several faculty members are starting to rival her (notable some of our recent arrivals). She’s been both complimented and criticized for that practice, but I personally believe it’s a positive thing.

Yesterday, she did something pretty interesting- she had a meeting with the some of the tech staff (including me) and talked about her plans related to the ALA presidency for the coming years. She sought our opinions about how to approach some of her ideas, particularly when they involve utilizing technology. I really appreciated that- you might be surprised at the kinds of things that we don’t get consulted about that we should be, and in this case there really are ways we can contribute that coincide with our existing projects. I’m not sure if the situation is the same in every iSchool/LIS school out there, but here all of the full-time tech staff have MLIS or equivalent degrees as well, so we do believe strongly in the success of the school and of the professions.

One thing I learned from this meeting is that she’s continuing her use of blogs- her campaign blog is now her president-elect blog, and she’s had blogs set up for the various task forces and groups that she’s creating/working with. I don’t like the navigation to find the blog listing and on the page with the blog listing (navigation text identified via rollover- well, I plan to direct the usability class her way ^_^;), but the sites have potential. Here are the blogs:

Loriene Roy’s President-Elect Blog
Workplace Wellness Blog
Circle of Literacy Blog
Supporting LIS Education through Practice

Each of those ventures seem worth following, to me.

It’s the day before the start of classes, so naturally things are a little crazy at the iSchool, and I expect elsewhere. However, this interesting item turned up: the University of California’s contract with Google. This should make some interesting reading along with my five chapters for my first doctoral seminar. The terms seem to have changed a bit from the earlier version we saw, including some provisions for external use of the library’s copy. I’ll take a closer look soon.

I’ve put up some instructions on installing DSpace 1.4 on Gentoo Linux, along with some minor configuration instructions. I’ll be updating it with additional information throughout the Fall semester.

My housemate has gotten around to playing Kingdom Hearts, and naturally he’s been reading the FAQ to play through it. (It’s the only way he plays.) I’ve used FAQs from GameFAQs before, and being the copyright nerd that I am I always read the copyright notices. They almost always contain erroneous information, and part of the reason appears to be that the most popular copyright notices are taken from the same sources. Here are some examples of how these FAQ copyright notices are wrong or, well, kind of silly.

-“No section of the guide can be used without permission.”
Well, that’s not entirely correct, but since this term is pretty common even with attorney-authored terms it’s not surprising. There are certainly legal uses of copyright material that don’t require the author’s permission, and in fact may be contrary to the author’s wishes. That concept applies to pretty much everywhere you see “all rights reserved” and similar statements, which is why those statements tend to be misleading.
-“This includes, but is not limited to posting on your website, making links to my guide, including parts of my guide in your own, or making reference to any material contained within.”
These terms betray some pretty fundamental misunderstandings of copyright in a couple of respects. As I just mentioned, some uses may fall under copyright exemptions. More importantly, copyright law usually doesn’t cover linking. Linking is almost always legal. There are some additional complications here involving the linking to materials that circumvent copyright protection, but as generally attemptiong to disallow linking through terms like this doesn’t actually have a legal basis, and is kind of silly. And “making reference to any material contained within…” doesn’t violate any kind of copyright law whatsover. I’m referencing things found within. I’m not doing anything illegal.

Mind you, earlier versions of this notice are worse.
-“By reading this guide, you automatically agree to these terms.”
Er, no. I don’t. Sorry. I’m just reading. I haven’t agreed to anything by just reading. This appears to be an attempt to make a copyright notice a contract. It’s not. You can go the Creative Commons route and allow additional uses that would ordinarily be covered by copyright in a license, but you can’t treat a license and a contract like they’re the same thing. Most of the time.
-“Any material found used without my permission is plagiarism, and I won’t tolerate it.”
Material used is not necessarily plagiarism. When material used is plagiarism, it might not necessarily be infringing on copyright. Copyright infringement is not equal to plagiarism, although they are related terms. Copyright infringement is a legal issue, and plagiarism is a (very serious) ethical issue. When plagiarism does correspond with copyright infringement, it’s probably illegal. Otherwise, it’s unethical. While you may not tolerate it, there’s actually not a lot you can do about it besides publicly shaming the plagiarist.

The gamefaqs.com copyright notice is better, but still somewhat misleading: This may be not be reproduced under any circumstances except for personal, private use. It may not be placed on any web site or otherwise distributed publicly without advance written permission. Use of this guide on any other web site or as a part of any public display is strictly prohibited, and a violation of copyright.

Well, that’s pretty standard fare. However, I can certainly take excerpts from an FAQ in certain circumstances and publicly display them without written permission. This notice falls under the same trap as most copyright notices- it ignores exemptions such as fair use, educational exemptions, library and archives exemptions and so on.

Now, their copyright FAQ does mention fair use, which is a plus, and does provide some basic information. Their FAQ also has a great deal of information that is a bit debatable, or at least could be expanded upon. The fair use question is a good example. Their emphasis on “limited portions” is usually correct, but there are situations in which the copyright-related use of a complete work can be fair. The examples they give, though, about posting complete FAQs without permission are probably not fair uses, and those are the types of uses they’re concerned about.

The ironic part of many of these notices is that if companies attempted to behave the same way, these FAQs wouldn’t exist. FAQs obviously “refer” to content in games, and many quote game text pretty liberally.

Back from vacation! My wife’s family lives in Nebraska, and we had a family vacation travelling around Nebraska, South Dakota, and Wyoming. We drove over 3,500 miles (starting from here in Austin) and saw some really great stuff that I’d never seen before, including Mt. Rushmore, the Crazy Horse monument, the Black Hills, Deadwood, Sturgis (just before bike week), Devil’s Tower, Cheyenne Frontier Days, and a demolition derby. ^^

We ventured through several small towns, and in just about all of them the city library had a prominent position on the main street, and looked well-maintained. There was a lead story about library programs in the main paper at Lincoln, NE, and in Cheyenne we saw a library reading program commercial on television. Today we saw a Library of Congress commercial about reading… when did those start?

We’ve started a Koha installation for our IT Lab’s book collection. There are several reasons for this, beyond our book collection getting out of hand. ^_^ First, open source and free software are pretty logical choices for libraries. Code can be examined and edited, and if you have people who are comfortable with tech and experimentation then it can be a pretty low-cost alternative to other software, especially for libraries with limited resources. I’ll write more about open source later (and link to the open source and libraries websites that are outhere), but we’ve always had a pretty good commitment to it- we’ve got about 25 or so servers running Linux, including our main systems. Koha is shaping up to be a pretty interesting project. We’re not too thrilled with the interface, but if the Z39.50 add-on works then we should have relatively smooth sailling… sadly, it seems that LDAP integration with Koha is problematic, so we’re not quite sure how we’re going to sign iSchool individuals up for accounts yet.

Got the new version of DSpace up (1.4) this week, using Gentoo. I’ll be creating pages detailing some suggestions for installing DSpace with Gentoo based on my, Sam’s, and Shane’s experiences.

Back in 2002, then-President Faulkner of the University of Texas at Austin shared a vision: to provide Texans with online access to educational and cultural materials located and generated at the university in a digital Knowledge Gateway. The Chronicle of Education wrote about this Gateway, as did other news outlets, and the project soon received funding from a variety of sources. The Knowledge Gateway promised a great deal:

Research, education and sheer appreciation alone are no longer limited by campus boundaries or travel time to Austin. The Knowledge Gateway will let you access UT’s resources from the comfort of your own computer. Browse through the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art’s extensive Latin American Collection, examine a map of Afghanistan from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection or bone up on aquatic trivia with the Texas Memorial Museum’s Fishes of Texas exhibit. The possibilities are virtually endless.

The Knowledge Gateway, soon renamed UTopia, was very ambitious and apparently worthwhile collection of digital materials. Things didn’t quite work out the way they were planned, as revealed in the June 28th “Coffee with the Vice Provost” notes. The Vice Provost of the University Libraries announced that UTopia will be losing support and funding in 14 months, after “an unambiguous and final decision” by President Powers and the University Budget Council. There will be an attempt to relocate some library staff to other areas… but I know this loss of funding will be a blow to the library’s digital services.

The Gateway had problems early in its existence, many of which had to do with it’s management (from an outsider’s perspective, albeit an outsider who interacted with some developers). Some of the early architectural and technological issues were hammered out, but then what? Management seemed to float between the gateway being it’s own entity, being managed by Information Technology Services, and being managed by the University (then General) Libraries. Eventually, it became housed in the Libraries, which inherited a pretty difficult set of tasks burdened by ambiguity and some odd decisions.

Here are a few other concerns that I and a few others I knew had about the project. UTopia depended on content provided by UT organizations and faculty, but apparently was to be aimed at the K-12 range. While commendable, this may have had an effect on how much faculty would be able to contribute as products of their research. Providing UTopia with content also meant that the provider agreed to keep the materials current in perpetuity. That certainly could prove difficult with limited time, money, and effort from the original providers. There were also a few strange copyright concerns (which may have just bothered me since that’s what I’m interested in). According to the FAQ, content could be used by anyone as long as the University was given attribution- but according to the faculty agreements with the UTopia group, the faculty only signed over authority for the University to use the materials, and did not give permission for other parties to do so. (The University allows faculty members to own the copyrights in educational materials they create.) The copyright problems could have been worked through, but I’m not in a position to know how other concerns could have been addressed.

I haven’t seen any official announcements- I was waiting for it and almost missed this reference- so we’re still waiting to see what happens with the existing collections/projects and the people who are currently funded by UTopia. I don’t know if this action reflects on other digital collection attempts or not, but I’ll be trying to figure out how people measure the success of digital collections…

I’m going to talk a little bit about anime fandom and briefly mention anime and manga in libraries. Next time I’ll look at the quiet demise of the University of Texas’s UTopia Project. Anime fans are an interesting bunch, and I’ll try to write more about fandom in the blog.

Holly and I were at HEB, a local grocery store chain. The largest version of the store carries books and DVDs, including an anime section. Holly stopped me when she noticed this last week, stopped me, and asked, “Could you have imagined that ten years ago we’d be seeing anime at HEB?”

I understood why she paused. A decade ago anime and manga were gaining in popularity, but nowhere near as ubiquitious as they are now. Back in ’94- and don’t I feel old now- some friends of mine and I started the anime club at Syracuse University. Anime was already making appearances in the U.S. and already had it’s first mainstream anime magazine (Animerica, in ’92) and was the topic of a few conventions, although a given college student might not know what the word meant. At the time, with a few American-released exceptions shows were still mainly obtained by sending tapes to fansubbers, who copied shows for people from their master copy (which still may have been a fuzzy 5th generation copy) and mailed them back for the cost of shipping. Fansubbing, in which fans subtitle the show, was a step up from the earlier method of sending tapes and obtaining scripts to read along with as the show played. There were ethical rules involved that still persist in modern fansubbing. They’re a topic for a later post, but at their heart was not to do harm to your community and industry. There were copyright discussions as the practice grew, but for the most part this became an established norm, and I believe helped to popularize the medium and several individual shows.

Anime and manga took off. The Internet was a huge part of this process, as it allowed communities of fans to find one another and made finding fansubbers and distributers much easier. The Anime Web Turnpike and the Big Anime and Manga Resource List provided links to fan pages with information about the show, however tangentially. At the time, you could write to the presidents of anime companies and expect a serious and prompt response. They were fans, too.

Things have changed, naturally, for the better and worse. Fandom has changed. A convention in 2006 looks very different from a convention in 1994. The conventions are bigger, the audience tends to be younger, and far more people cosplay (“costume play,” or dress in costume as various characters, a term popularized in Japan). (For a scary example of cosplay that has at least partly made public view, if you catch the “Who wants to be a Super Hero?” commercial for the reality television series, you can catch “Man-Faye,” a male dressed as the female character Faye Valentine from Cowboy Bepop. Most cosplay isn’t quite that disturbing.)

The companies have changed as well. They’re a great deal larger and many are far more impersonal. Some of them frown on the practice of fansubbing, some of them turn a blind eye. Some company representatives have reportedly said that fansubbing was all right when they were fans early on, but now that the market is established it should be discouraged (which really rings hollow to me). Some companies reportedly watch the activies and distribution of fansubbers to determine which licenses to acquire. Conventions have to worry about fanart and copyright infringement. Anime is also much, much easier to purchase and find online. New anime acquisitions are announced at by companies at conventions regularly, and P2P has played as big a role in the fansubbing realm as it has for other cultural exchanges.

HEB made us pause, but we’ve seen other signs of how popular these things are. Libraries appear to be playing a role. Viz media had a booth at the last Texas Library Association vendor room. The Houston Chronicle recently ran an interview with a Young Adult librarian, who noted the popularity of manga with the young adult crowd, mentioning Fruits Basket as popular with girls (a truly cute show involving the interactions between a girl and people who are possessed by animal spirits of the zodiac) and Fushigi Yuugi as popular with boys (an older title full of fantasy and magic, originally published in a girls’ comic in Japan. Shh.). Manga has also been challenged in libraries, and that’s a subject I’ll talk about later.