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Fair use is strengthened, according to Ars Technica, which provides a nice summary of Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley, in which a book had reproductions of Grateful Dead concert posters, ultimately deemed fair.

My copyright discussions at the Region One Technology Conference seemed to go well, and I’ve been invited to a couple of other districts here in Texas. I’m leaving for Chicago in the morning for the Managing Electronic Records conference, so I”ll write more later!

PERFORM Act to restrict recording, broadcasting rights From Ars Technica, a disturbing story about the way some members of Congress think about technology and copyright law with the new PERFORM Act, and this just after the scary new intellectual property bill (via Library Juice).

The new Copyright Advisory Network website from ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy is up. Ross Housewright and I have spent quite a bit of time on that site (it’s what I took some time off last week to work on). Please let us know if you find it useful or if you’d like to see something else there!

From Miriam Nisbet,
Copyright News updates & reminders:

(1) Section 108 Study Group: Due to a delay in posting the public roundtable transcripts on the Section 108 Study Group website, and because many commenters are busy responding to an Orphan Works legislative deadline, the deadline for submission of written comments on the issues raised in the February 15 Federal Register notice has been extended from Monday, April 17 to Friday, April 28.

The transcripts will be posted on the Section 108 Study Group website this week. http://www.loc.gov/section108/ The Study Group is charged with preparing findings and makeing recommendations to the Librarian of Congress by mid-2006 for possible alterations to the copyright law that reflect current technologies.

Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft’s Academic Live Service is now available (in beta, naturally- does that mean it’s actually live?). Did quick keyword searches on copyright, fair use and “fair use” by date and relevance. In each case, relevance produced better results than date, and “fair use” probably produced the most useful information. Like Google Alerts, just copyright alone tends to produce articles that have a copyright notice rather than anything about copyright itself, and this caused some problems particularly with searching by date. Not sure how it gathers information yet- in the “for publishers” FAQ, it seems to indicate it uses general crawls in addition to feeds for publisher-provided content.

Haven’t been posting much recently because I’m working on the next version of librarycopyright.net. Several people on ALA’s copyright advisory network group, including me, have been creating lists of resources. I hope to be able to put up the new version of the site later this week/weekend.

For the part of this collecting process involving books, I’ve been in the library and online. I find the Amazon reviews of some of books we have listed interesting. I’m slightly surprised at the accusations of communism and marxism directed towards the authors of some copyright-related books… occasionally very heated reactions against proposed reforms to copyright and IP law. I wonder if the authors read them (looking at Lasica, Lessig, Litman, Stallman, Vaidhyanathan)?

At any rate, if anyone has any good copyright resources that must be listed, let me know.

Smithsonian Agreement Angers Filmmakers (New York Times, free registration required)

I had been hoping this was an April Fools joke, since I first heard about it on that day, but no such luck. The news has actually been around since early March.

The Smithsonian- a public archive and museum- is making an exclusive deal with Showtime. Documentaries that feature exhibits or personnel from the Smithsonian will have to be shown on Showtime first, and not PBS or other forms of distribution. Officials say that the deal “was not meant to be exclusionary,” but that’s completely untrue. They’re using public resources to sustain themselves in an exclusionary manner. While finances are obviously an issue- and not just for the Smithsonian, but museums and archives in general- this type of abuse of public goods has some pretty terrible implications. We’ve seen this type of behavior from museums and archives before, particularly when there are monetary problems, but these types of actions tend to defeat the purpose of why we have these public services in the first place. Without public access, public institutions are not serving their purpose.

Public Citizen | Press Room – Software Company Wrongfully Interfered with Sale of Guide to Popular Video Game on eBay

Here’s more on the Blizzard story from CNET. Blizzard’s restrictive policies and in this case, abuse of the DMCA, are far more destructive to Blizzard’s goodwill and recognition than any guide could possibly be.

Siva Vaidhyanathan has published Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manfesto in the journal Cultural Studies, also available on that link through his website. He’s also posted some reactions and a description of that journal issue about Critical Information Studies, which includes some really interesting people. The journal includes articles by Kembrew McLeod, who famously trademarked Freedom of Expression (TM). (I had a copy of that trademark hanging outside my office for the better part of a year.)

This looks like a really great inter-disciplinary framework. It’s also exactly the kind of thing I’m studying- I’m familar with a lot of the resources in that bibliography. This is really a great concept. I look forward to reading and hopefully, contributing to this area in the future.

I’d add Peter Hirtle to the bibliography, too. ^_^

DIDDY AVOIDS COPYRIGHT ISSUE OVER COLOGNE
Not quite. Fans of Diddy/P. Diddy/Puff Daddy will be relieved to know that the *trademark* issue was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. The US Patent & Trademark Office does not deny anything having to do with copyright, news writers. 😛

An article in the newspaper for Virginia Tech states that “[c]opyright laws [are] becoming increasingly more absurd. While I do tend to agree with this statement and am sympathetic to his views and those of many of the quoted sources, I am curious to what the author means when he states that “[w]hile I can rip, mix and burn a CD I purchased without fretting, according to American law, were I to try the same thing with a DVD, I could be thrown in prison for near a decade and/or be fined upwards of a quarter-million dollars.” Is he talking about first sale, Rio, private use, or circumvention of copyright protection technologies? Also, would be nice if he wrote about the problems authors are facing.

In sad news, the release of the PS3 is being delayed, apparently due to problems with COPYRIGHT PROTECTION TECHNOLOGIES. Come on, guys, you’re killing me. It’s bad enough that I might not be able to watch DVDs from the competing new standard, but this is ridiculous.

Across the pond, the British Library may be moderating the DRM debate at the suggestion of one of their politicians. The article notes multiple interested groups with a stake in the debate, including creators, publishers, and the public. This will be interesting to watch, and hopefully productive.