Colette Vogele at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society provides a short summary of the important features of the new FAIR Use Act, Support the Fair Use Act | Stanford Center for Internet and Society [beta site], as well as links to sites that allow you to register your support.
Hope springs eternal...
A recent entry on Lawrence Lessig's blog is entitled simply, "Wow." That's certainly enough to get my attention. The subject of the post is a video to which he links, that provides information about a difficult subject to fully understand, net neutrality: Lawrence Lessig.
There are many sources of information about this subject on the Web, of course, so by all means, don't limit yourself to this one, but it does have a powerful impact at least partly because of the medium. It reminds me of another video that's been making the rounds that explains in brief (about 5 minutes) the awe and power of xml and Web 2.0. Both of these videos highlight the power of the mix culture that the Internet enables. It's all very circular, very connected, recursive. Anyway, have a look.
Larry Downes, adjunct professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, has nailed the business model issues for media companies with respect to the transition from the closed, "scarcity" model of the 20th Century, to the open, abundance model of the 21st: Viacom and Joost and YouTube, Oh My | Stanford Center for Internet and Society [beta site]. But in the end he shows less cynicism than I sometimes find myself feeling about the reasons for the long slow awakening to the realities he lays out.
Wendy Seltzer is a law professor at Brooklyn Law School and recently sought to illustrate a point about the extent to which copyright owners go to protect their works by posting on YouTube a clip from a football game that contained the NFL's copyright notice: Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags: My First DMCA Takedown. Predictably, YouTube got a take-down notice from the NFL and removed her video. She is protesting the take-down as fair use, also predictably. What's really interesting is the range of opinion evidenced in the discussion and commentary to her posting of the facts of this event on her blog. For those of us who can't imagine how anyone could not believe that such a use is fair -- a law professor posting a 30 second clip that contains the copyright notice for the game, in the context of study of copyright protection -- will find some interesting explanations, from at least one IP lawyer, of why it's not fair. Go check it out.
If I were in NYC tomorrow, I would sure make every effort to hear this distinguished panel discussing appropriation art: The Patry Copyright Blog: Appropriation Art Conference. Patry's blog entry on the panel discussion notes Jeff Koons' 2005 fair use win for a transformative use of another's photograph Blanch v. Koons), in stark contrast to his "String of Puppies" loss years ago (Rogers v. Koons). Patry discussed the Koons win in more detail in an earlier entry. Tomorrow's Conference is sponsored by the College Art Association.
Google has a pretty good track record with its court cases, but this one, as reported by O'Reilly Radar, has gone against the company: O'Reilly Radar > Google Loses Newspaper Copyright Case in Belgium. Ironically, O'Reilly's note points out that the result will likely harm the publishers who won their case, whose materials will not be available through Google. It's the business model...
As Lawrence Lessig reports, Very Sweet Victory: Schloss, Stanford's Center for Internet and Society and its extended legal team has won a victory in the district court, allowing the Schloss fair use case to move forward. Lessig's site includes a link to the opinion which he terms well and completely reasoned.
In an intriguing article about remix culture, The Ecstasy of Influence (Harpers.org), author Jonathan Lethem practices what he preaches, that creativity requires a generous scope for borrowing, alluding, quoting, reusing, remixing, that these acts are fundamentally sane, wholesome, and critical to creation.
My husband is an artist and I am a lawyer. You might wonder whether we have a whole lot to talk about. Well, I guess it's fortunate that I'm a copyright lawyer. At least that has an obvious relationship to the art world. But more to the point, we're both in graduate school right now (I'm pursuing a degree in Information Studies, he's pursuing an MFA in studio art), reading incredible things and talking about how phenomena in the art world, such as the shifts that occurred in the 20th century, are mirrored in the development of communications technology, of law and information policy. We should have had this article in front of us this weekend. It's right to the point. Lethem's themes are universal and so very important to the worlds of innovation, wherever based.
The article is long, but well worth your time to read it.
Check out the NYT Technology article about PARC's startup whose goals are to go head to head with Google: In a Search Refinement, a Chance to Rival Google - New York Times. The idea of a "conversation" with a search engine is quite appealing, to say the least, but what interested me even more about this article is the idea that there will be something better than Google. One of the concerns I hear most often about the Google Book Search project, aside from the copyright issues, is that a company's ownership and control over the accumulated knowledge represented by 30 million books is unprecedented and frankly, quite scary. But Google lives in a world where control slips through one's fingers, inevitably. More, better pushes hard on all those who would preserve their status as best. Trying to predict where anything this dependent on technology might go is impossible. So, we voice our concerns, we question, we push for improvement in projects like Book Search, and we keep looking for new opportunities to accomplish our objectives. Collectively, we all keep going...
If Web 2.0 is a little bit fuzzy for you, have a look at this entrancing YouTube video highlighted on Lessig's blog: Lawrence Lessig. Incredible, no?
A little while ago, a friend forwarded to me a note about Steve Jobs making a plea to the big four record companies to authorize sales of mp3s, free of drm. I read the headlines of the Paris papers (to practice French, and to see what makes it to front page in France), and this is in at the moment: Le Monde.fr : S. Jobs (Apple) plaide pour des telechargements de musique sans protection. It says "Steve Jobs pleads for downloads of music without protection." Front page of Le Monde, a major Paris paper. An important point of Jobs' article was that 2 1/2 of the 4 labels are owned by European (including Britain) companies, and Europeans are complaining the most about the problem with interoperability of music downloads and portable players.
Earlier this year there was a big meeting of the major labels in Europe and several notes about this subject drifted out from that meeting, as I mentioned in earlier blog posts here. More signs that this could be the year the dam bursts.
In a very nicely written article on the importance of one of the Copyright Office's recent DMCA exemptions, Law.com - Copyright Law Gives Mobile Users New Freedom With Legally Unlocked Cell Phones, the authors, Timothy Meece and Aseet Patel, do a fine job of explaining why the Copyright Office was persuaded to allow users to circumvent the DMCA to unlock their cell phones to connect to a rival's network. But the article seems to me to be missing its last paragraph...
It fails to point out that while it may now be legal to circumvent this particular technological lock (for the next 2 years and 9 or so months), it is still illegal to make or distribute the means of doing so. So, unless the cell phone user knows how to unlock his or her phone without resort to third party tools, the ability to circumvent would seem to be a bit hollow, sort of like an empty promise (which leads one to question the whole exemption process, but that's another story).
The authors should have made at least some mention of this serious problem with the way the law works, or explained why continuing liability for making and distributing devices to exercise this right would not be a problem in this case. I'm certainly wondering how to unlock my phone without anyone else's help. Is this something everyone (but me) knows how to do?
Thanks to Kim, Olga, Jack and all those at CIP whose work over the last month or two brought (c)ollectanea to life. This is a wonderful opportunity to expand the good work of the CIP by bringing members of its audience into a broad conversation about copyright issues.
One never knows for sure who, if anyone, is listening when you blog, so I hope those of you who are will take a moment now and then to add your voices to the mix. Comments, questions and observations are welcomed.
I follow many other bloggers daily and have found it to be an excellent way to keep up with what's happening in areas that interest me. Today I noticed that the author of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson, posted a note about his book having been pirated and made available through Bittorrent -- The Long Tail: Books want to be free. Far from being upset about it, he's elated. What interests me are his musings about the possible business models that could support free audio books, alongside hardback and paperback versions. These kinds of conversations about the future of the publishing industry are very important. Publishers need all the creative minds they can get working on the problems of moving forward in a networked world. Copyright by itself is only part of the answer.
Welcome to Collectanea!
Collectanea is the new blog from UMUC's Center for Intellectual Property (CIP). The purpose of Collectanea is to provide an opportunity for CIP's virtual scholar to share his/her thoughts, musings, and ideas on intellectual property (IP) law, policy, and culture. Further, to her thoughts on the breaking developments that influence IP now and in the future.
Our current scholar, Georgia Harper, will launch the blog. She will provide regular blog entries and further, she intends to have guest bloggers from time to time to discuss issues of interest on intellectual property. Stay tuned for her first guest blogger in March.
Please join me in welcoming Georgia Harper to the Collectanea blog.
Kim Kelley
Vice Provost and Dean
UMUC
If you are following the story about Viacom's notices alleging massive infringement of copyrights on YouTube, you may be reading about it from many different angles. John Palfrey from the Berkman Center at Harvard is particularly interested in the issue of the chilling effect that notices have on fair uses and has referenced this and other issues involved in the Viacom action in a recent post, Another Video for the Put-Back-Up List?.
For more information on this subject, visit The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, and read, "Will Fair Use Survive? Free Expression in the Age of Copyright Control," by Marjorie Heins and Tricia Beckles. This is a Brennan Center report detailing the chilling effects of the notice and take-down procedure.
The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse is collecting evidence to further document the negative effects of the notice and take-down procedure. Viacom's 100,000 notices are sure to add many stories to the list. Whether it will be enough to prompt changes in the law is another thing, however. That process itself is extremely difficult. When Congress revisits an existing law -- everyone who has any problem with it can take that opportunity to urge amendments. Just as users and ISPs have their concerns with the law, content owners are unhappy about some aspects of the law as well, so opening it up to change could be a risky proposition for all.
A short post by Colette Vogele, at Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, Schloss hearing, suggests that the judge in the case will likely allow the case to proceed, denying the defendant's motion to dismiss. She attended the hearing and had this to say:
From the hearing, I felt Judge Ware was fairly predisposed to rule in Professor Schloss's favor and allow the case to proceed beyond pleadings. I was really impressed with how prepared he was and how he clearly understood the background and factual questions that were being raised by the defendant's motion to dismiss the complaint. Although he didn't rule on the motion at the time of the hearing, he did give a strong indication that he'd be issuing a scheduling order (so, I gather he's not dismissing the case!).
If you are not familiar with this case, The Center, whose attorneys are representing Schloss, also has more information on it. It is a very high-stakes fair use case, so we should all be watching it carefully.
Encouraging note in the Feb. 1 Library Journal Academic Newswire, For Oxford University Press, Online Venture Breathes New Life into the Monograph, describes just the kind of thing I'm excited to see in the scholarly publishing arena -- a database of monographs that can be licensed under a "perpetual access" model. And it appears to be paying off handsomely. Says Niko Pfund, OSU's Vice President and Publisher:
"We're not seeing the end of the book, we're seeing the galloping diversification of how its message can be conveyed," he explains, describing the press' philosophy as "format agnosticism," that is to deliver content in whatever format is desired. "If dissemination and influence is our primary currency, then having books available via OSO, or netlibrary, in print perpetuity via print-on-demand, or in Google Book Search and Amazon's Search Inside the Book means that more people can access your work in more ways from more places than ever before. That does translate to dollars."
I have believed for some time that copyright is only one lever, and perhaps not the most effective lever, to press in attempting to negotiate a path into a more productive future for scholarly publishing. Creative business models are by far more powerful. Of course, I realize that holding a copyright gives one the power to veto someone else's creative business model with respect to that copyrighted work, so copyright is not unimportant. Nevertheless, it's such a relief to see evidence that copyright owners are taking chances, experimenting, and learning about the benefits of digital access and use.
I don't think it will be long before more authors will be willing to experiment themselves -- with or without the aid of publishers. It would seem to be better for both if publishers are willing partners in the exploration of the world of the networked book. Brave explorations like Oxford University Press' can shed some light on the path.
