Identifying Public Domain Books

Matthew Gault reports on work by the New York Public Library to determine which works published prior to 1964 have fallen into the public domain . Preliminary work shows millions of books published from 1923 to 1964 never had their copyright renewed.

Gualt's article provides links to sites were public domain books can be downloaded.

-DD

Copyright and Tattoo Creators

Jason Bailey discusses the copyright laws that restrict the use of tattoos in video games .

-DD

Duplication and Copyright

Jake Swearingen reports that Eric Lundgren is going to jail for pirating CDs.

-DD

Google and "Fair Use"

David Kravets reports that the U.S. Supreme Court considers Google's scanning of library books to be an example of the legal concept of "Fair Use ."

-DD

Lesson Sharing Sites and Intellectual Property

Stephen Sawchuk reviews the legal rights teachers can surrender by posting to lesson-sharing sites . Sawchuk provides exerpts from various site licenses, some of which transfer the right of sale to hosting site.

Sawchuk notes that it is still unclear who ownes a teacher's lesson:

The 1909 [copyright] law establishing U.S. copyright policy made employers the owner of employee work products and carved out a special exemption for teachers. But in what some suspect might have been a drafting error, Congress deleted that exemption when it rewrote the law in 1976. (Section "Who Owns A Lesson?" para. 5)

To quote Sawchuk's conclusion: "In other words, dull and uninspiring though it is: Read the fine print."

-DD

A Consequence of Free Information

Mark Buchanan suggests that the concept that "information is free" is impoverishing the middle class artisans who create information, while concentrating a great deal of wealth in the hands of those few who own server platforms (Facebook, Google, etc.) which distribute that information and then distribute in turn the behavioral data about the information users.

Buchanan suggests that nanopayments should be distributed to all information providers, providing economic benefit to largely middle-class information contributors.

It is my belief that a micropayment requirement might succeed in a "walled garden" nation such as China, a nation which can control the distribution of information to citizens. Micropayments probably would not be equitable in an environment where some nations require micropayments, and other nations do not. -DD

 

Copyright and Developing Curriculum

Stacey Patton has written about the case of Karen McArthur and her stolen course . McArthur created a course shell or template which she used in her own teaching. She was appalled to find that other professors copied her work and taught her course without telling her, even including experiences from her journey to Europe.

-DD

 

How Matters

Ben Yagoda comments on Dov Seidman claim to own the word "how" when used as a noun . Seidman, an author and management consultant, wrote a book entitled How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything (2011). One of his consulting clients was an advertising agency who later created an expensive ad campaign for Chobani yogurt, based around the slogan "How Matters." Seidman is claiming ownership of the concept of "how" having value.

-DD

 

Copyright Issues Flowchart

Nancy Sims recently evaluated a flowchart used to recommend how to deal with copyright and copyright issues.

-DD

 

Source: Langwitches.org

Copyright Infringement

John McNamara notes that an Ohio felon, who was incarcerated in part for pirating films, was subjected to watching a pirated film repeatedly.

-DD

Publication Rights

Jennifer Howard has written about authors signing away their future rights . If an author does not negotiate rights to distribute articles to other scholars, then the publisher who owns the article has full rights to article distribution. Authors ignorant of their legal rights and responsibilities may later find their articles removed from institutional or open access repositories where they posted them in violation of their print-publication contracts.

-DD

Boundless Lawsuit Continues

Jake New reports that the lawsuit against "free" textbook publisher Boundless is set to continue.   The litigating publishers claim that the process where students use open-source content to mimic a traditional textbook results in a product that is almost a duplicate of the commercial product.

-DD

1DollarScan eBook Publishing

Calvin Reed notes that "Despite Copyright Concerns, 1DollarScan Grows, Marks Second Year."   1DollarScan creates a PDF of a submitted book, and then destroys the original paper copy. Such services seem to be popular in Japan, where it makes fiscal sense to archive old books into electronic versions. According to the comments of a reader, the quality of the 1DollarScan PDF does not match that originating from an e-book publisher.

-DD

The Teach Act

Kenneth Crews, Director of Columbia University's Copyright Advisory Office, has written Copyright Law and Distance Education: Overview of the TEACH Act

-DD

Flickr As A Source Of Creative Commons Photos

Jason B. Jones shares Five Ways to Use Flickr to Make Better Slides. In 2009 he had shared how Flickr can searched for photos which have been released to the Creative Commons, allowing them to be used without copyright royalties as long as each photo received appropriate attribution.

-DD

"Fair Use" and Student Document Retrieval

At my university librarians instruct students and faculty on how to obtain articles from databases. Upon request, librarians suse tools within the databases to provide permanent links to specific database articles. However, unless the university has contracted with the publisher/copyrightholder, the university does not provided PDFs of the articles themselves to groups students. A major reason for this is the limited nature of the legal concept of fair use. The university's purchase of database access allows faculty and students to print documents for their own scholarly use, but the purchase does not include the right for one individual (or a library staff member) to distribute hundreds of copies of an article. An additional contract with the publisher is required to distribute an article to an entire class.

Widespread distribution of article PDFs is the premise of many e-reserve systems. If the library distributes multiple copies of the same article PDF, the library needs to have a contract with the copyright holders, or it runs the risk of a lawsuit.

-DD

Google Removes Over One Million Pages Per Month

ComputerWorld reporter Jaikumar Vijayan reports that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is complaining that "Google Piracy Policies Are Lacking." Quoting Vijayan:

• According to Google, Microsoft or its representatives have asked Google to remove more than 2.5 million URLs, or a median of 48,700 URLs per week, from its search engine results since July 2011.
• The next highest requester was NBC Universal, which asked Google to remove about 1 million URLs over the same period.
• The RIAA requested that some 416,000 URLs be blocked during that time.
• In all, a total of about 2,400 copyright owners have put in URL removal requests covering about more than 24,300 domains since last July.
• Google noted than it complied with 97% of takedown requests at an average response time of 10 hours or less.

Vijayan notes that the RIAA uses statistics from Google's Tranparency Report listing copyright removal requests. The report lists the major requesting agencies and offending Web domains.

Google also maintains reports on governmental requests for user data, which includes statistics on Google's compliance rate for each nation, and statistics on the number and timing of Google traffic from each major nation.

-DD