Celia's

but it has a happy ending.

From Sands of Time blog

Celia: Please read the update which includes the following advice

As Steve Vavasis noted last week, authors who care about making their
articles more available need to look into mechanisms such as the SPARC
copyright addendum: http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/addendum.shtml

See also the SHERPA/RoMEO site that provides the copyright policy for
many journals: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo

From Chronicle of Higher Education  Volume 57, Issue 38: June 3, 2011

• A Professor's Fight Over Shostakovich Heads to the Supreme Court

  Lawrence Golan, music teacher and conductor, has a case whose outcome could affect access to many books and films, as well as to some composers' scores.

• 2 Universities Under the Legal Gun

  Book publishers take on Georgia State University, while video publishers sue the University of California at Los Angeles.

• What You Don't Know About Copyright, but Should

  In a maze of rights confusion, Nancy Sims, copyright-program librarian at the University of Minnesota, guides colleges to safety.

• Pushing Back Against Legal Threats by Putting Fair Use Forward

  Two professors at American University fight against "copywrongs" with common-sense guides to the law.

... A close look at one archive shows why the mass digitization of orphan works is creating such trouble.

The UCLA library is building a Web repository for the Arhoolie Foundation's Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican American Recordings, an archive of rare 78- and 45-rpm records that date as far back as 1905. When many of the recordings became accessible to the public on the collection's Web site, in 2009, UCLA bragged that it was largest online archive of its kind. And the digitizing is only about halfway done. The archive is important to students and scholars who want to learn about the musical heritage of North America and the cultural development of one of the largest minority groups in the United States.

...

But the university is sharing only a fraction of that music with the world because it believes most of the collection is made up of orphans, still covered by copyright. Full access is restricted to computers connected to the campus network. Off-campus users can hear only 50-second snippets. UCLA chose that policy based on its reading of fair-use exceptions to copyright law, which may permit reproductions for teaching and research. Going further would introduce "a level of risk that, given the current status of copyright law, was really challenging," says Sharon E. Farb, associate university librarian for collection management and scholarly communication...

... the bibliographic orphanage run by the HathiTrust Digital Library. The 8.7-million-volume library pools digital copies of texts that Google scanned from universities. John P. Wilkin, its executive director, estimates that HathiTrust may contain 2.5 million orphan works. HathiTrust publishes the full text of works in the public domain, but not of those that are orphaned...

Bottom line: Lots of works that don't have any marking on them are very likely under copyright, but we can't say for sure, since there's nowhere to go to look...

[Full article]

From: Chronicle of Higher Education

The National Consumer Forum (NCF) and The African Commons Project (TACP), two registered Section 21 companies operating within South Africa, on behalf of South African consumers hereby request the Minister to urgently consider a consultative, transparent review of the current Copyright Act.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/1978_update/

The Act, initially drafted more than 32 years ago, should be reviewed in light of the digital innovations that have occurred within the last three decades which have dramatically altered the way we create, share, distribute and use information materials and cultural products.

The limited monopoly conferred to rights-holders by copyright has the potential, in the absence of adequate legal flexibilities (especially copyright limitations and exceptions) to limit a number of important human rights enshrined in our Bill of Rights, notably the right to receive and impart education, the right to participate in cultural life, the right to education and the right to equality.  For example, the current Copyright Act does not contain any limitations or exceptions to allow permission-free adaption of copyrighted materials for visually-impaired persons, and this gap in the law unconstitutionally infringes the constitutional right to equality of visually-impaired persons.

We believe
that the human rights dimensions of access to copyright protected materials are critical ones which have been largely overlooked. Empowering ordinary South Africans to access knowledge, be educated and express themselves is just as important to the development of the country, and in many respects even more important, as protection of rights-holder economic interests, particularly given that a large portion of copyright royalties paid in South Africa go to corporations based in the global North.

We believe
that whilst there should always be consideration for the rights of the creators and owners of information and cultural products, so too should there be consideration for the rights of consumers who interact with these information and cultural products on social, cultural and economic levels.

We believe
that the Copyright Act is currently too ambiguous in many areas, making the Act difficult to interpret for the digital age, both for creators and for consumers. We believe that this ambiguity has been leveraged by multi-national corporations and private enterprises to:

• attempt
  to develop their own digital rights management (DRM) processes which lock down digital content and impede certain rights and actions of consumers (example such as fair dealing uses) that are otherwise permissable under the current Copyright Act; and

• call on more
  stringent protections and penalties to be included in the Copyright Act in an effort to broaden the net of criminalised actions in relation to creation and consumption of cultural products.

One of the catchphrases on the internet is “Information wants to be free.” This creates the impression that anything you come across online is free for the using. Not quite.

The same laws that protect intellectual property elsewhere can get you in trouble for appropriating someone else’s words, images, music, video, and so on.

As with much else about the law, the devil is in the details. But you don’t need to hire a lawyer to stay safe. A basic understanding is often all you need. However, if you’re involved in a project that you’re uncertain about, by all means consult with an attorney specializing in intellectual property...[More]

Reid Goldsborough is a syndicated columnist and author of the book . Straight Talk About the Information Superhighway.

He can be reached at:
reidgold@netaxs.com or http://www.netaxs.com/~reidgold/column. 

The American University’s Center for Social Media released a new Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy guide yesterday.

“This guide identifies five principles that represent the media literacy education community’s current consensus about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials, wherever and however it occurs: in K–12 education, in higher education, in nonprofit organizations that offer programs for children and youth, and in adult education.”

 From iLibrarian blog

User-Generated Content & the Open Source/Creative Common Movements: Has the Time Come for Users’ Rights?
Source: Social Science Research Network (SSRN)

This paper, written for the 4th Asian IP Law & Policy Day co-organized by the IP Academy of Singapore (Singapore) and Fordham Law School (USA) in conjunction with the annual Fordham Conference on International IP Law & Policy, traces the development of the free software/open source (FOSS) and creative commons (CC) movements and the rise of user-generated content (UGC). In light of existing international treaty standards for copyright protection, growing global Internet penetration and various case law developments, the article considers whether the combined phenomena of FOSS, CC and UGC provide sufficient basis for a re-tilting of the copyright balance toward the user rather than the original copyright owner. Finally, the article examines whether the philosophy, rhetoric and experiences of the FOSS and CC movements make them appropriate models for copyright protection for UGC.

Several options available for retrieval of full text (PDF; 529 KB)

Permalink Docuticker

Copy South Research Group

This website represents the Copy South Research Group, which has examined copyright laws and their impact on developing countries, something it regards the developed world (‘The North’) imposing on developing countries (‘The South’) to their detriment. It examines alternatives from these regions, stressing the potentially enriching role which freer forms of information sharing can have. Of primary interest on the website is the 208-page ‘Copy South Dossier’, a free collection of articles examining the issue from a wide variety of perspectives. Since 2006, when the dossier was published, the group has received AHRC funding. Intute.ac.uk
http://www.copysouth.org/

The ACRL Instruction Section’s Research & Scholarship Committee has started a “5 Things” series that will focus on topics of interest to instructional librarians. Their first publication in this series is titled 5 Things You Should Read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials in which they recommend and review five useful resources to read and discuss - they even provide approximate reading times. These recommendations are right on track with the “open” course I’m building for the fall, so I’ll be sure to check these out:

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

July 8th, 2008

On Copyright's Authorship Policy
Source: Cyberprof (via SSRN)

It has long been the stated aspiration of copyright to make authors the masters of their own destiny. Yet more often than not, the real subject of American copyright is distributors, book publishers, record labels, broadcasters, and others, who control the rights, bring the lawsuits, and take copyright as their industries' 'life-sustaining protection.'

Permalink The Docuticfker

 (More)

Social Networking and Video Web Sites: MySpace and YouTube Meet the Copyright Cops / by Stephanie C. Ardito, Principal, Ardito Information & Research, Inc.

Help Key: The Essential Guide to Piracy
Source: CrunchGear

"Piracy" happens, piracy will never go away, and, as a service to you we've decided to explain some of its relevant points to the uninitiated. Whatever your stance on the topic, if you're reading this, you don’t understand it and want to learn more and if you're not reading it you already have terabytes of "H0T WAR3Z" on your hard drives anyway. Call it illegal, call it an act of rebellion, call it what you will. Our goal in "Help Key" is to help our audience understand complex topics and piracy, to say the least, is a complex topic.

Permalink The Docuticker

Creative Commons as Conversational Copyright
Source: Villanova University School of Law Working Paper Series (More)