Video of Our CUNY Fair Use Talk on iTunes U
A few weeks back, Peter Jaszi and I had the honor of speaking to the CUNY library community about our work on fair use at academic libraries. Peter discussed fair use generally and the history of best practices work that he and Pat Aufderheide have done, and I spoke about the results of our research on current practices at academic and research libraries.
Peter had to run to another engagement, so I was left on my own to field a series of interesting questions from the audience about copyright, fair use, and best practices. Big thanks to CUNY for having us up to New York and being such an intelligent, inquisitive audience! Also, my apologies for chewing gum during the Q&A.
The video is available from iTunes U here.
Fair use principles are a crucial part of the foundation of an open Internet.
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Matthew Ingram at GigaOm, discussing recent remarks by Google’s Eric Schmidt and the UK copyright policy review.
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The library community is disappointed that meaningful floor debate and a vote on these important issues is likely to be deferred yet again.
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ARL joins ALA in a statement endorsing proposed amendments to today’s disastrous PATRIOT Act sell-out bill in the Senate.
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That two university presses and an academic publisher would take such an aggressive position against a university really is troubling.
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Jonathan Band, speaking to Inside Higher Ed about the strange priorities of the publishers in the Georgia State case.
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I make my world podcasting debut, discussing the Georgia State case with Mike Weinberg at Public Knowledge. My bit starts at the 13:40 mark, but the whole thing is great.
It’s not just careless to give our scholarly work to companies that are averse to sharing it, we are giving hard-earned and important knowledge to companies that will only make it available to those who can pay to play—over and over again.
Leahy Bill Would Give Vital Protection to Internet Communication
On Tuesday, May 17, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill that would update the privacy protections currently available for Internet communications such as email. Under current law — the Electronic Communication Privacy Act, written by Senator Leahy in 1986 — material stored in the cloud, including email, loses much of its privacy protection after it has been stored for 180 days. Government agents can gain access to this information without a standard 4th Amendment-required warrant.
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Claudia wasn’t worried about the privacy of her Gmail account back in 1986, and neither was Congress.
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Leahy’s bill would do away with this arbitrary expiration date, replacing it with a uniform standard for all stored communications: no access to content without a warrant supported by probable cause. In addition, Leahy’s bill would require law enforcement agents to notify the owner that her communications were being accessed subject to a warrant, and provide a copy of the warrant.
The bill embodies several recommendations made by the Digital Due Process coalition, of which ARL is a member. However, the bill is not perfect. For example, although it requires a warrant for real-time tracking of someone’s location using cell phone data, it does not require a warrant for retrospective location information. Still, the bill represents significant improvement over the status quo, and we welcome this improvement.
In the post linked above, David Hansen raises some interesting questions about who should bear the burden of copyright enforcement. The piece begins with the doctrine of adverse possession, which transfers title in real property from the owner to a squatter, provided she possesses the property in the right way (possession must be open, notorious…the mnemonic I used in law school is escaping me now!). I wonder if there’s an orphan works solution in there - if libraries use orphaned works in analogous ways and the owner never shows up to object, should a non-exclusive license issue? Hmm.
What Libraries Need In Copyright Reform
Today the Library Copyright Alliance released a statement describing the key features copyright reform proposals should include in order to constitute significant improvement over current law for libraries and their users. In the wake of the recent rejection of the Google Books settlement, interested parties are discussing with renewed vigor the issues of orphan works, mass digitization, and even modernization of Section 108 of the Copyright Act. The LCA statement, which represents the needs of major library stakeholders in these debates, should provide helpful guideposts for these discussions.
Libraries have always advocated for reasonable copyright policy, in courts as well as in Congress, and the LCA welcomes renewed interest in these issues in response to Judge Chin’s decision. At the same time, library activities already benefit from broad, flexible protection under the fair use doctrine and related provisions in current law. Therefore, only a clear improvement over the status quo is worth the substantial investment and risk associated with legislative change. The LCA statement describes the status quo for libraries as well as the policies that would constitute substantial improvement.
The proposal focuses on exempting libraries from the draconian statutory damages currently available under copyright law. Together with a notice-and-takedown mechanism, this reduction in damages would free libraries to make policy decisions based on the true balance of equities between library use and rightsholder harm, rather than acting under the threat of damages awards out of all proportion to the typically negligible harm associated with library uses. While the future of copyright reform efforts is foggy at best, the LCA statement represents a clear articulation of what libraries need for reform to be worthwhile.
