Copyright Advisory Network

Cross-posted on District Dispatch:

If you’ll be at ALA’s Midwinter Conference in Denver at the end of January, please check out the session “Google Book Search: What’s In It for Libraries?” The open forum will be hosted by the ALA Committee on Legislation’s Copyright Subcommittee to discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. The discussion will take place on Saturday, January 24, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. at the Grand Hyatt, Maroon Peak (listed as the Washington Office Breakout Session IV – Google Book Search in the program).

Panelists will include Dan Clancy, Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project, Karen Coyle, Digital Librarian and Consultant, Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, and Laura Quilter, Librarian and Attorney at Law. The session will be moderated by Nancy Kranich, chair of the COL Copyright Subcommittee. Following brief opening remarks by each panelist, there be an opportunity for dialogue and questions from the audience.

Check out some of ALA Washington’s other events at midwinter, including one session on International Copyright and Library Advocacy.

Additional information about the proposed Google Book Search settlement is available at http://wo.ala.org/gbs/.

Timothy Vollmer ALA ALA, conference, gbs, Google, googlebooksettlement, settlement

As you know, ALA (as a member of the Library Copyright Alliance and with the Music Library Association) submitted comments for the DMCA 1201 rulemaking in December 2008 arguing that the exemption to circumvent TPMs on DVDs to create clip compilations for classroom use by film and media studies faculty be expanded to include faculty who teach in all subject areas. See our comments here (PDF).

Reply comments are due February 2nd, and we would like to provide even more examples of faculty who would like to or are circumventing DVD copyright technology in order to make clips for the classroom (not online, face-to-face). For the academic librarians reading this blog, could you try to get some examples from your faculty? We need to know how the faculty person is using the clips — why they are a valuable teaching tool — subject area and institutional affiliation. If we can actually use the faculty member’s name, that would be great.

Thanks very much!
Send examples to me
Carrie Russell at OITP
crussell AT alawash.org

Carrie Russell Copyright news 1201 rulemaking, Academic libraries, copyright, DMCA

Check out this interesting upcoming fair use webinar from EDUCAUSE:

On Tuesday, January 13, 2009 from 1-2pm U.S. Eastern Time, Steve Worona will be hosting Patricia Aufderheide, Professor and Director, Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University and Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law, American University. Patricia and Peter’s talk is called, “Copyright Balance and Fair Use in Networked Learning: Lessons from Creators’ Codes of Best Practices”.

Summary: Copyright balancing has become a critical issue in the academy as digital practices increasingly have challenged creaky policies and practices. Scholars, academic administrators, librarians, and intellectuals, as well as their students and mentees, need reasonable access to copyrighted culture to research and produce new knowledge. They and their distributors, whether journal publishers or YouTube, need to be able to share work that references and quotes copyrighted material without going through clearance processes never designed for this sector.

Academics have begun to explore their rights under copyright law to quote copyrighted culture, especially under the doctrine of fair use. They have powerful examples: since 2005, several creator groups, including documentary filmmakers, remixers, and media literacy teachers, have developed codes of best practices in fair use. These codes are having a powerful, even game-changing, effect in practice. In this session, the presenters will discuss their collaboration to facilitate the creation of these codes and discuss how this model might apply to the academic environment.

Sign up here, and if you can’t make it, check out the EDUCAUSE Live! archives.

Timothy Vollmer Events copyright, educause, event, fairuse, webinar

I’m coming late to the OCLC WorldCat records policy conversation, but that gives me the advantage of having digested some of the discussion that’s already happened. There’s a little bibliography at the end of this post that points to many of the comments I read and considered.

Gavin Baker summarized the issue nicely:

There’s been a dust-up lately over a policy change announced by the Online Computer Library Center for the terms of use for WorldCat, the union catalog of bibliographic records contributed by OCLC member libraries.

It’s disputed whether OCLC provides [Open Access] to the full WorldCat data: Open Library’s Aaron Swartz says it doesn’t; OCLC’s Karen Calhoun says it does.

The new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records supercedes the earlier Guidelines for the Use and Transfer of OCLC-Derived Records, last revised in the pre-Web era. (Karen Coyle points out that the Guidelines were themselves a response to an earlier attempt by OCLC to claim copyright in WorldCat records. The new policy avoids the term copyright, but does make an oblique reference to “the intellectual property rights [in WorldCat or WorldCat Records]“.) The new policy is slated to go into effect in February 2009.

Aside from the name change (from “guidelines” to “policy”, implying enforceability), key points of the new policy include prohibitions on commercial or “unreasonable” use. (An earlier version of the policy also required attribution to OCLC in each record re-used; in the latest version, the attribution requirement has been weakened to a recommendation.)

The dust-up arose because OCLC’s new policy for use of WorldCat records seems to restrict what people can do with OCLC’s records, in ways that the old guidelines hinted at but didn’t actually do. Though it sounds like this was not OCLC’s intention (more on that in a moment) the new policy, if taken literally, prohibits uses that many libraries and organizations are already making of OCLC records, and blocks potential uses that could have been opened up by a more liberal policy.

A couple of people asked me to write about the brouhaha from a copyright perspective, but this isn’t a copyright issue at all. Like many of the challenges facing libraries in the digital age, the problem isn’t copyright, it’s license agreements; in this case, the agreement between OCLC and the libraries that participate in WorldCat.

Read more…

MollyKleinman Copyright news licensing, metadata, OCLC, records, WorldCat

Will legislation be introduced in the 111th Congress? According to Maria Pallente, Deputy General Counsel at the US Copyright Office, yes. Pallente’s hope is that orphan works legislation can be dealt with early on in the new Congress, a repeat version of the Senate bill (S. 2913) from this fall that most stakeholders have been willing to accept.

For libraries, the orphan works issue is pretty simple.
1. Libraries want to use orphan works for preservation purposes or to add to their digital collection so access to the work can be enhanced.
2. If the rights holder cannot be found after a reasonable search, the library can go ahead and use the work.
3. If the rights holder turns up later, the library and rights holder can agree on a license agreement for the use of the work.
4. If the rights holder takes the matter to court, then statutory damages would be limited or eliminated altogether for noncommercial uses.

Librarians try very hard to get permission from rights holders when necessary. They spend a lot of time conducting a diligent search. (They are good at this because they are librarians.) If the rights holder cannot be found, the library does not use the work. Often, librarians will seek the advice of legal counsel, who tend to offer the “better to be safe than sorry” opinion. End of story.

Why do we care? So what, we can’t preserve something? It’s not like it’s the end of the world. But librarians take very seriously their responsibility to society to preserve the cultural heritage. The works libraries want to preserve are orphans without caregivers. They have no commercial viability, and haven’t for a very, very long time otherwise the rights holder could be found.

Our hope is that orphan works legislation will be straight-forward, without a lot of unnecessary hoops to jump through. This is the same opinion of the U.S. Copyright Office who has studied this issue for a long time. We can keep our fingers crossed. But we also must continue to recognize that no orphan works legislation will be a lot better than bad orphan works legislation.

Carrie Russell Copyright news