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The United States Senate indefinitely postponed its vote on the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act, also known as S. 1010. The bill, introduced in May 2017, proposes to amend title 17 of the United States Code to make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee.
The Academic Libraries Video Trust (ALVT) this week announced that six universities have joined the organization as Founding Benefactors. The project, now live at videotrust.org, will facilitate the preservation of commercial video content available exclusively on VHS or other obsolete, deteriorating formats.
Copyright experts have begun building a framework for Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) with the recent publication of a white paper and an official position statement initially supported by forty individual and 24 institutional signatories, including major academic and public library systems, library consortia such as Califa Group, legal scholars, and organizations such as the Internet Archive.
On March 15 the Marrakesh Treaty Implementation Act (S. 2559) was introduced in Congress, moving the United States closer to implementing the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled. The treaty was adopted in 2013 by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)—the United Nations international copyright arm—at an international diplomatic conference in Marrakesh, and has since been ratified by 36 countries.
How did April Hathcock go from corporate litigator to librarian? “I was working away on multimillion-dollar suits every night when I noticed the law librarians, who left at a decent hour, did much of the same research I did,” she says. “I realized I could do…the information wrangling I loved without [working] myself to death.” Now, as scholarly communication librarian at New York University (NYU), Hathcock still does legal work, helping with copyright or intellectual property research, library contracts, or access and rights issues. “But it’s combined with the values of librarianship,” she says.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (LC) announced June 15 the creation of two new born-digital collections: the Web Cultures Web Archive (WCWA), which will feature memes, GIFs, and image macros that surface in online pop culture, and the Webcomics Web Archive (WWA), which will collect comics created for an online audience.
A bill empowering the president to appoint the next Register of Copyrights, which would effectively remove jurisdiction over the position from the Librarian of Congress, sailed through the House of Representatives 378–48 on April 26 and will now continue to the Senate. The Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act, also known as HR 1695, was introduced on March 23, and would make the Register—who has traditionally been appointed by the Librarian of Congress—a presidential appointment, with the advice and consent of the senate.
Nonprofit altmetrics pioneer Impactstory has launched Unpaywall, a free extension for Google Chrome and Firefox browsers that helps users obtain free full text copies of open access (OA) research papers.
Delores Tucker is often remembered for her criticism of “gangsta rap,” but she can also be credited with prompting a new form of hip-hop scholarship. In 1997 the activist and politician used several Tupac Shakur lyrics to issue a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against the artist’s estate. Teresa Neely, then a doctoral student, heard the news and recognized the lyrics as being taken out of context. To her it was a sign that Shakur’s words needed to be studied as a whole to be understood.
The theme of the Urban Librarians Unite (ULU) 2017 Conference, held at Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library on April 7, was Dangerous Librarianship—an appropriate designation for a librarians challenging the status quo. Some 186 librarians from the New York metro area and beyond—including attendees from Massachusetts, Arizona, and California—gathered to share and learn about advocacy, social justice, alternative service models, privacy, leadership, and more.
In the wake of the October 29 resignation of Maria Pallante, the former Register of Copyrights, the Library of Congress (LC) has put out a call to the public for input on the expertise needed by the next Register of Copyrights. (On January 17, Pallante will join the Association of American Publishers as president and CEO). The survey, posted on the LC website on December 16, invites the public to answer a series of questions about the knowledge, skills, abilities, and priorities that the incoming Register should possess.
In the mid-1970s, the advent of the VHS format revolutionized the ability of libraries to collect and loan film. Now, collections developed during the 25-plus years of the format’s dominance present an impending crisis.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been making some interesting decisions that could affect libraries. A few weeks ago, it was liability for hyperlinking; this week it’s about ebooks and lending.
On Halloween night, Friends and trustees of New York Public Library (NYPL) got a treat that didn’t require a costume: Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and NYPL President Tony Marx sat down together for a lively hour-long discussion of research, preservation, digitization, Hayden’s plans for the Library of Congress (LC), and the influence of Hamilton.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the chief judicial authority of the European Union, on September 8 issued a landmark ruling in a case called GS Media v. Sanoma (C-160/15), concerning hyperlinking and potential copyright infringement. This interesting case expands upon a theme that has been present in Europe for some time—a copyright crackdown on linking, news snippets, and other content.
On Monday, October 24, Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante declined a reassignment and resigned from the Library of Congress (LC). Pallante had sought to have the copyright office removed from LC oversight.
On August 12, the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication published a comprehensive literature review detailing strategies for digitizing copyright-protected works for which rights holders cannot be found or contacted—colloquially called “orphan works.” This 112-page peer-reviewed report, “Digitizing Orphan Works: Legal Strategies to Reduce Risks for Open Access to Copyrighted Orphan Works,” is the culmination of the 2015–16 Orphan-Works Project at Harvard.
The website repository Sci-Hub, which enables users to freely download scholarly articles that normally require institutional subscriptions or individual payments, has found itself at the center of a series of conflicts over the past year. Many publishers are increasingly angry at the theft of copyrighted material, with the Association of American Publishers (AAP) going so far as to censure an academic librarian for his comments on Sci-Hub during a panel at the American Library Association (ALA) annual conference in Orlando in June.
Reading a recent article in the Atlantic and the subsequent comments, I was struck again by how much confusion there is among the public about the difference between plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Copyright is the only right defined in the main text of the U.S. Constitution. It is specified in Article 1, Section 8, so it didn’t have to be added in the amendments known as the Bill of Rights, which tells us how important the concept of copyright was to the founders. They enumerated its dimensions in a sparse sentence: "To promote the Progress of science and useful Arts by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
The infamous Georgia State University (GSU) e-reserves case (Cambridge University Press v. Patton) emerged last month from its long winter slumber to give us yet another 200+ page decision which librarians, lawyers, and publishers have begun to parse and analyze. And, like me, they are probably asking themselves: What does this decision actually mean?
It’s been a while since I spoke with the inimitable Kyle K. Courtney, 2015 LJ Mover and Shaker, “Harvard Hero” (for his work on copyright), and the organizer of the Copyright First Responder program at Harvard, among many, many other roles. With Fair Use / Fair Dealing Week upon us (Feb. 22nd – 26th), it seems like a good time to see what developments have taken place in Kyle’s universe since last we chatted in 2013.
James H. Billington, who has served as the 13th Librarian of Congress since he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, announced on June 10 that he would retire effective January 1, 2016.
A group of technology companies, trade associations, and civil society organizations have joined forces to form Re:Create, a national coalition to advocate for balanced copyright policy. In the wake of recent proposals to amend the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as well as constant advances in the field of knowledge creation, coalition members are calling for responsive copyright law that balances the interests of those who create information and products with those of users and innovators, providing robust exceptions as well as limitations to copyright law in order that it not limit new uses and technologies.
Each year the copyright community celebrates January 1 as “Public Domain Day.” That is because a convenient fiction included in most nations’ copyright laws says that if a work’s term of protection expired during the previous year, it officially enters the public domain on the following January 1st. Instead of having to figure out the exact day of an author’s death, and having different works enter the public domain each day, we just save them all up, so that all the works whose term expired in 2014 (i.e., all works whose authors died 70 years earlier, in 1944) entered the public domain on New Year’s Day 2015. At least, they did in most other countries, but not in the U.S.
The word “incentive” appears ten times in the ruling issued last month by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the Georgia State University (GSU) copyright infringement case, but it is slightly unclear in this rather odd opinion just who is the object of the incentive created by copyright. In seven of those ten instances, the incentive is clearly intended to benefit the author. But there are three sentences at the very end of the majority opinion (the other three uses of the word) where the court seems to interrupt its analysis to state that the incentive belongs to publishers, not authors. It is, I think, worth parsing this apparent contradiction in order to guess at how the trial court might think about incentives on remand.
On October 17 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta unanimously reversed the District Court’s ruling on the Publishers v. Georgia State University (GSU) Fair Use Case.
The legal adage that hard cases make bad law apparently has deep roots in English common law, and it was cited in a Supreme Court decision by no less a Justice than Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Its applicability has been disputed over the years, but in recent weeks we have seen the truth of the maxim illustrated in some copyright debates. Colleagues have recently sent me two different stories where the extremes of copyright law are in play—hard cases, I suppose. Both offer confirmation that when the facts are really well outside the realm of normal expectations, people can draw very bad legal conclusions. But both also offer opportunities to remind ourselves of fundamental truths about law, journalism, and copyright.
In late June, a minor brouhaha erupted when the library at the University of Arkansas suspended reporters from the Washington Free Beacon, an online newspaper, from using its special collections. The reason given by library administrators was that on multiple occasions the newspaper's reporters had published content from those collections without asking permission, as library policy requires. Much has been made in the right-wing press about the politics supposedly surrounding this conflict. I want to focus on a different issue: the practice of making patrons request library permission before republishing content drawn from documents in our special collections.
While most academic librarians are familiar with the basics of copyright law, the questions they’re asked are getting more complex. Issues of fair use and open access, MOOCs and repositories, and the push to digitize mean that students and faculty need more guidance on copyright matters than ever. This spring Kyle K. Courtney, Harvard University’s Copyright Advisor, brought together a pilot group of librarians known as Copyright First Responders (CFRs) to address this situation.
On June 10, the U.S. Second Court of Appeals handed down its latest decision in the continuing legal battle between the HathiTrust and the Authors Guild, and it is good news for fair use advocates. A three judge panel largely confirmed the decision handed down in 2012, which found that the HathiTrust’s activities of digitizing books from its member libraries and increasing their discoverability by letting users search for key terms within titles are fair use. The court also upheld Baer’s finding that the Guild lacks standing to bring cases as an association, though individual members can do so.
Everyone who teaches copyright uses the same metaphor, I think. Copyright is a “bundle of sticks.” A property owner is said to have a bundle, where each “stick” represents an exclusive right. I had not really thought deeply about this metaphor until it was raised at a conference I attended whose theme was what a new copyright law might look like. There was a lot of talk about the problems with the current law. Until then it had not occurred to me that one of those problems was the bundle of rights itself.
Last November Judge Denny Chin dealt a blow to the lawsuit filed by publishers and the Author’s Guild against tech giant Google and its Google Books Service (GBS). Chin, of the 2nd Circuit U.S. Appeals Court, dismissed the case, which challenged the legality of GBS providing searchable PDFs of copyrighted works when Judge Denny. On Friday, April 11, the Guild filed an appeal in the case, marking the latest flareup in a long-running suit with major implications for copyright law in the U.S.
Whether librarians and faculty like it or not, Wikipedia remains at the heart of the research process for many undergraduate students. Rather than trying to stem the tide, the University of California Berkeley is trying to make students there into more responsible and effective users of the online encyclopedia. To that end, the university’s American Cultures program has hired alumni Kevin Gorman as the first Wikipedian-In-Residence at a US university.
Imagine that you bought a new jacket on Amazon.com and received an email a month later from the manufacturer telling you that you paid the wrong amount for the jacket and that you owe the company several hundred dollars more. This may seem implausible, but for academic libraries that buy DVDs through distributors like Amazon.com, it is a recurring problem: after buying DVDs at retail prices, they get an official-looking email saying they owe more.
The U.S Department of Commerce (DoC) has been collecting public comment on the topic of the first sale doctrine and digital files in recent weeks; the agency was scheduled to meet about the issue on December 12 in Washington, DC. First sale doctrine is a set of exemptions to U.S. copyright law that permit consumers to resell used books or DVDs and libraries to loan books without seeking permission from publishers. Yet for reasons examined in more detail below, first sale exemptions have not translated well for digital content. The DoC’s call for public comment could mark the beginning of a campaign to reassess what copyright and first sale mean in the modern digital era, notes one expert.
In what analysts are describing as a big win for scholars and libraries, federal circuit court judge Denny Chin today dismissed a lawsuit against Google brought by the Authors Guild claiming that the company had violated copyrights by digitizing millions of books and making short samples of the works available via its Google Books service. In the decision, Chin stated that Google Books provided “significant public benefits,” and that the digitized works were protected by the principle of fair use.
In advance of a public meeting scheduled for December 12 in Washington D.C., the U.S. Department of Commerce is seeking public comment from all interested stakeholders on the issue of first sale doctrine and digital files, including ebooks. Comments are due on or before November 13.
The new AAUP Draft Intellectual Property Statement has nothing to say about works of scholarly publication. Are they not intellectual property? Or does some property count more than others?
Black Elk Speaks has been published by three different publishers in the U.S. The rarity that this movement creates is the availability of different editions of the book from different publishers. That is, there is a semblance of competition in the publishing of Black Elk Speaks. This anomaly brings into relief the normal effects of the copyright monopoly. It offers an opportunity to reflect on what alternatives to the strict publishing monopoly might look like.
Citing concerns about the privacy of employees and the security of their networks, both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and nonprofit JSTOR have filed motions intervening in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit that seeks to obtain Secret Service documents regarding internet activist Aaron Swartz.
Global information services company Swets this month launched a new service to help academic libraries pay and manage article processing charges (APC) on an institutional scale. The move comes in response to a sharp increase in fee-based open access publishing in the United Kingdom.
Having written a column a couple of weeks ago expressing skepticism, even cynicism, about the prospect of the international diplomatic conference sponsored in Marrakesh by the World Intellectual Property Organization actually producing a treaty on copyright exceptions for the blind and visually impaired, I was both pleased and surprised to hear that such a treaty was agreed to by the delegates in the wee hours of June 25.
All of the Big Six publishers are now working with libraries on ebook lending in some capacity, but pricing and licensing terms remain unfavorable in many cases, Saturday’s “ALA, Ebooks, and Digital Content: What’s Next?” panel at the 2013 ALA Annual Conference and Exhibition in Chicago concluded. Meanwhile, concerns about long-term preservation of ebooks and [...]
On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated Judge Denny Chin’s 2012 grant of class action status to the Authors Guild in its long-running suit against Google Books. The panel called the certification “premature.” It added that the court should first have decided on the merits of Google’s fair use defense, which, the court said, “will necessarily inform and perhaps moot our analysis of many class certification issues.”
AcademicPub launched “Off The Shelf,” a new component of its Custom College Plus course pack publishing solution that will help institutions maximize the value of their existing licensing arrangements with journals, databases, and other content providers.
The HathiTrust Digital Library will become The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)’s single largest content hub, the two institutions announced on June 18. The metadata records associated with some 3,384,638 volumes (and growing daily) held by the HathiTrust will be accessible on the web at dp.la, and through the DPLA application programming interface (API). (The digitized volumes themselves will continue to reside in HathiTrust.)
During these last two weeks of June, delegates to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) are meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, to negotiate around a proposed treaty on Limitations and Exceptions for Visually Impaired Persons. Such a treaty would require that each country allow copies of copyrighted materials that are compatible with assistive software to be made.. Such an exception would be very limited, and would serve a very laudable purpose. So it is fair to ask why it has taken so long, seen several reversals on the part of the U.S. administration, and remains controversial.
What would happen to our libraries if the following statement became a reality: “If you can buy a book, you can’t borrow it?” What if I told you that it’s on the verge of happening internationally, and in a way that is pretty despicable? For years, international negotiations have been moving forward on a treaty is to make it possible for people who are blind, or have other print disabilities like dyslexia, to get access to the books they need. At first, private interests were supportive. Then, they realized they could squeeze something out of this treaty that would greatly benefit them—stricter international copyright law.
On May 21, SIPX, which provides cloud-based end-to-end copyright management and digital document delivery for higher ed, announced customer agreements with several schools and consortia, including the company’s former home, Stanford University, where the research underlying the technology was conducted over the last three years. (SIPX has now “spun-out” from Stanford, completed its financing, and is operating as a separate, for-profit company.)
If you’re an academic librarian, you’re probably already awash, at least peripherally, in news about MOOCs—massive open online courses have been touted as the next big thing in higher ed since they burst on the scene about a year ago. If you’re a public librarian, on the other hand, you may not even have heard of them. Yet MOOCs are bringing unprecedented challenges and opportunities to both kinds of libraries already, and they’re only going to grow.
Libraries and Friends groups interested in reselling or giving away used ebooks or other digital content files (or purchasing them) may be a little more cautious after the March 30 court decision, Capitol Records v. ReDigi Inc. ReDigi, a virtual marketplace for “pre-owned” digital music, was sued by Capitol Records in what the court characterized as “a fundamental clash over culture, policy, and copyright law.”
Damon E. Jaggars, Associate University Librarian for Collections & Services at the Columbia University Libraries, recently stepped down as editor of the Journal of Library Administration (JLA), along with the rest of the editorial board, because of disagreement with the publisher’s licensing terms. LJ caught up with him to hear his reasoning and plans for the future.
This country’s fascinating and invaluable patrimony of recorded sound and culture is at risk. Libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies have approximately 46 million recordings in their collections and more than six million are “in need” or “in urgent need” of preservation, according to the National Recording Preservation Plan released by the Library of Congress (LC) in December. The condition of another 20 million of the recordings is unknown, and these numbers do not include important material in private hands.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) last week appointed Dan Cohen as its founding Executive Director. LJ caught up with him to discuss his work as Director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and his plans for DPLA.
In this article, the fourth installment in a series on the initiative to build a Digital Public Library of America, I examine the underlying role of law in the ebook lending debate, explore potential solutions to the problems, and consider how the DPLA can contribute to solutions for those we serve. At the core of this issue is the way the copyright law works–or doesn’t–when it comes to books, libraries, and readers in the United States today and into the future.
Most of us are aware of the basics of U.S. copyright law, including the categories of copyrightable and non-copyrightable works. Some materials are explicitly exempted from copyright in this country, a key example being U.S. Federal documents. Another exempted category is that of facts and compilations of facts that have no creative component. As you might imagine, "modicum of creativity" is itself very difficult to define. This question of facts versus creativity comes up in the discussion of ownership and copyrightability of library catalog data.
Copyright’s an issue whose prominence has increased enormously since the long-ago days when I worked in interlibrary loan. Now, although I’m not working in interlibrary loan, I find that copyright raises its head at nearly every turn of my (and others’) library work.
A new center that will examine the changing nature of copyright and the need for new business models in the digital age launched January 31 at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
I think we can all agree: First Sale is important. But can you explain it in the simplest terms possible? We aimed to find "The Story of 'First Time Buying' Idea for Book-Sharing Places"
Planning and executing a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course, is not an easy undertaking. It involves a lot of work, including a thoroughgoing reevaluation of pedagogical goals and methods, lots of planning, and extensive technological support to get each module in the MOOC just right. It also involves lots of “new” decisions about copyright.
I never met Aaron Swartz, though I certainly knew of him. I’ve been teaching library school students about him since his 2011 arrest for sneaking into an MIT server closet to mass-download the contents of JSTOR. I learned of his death by his own hand via airport wireless, early on the morning of Saturday, January 12. Exhausted by a week of teaching a data-curation bootcamp for librarians and digital humanists, the most I could muster was a weak, aghast “aigh. no.”
It was a seismic move in the struggle to create a workable ebook access model for the users of America’s libraries. It was engineered by Joanne (Jo) Budler, the Kansas State Librarian, when she realized that an initial proposal in 2010 to renew the Kansas State Library (KSL) contract with OverDrive would increase administrative costs by some 700 percent over the next few years, as the state ebook deal was being restructured. Despite the risk of disrupting and even losing access to ebooks for the users of Kansas libraries, Budler rejected more than one proposal from OverDrive for a new contract until a year ago when she won the right to transfer titles from OverDrive to a new platform. The dispute set off a long (and public) national examination of library service agreements.
When I consider the current state of American copyright law, I often think about the 19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat and his “Petition from the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, Sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting,” usually referred to as the Candlemaker’s Petition.
Lansdowne Public Library’s “Read It” video, based on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”, was originally yanked from YouTube for a copyright violation. But the story may have a happy ending: the library director told LJ that "The Lansdowne Public Library ‘Read It!’ parody is back up on YouTube and I believe that it will stay there."
The cheering echoes still throughout librarianship. Recent court decisions—such as the HathiTrust’s win over the Authors Guild—strengthen the use of the concept of “fair use” to exempt from copyright the reproduction of material, liberate the free digitization of so-called “orphan works,” and allow free public access to the results. Yet even those cheering the loudest caution that there are still no definitive rules to apply to these victories. The victories are yet evidence of the value of well-organized efforts to prevent copyright from locking up our intellectual and cultural resources. The leaders of the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), comprised of the Association of Research Libraries, the American Library Association (ALA), and the Association of College and Research Libraries (an ALA division), deserve the cheers and the continuing support of librarians.
While the verdict in the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case has been widely hailed for its impact on how libraries can handle digitization for search, the findings on access for the print-disabled may lead to even more profound changes in practice. On an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) webcast, Daniel F. Goldstein, counsel of the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), said the decision could revolutionize university services to their blind and print disabled students.
The publisher plaintiffs in the Georgia State University (GSU) ereserves copyright case deposited $ 3,271,275 into the Commercial Registry of the Court for the Northern District of Georgia to cover the attorney’s fees and costs of GSU, the prevailing party in the dispute. However, the money will be held in escrow until the appeal is decided.
The American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) today teamed up with 17 other associations, retailers, and charities to launch a new coalition called the Owners’ Rights Initiative (ORI). ORI is an “informal alliance of stakeholders” that will defend the first sale doctrine, which allows libraries to lend books and other materials, as well as individual owners to resell them.
There are two things I know about elephants. First, they have long memories. Second, they are large, ponderous beasts, and getting an elephant to move where you want it to go takes care, patience, and agility. It is that legendary memory that caused the HathiTrust to name itself with the Hindi word for an elephant. As for the second characteristic of an elephant, it came in to my mind as I listened last month to reports about Hathi and marveled at the careful and meticulous work that is being done there to make public domain works accessible to the public. The elephant that is the HathiTrust is indeed being directed with patience and agility.
The Honorable Harold Baer, Jr., yesterday held that the HathiTrust’s mass digitization is fair use, in spite of the challenges raised in a lawsuit by the Author’s Guild and others, both associations and individual authors. Crucial to his reading of the case is Baer’s rejection of the plaintiff’s theory that section 108 of the copyright law prevents libraries claiming fair use as a defense. Baer said in his opinion, “I cannot imagine a definition of fair use that would not encompass the transformative uses made by Defendants’ MDP, and would require that I terminate this invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts that at the same time effectuates the ideals espoused by the ADA.”
On September 30 Judge Evans, who had already said the publisher plaintiffs in the Georgia State University (GSU) ereserves case would have to pay the university’s court costs, has now put a number on that obligation: just shy of $3 million. That’s $2,861,348.71 in attorney’s fees and $85,746.39 in costs.
Seth Finkelstein’s blog alerted me to the fact that the case against Aaron Swartz for stealing JTSOR files had expanded from four felony counts to thirteen. The overview of the revised charges: “Between September 24, 2010, and January 6, 2011, Swartz contrived to: a. break into a restricted-access computer wiring closet at MIT; b. access [...]
In June, nicely timed just before the American Library Association’s Annual Conference, Gluejar announced their first “unglued” title: “Oral Literature in Africa”. Well, now it is available for downloading in several different formats: PDF EPUB Kindle Kindle Daisy Full Text DjVu You can also read it online using the Internet Archive’s book reader. It should [...]
The post First Book Comes Unglued appeared first on The Digital Shift.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will allow Google to appeal the class action status of the seven-year old Google Inc. v. Authors Guild case, the court announced in an order this morning. Decertifying the case would force Author’s Guild members who dispute the digitization of their works to sue Google individually. Google has argued that many authors have benefited economically from its Google Books project, and whether a scan violated copyright or was protected under fair use doctrine should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
Unglue.it, the new crowdfunding site that encourages authors and publishers to make their ebooks available under a Creative Commons license, today was forced to suspend all active campaigns, after Amazon informed the organization that it would no longer process its pledge payments. Eric Hellman, founder of Unglue.it developer Gluejar Inc., told LJ that an Amazon representative had informed them that crowdfunding, in general, presents regulatory and contractual issues that Amazon is having difficulty keeping pace with. According to their conversation, with the exception of Kickstarter, Amazon Payments will be rejecting business with all new crowdfunding operations.
The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) today filed a friend of the court brief in the case of John Wiley & Sons v. Supap Kirtsaeng, which raises the issue of whether the first sale doctrine applies to books printed overseas and imported into the U.S. The LCA argues that, if the Supreme Court were to confirm that the first sale doctrine does not apply to books printed overseas, it would prevent libraries from lending major parts of their collections.
Highlighting a number of cases and rulings covering digital fair use— including the recent Georgia State ereserves verdict as well as Authors Guild vs. Google, Authors Guild vs. HathiTrust, and AIME vs. UCLA – the “Fair Use, Intellectual Property, and New Media” panel at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA played to a standing-room only room eager for expert analysis on which direction the library fair use winds are blowing.
A petition calling for public access to all federally funded research posted last month on the White House’s “We the People” website has garnered the 25,000 signatures necessary to be considered for action by the Obama Administration.
Unglue.it, the crowdfunding platform designed to encourage authors and publishers to make their ebooks available under a Creative Commons license, was officially launched on May 17, featuring campaigns for books from Michael Laser, Joseph Nassise, Nancy Rawles, Budding Reader, and Open Book Publishers.
One of the most closely watched e-reserve cases in recent memory came to an end—though an appeal is still possible—on May 11, when Judge Orinda Evans of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in Cambridge University Press (CUP); Oxford University Press (OUP); Sage Publications v. Georgia State University (GSU). The case alleged copyright infringement in GSU’s e-reserves, and in essence the judge came down on the side of libraries in a 350-page decision delivered almost a year after she heard closing arguments.
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