After being delayed several months, the Copyright Office has come out with the latest round of exemptions.
Section 1201 Rulemaking
There are some good things here. The news immediately circulating the tech blogs was that it should be allowable to jailbreak smartphones. (I expect we’ll see some interesting license-related battles soon as a result.) The exemption allowing film/media studies professors to use small clips for educational purposes has been expanded so that it can actually be used by professors and students. Even more notably, IMHO, the exemption was expanded to include noncommercial use. That’s huge, and I’m not certain how this will play out.
Interestingly, it looks like the Librarian of Congress extended the circumvention exemption for the blind, even though the Register of Copyrights recommended against it. She was sympathetic, but she blamed the process for her recommendation.
There’s no question that the process is flawed. I wrote a bit about it on my blog. The process is structured in such a way that makes serving the public interest quite difficult. I’m glad ALA and other library organizations participate.
Carlos Ovalle Copyright news
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing lots of notices lately about a symposium coming up in June in Washington, DC, on “Sustaining Culture in Copyright”, on how we can better balance “cultural innovation” with copyright owners’ rights. This happens to be taking place on June 22-24, right at the start of the American Library Association’s annual conference, also in DC. Now, I’m from Alaska, and generally the idea of being somewhere as warm as DC can be in the summer does not greatly appeal to me. After all, isn’t summer the time when folks should be leaving DC for cooler climes?! This time, though, I might be just a little bit jealous. Three whole days learning about copyright in a current context, with speakers like Peter Jaszi of Washington College of Law, American University, and William Patry, now of Google, Inc.! Information related to filesharing, social media, net neutrality! What fun!
For more information about UMUC’s Center for Intellectual Property’s 2010 Symposium, see http://www.umuc.edu/cip2010.
For more information about ALA’s Annual Conference, see http://www.ala.org/ala/conferencesevents/upcoming/annual/index.cfm
Freya Anderson ALA, Copyright news, Events
According to an article* in the UCLA Newsroom,
UCLA is taking steps to restore the streaming of previously purchased instructional content behind password-protected course websites, a practice the campus believes is permitted under various provisions in the federal Copyright Act.
The article indicates that while UCLA had stopped streaming to show good faith during negotiations, they had determined that their uses were allowable under Fair Use, as well as the TEACH Act safe harbor, and so they intend to restart streaming sometime in the spring semester. They did modify protocols so that faculty now specify the intended education use for material, although they believed that their previous practice was within the law.
Although there was no ruling by a court, UCLA sharing their reasoning may help smaller institutions, who may not have ready access to intellectual property specialists, in determining which of their own practices may be allowable under current copyright law.
Thanks to Janet Croft for the tip!
* Hampton, Phil. “Campus to restart streaming of instructional video content.” UCLA Newsroom, March 3, 2010.
Freya Anderson Copyright news
I’ve been remiss in not posting about a great new resource for librarians and others working in cultural institutions: Peter Hirtle’s new book, “Copyright and Cultural Institutions: Guidelines for Digitization for U.S. Libraries, Archives, and Museums.” I finally had the time to read it in its entirety over winter break, and I believe it will definitely be useful to anyone having to think about these issues. If you’re involved in decision-making related to digitization, dealing with orphan works, or having to consider those types of hard questions, I’d say this book is a must-have. IMHO. ^_^ I’ll provide a more in-depth description when I have a chance, but I wanted to make sure that it made our lists of resources now.
Carlos Ovalle Academic libraries, Copyright news, Fair use, International copyright, Orphan Works, School libraries, Technology
The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) has posted a free basic video on copyright at http://216.183.190.29/. It’s geared towards corporate clients, but I think that it’s pretty good for others too: cute, catchy, and more balanced than I had expected. It provides brief explanations of copyright, public domain, and fair use.
I posted a link rather than embedding the video in this post, because their license agreement allows for posting on a corporate intranet, but seems to disallow including it here. The other aspect that I found discouraging is that they didn’t include a publication date. Strictly speaking, this may not be necessary, because they are licensing the video, which trumps copyright, but of all places, the CCC should understand the importance of a publication date and should include it.
Freya Anderson Copyright resources copyright, education
