Thursday, December 27, 2007

Copyright Corundum Here comes another bubble video | TechWag

 

Copyright Corundum Here comes another bubble video

Copyright Corundum Here comes another bubble video | TechWag

 

More on the video......

Misunderstanding Copyright Law And Ruining Everyone’s Fun

 

Misunderstanding Copyright Law And Ruining Everyone’s Fun

 

Finally the Richter Scales video -- in question of the Lane Hartwell and the band.... a 2nd opinion on whether it is fair use.....Any wonder why everyone is so confused?

My feeling is only the lawyers win.....

FirstScience - Top physics laboratories sign up to open access with PhysMath Central

FirstScience - Top physics laboratories sign up to open access with PhysMath Central 

PhysMath Central, the Open Access publisher for Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science, today announced membership agreements with the CERN and DESY high-energy physics laboratories. Under these agreements the organizations will centrally cover article-processing charges for all research published by their investigators in the peer-reviewed open access journal, PMC Physics A.

PMC Physics A is edited by professor Ken Peach of University of Oxford and Royal Holloway and was launched in October 2007. All articles published in the journal are made immediately and freely available on the web in their final published form and are indexed by speciality databases such as SPIRES.

Jens Vigen, CERN head librarian commented “This membership program is an important, intermediate, step towards the SCOAP3 publishing model, where high-energy physics literature will be open access and article processing costs borne centrally in a transparent way for authors”. Salvatore Mele, SCOAP3 project leader, echoing Vigen’s views, stated “The SCOAP3 consortium will be open to all high-quality peer-reviewed journals, including emerging publishing outlets as well as established titles”.

Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Research Director at DESY, is also optimistic about the future. "We at DESY have long been active supporters of open access and welcome this new OA journal. This is another important step in removing access barriers to knowledge about high-energy physics experiments and theories. Increased choice and diversity is a benefit to all, leading to a healthy and dynamic market in academic publishing in particle physics, in line with the spirit of SCOAP³."

PhysMath Central’s Christopher Leonard commented, “We are exceptionally pleased to welcome these major institutions on board. This reinforces CERN and DESY’s commitment to supporting open access publication of the research from their laboratories. Central funding for article processing charges makes life much simpler for authors, and so accelerates the take up of open access.”

###

FirstScience - Top physics laboratories sign up to open access with PhysMath Central

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Exact Editions: The Optimal Term of Copyright

Exact Editions: The Optimal Term of Copyright 

The Optimal Term of Copyright

Rufus Pollock, a researcher at Cambridge University, has produced a rather brilliant but difficult, because formal and mathematical proof (whilst yet embodying many empirical propositions), that the term of copyright should be much lower than it is now, and that it should in general become shorter as technology advances. He suggests that the optimum term of copyright should be about 15 years from creation. The argument is complex, but he provides some neat informal guidance vis:

........consider the situation with respect to books, music, or film. Today, a man could spend a lifetime simply reading the greats of the nineteenth century, watching the classic movies of Hollywood’s (and Europe’s) golden age or listening to music recorded before 1965. This does not mean new work isn’t valuable but it surely means it is less valuable from a welfare point of view than it was when these media had first sprung into existence. Furthermore, if we increase protection we not only restrict access to works of the future but also to those of the past.
As a result the optimal level of protection must be lower than it was initially in fact it must fall gradually over time as our store of the creative work of past generations gradually accumulates to its long-term level. Forever Minus a Day?...
Pollock does not consider the related question: how will the efficient and optimal pricing of information services respond to changes in technology which reduce barriers to access? As more information becomes available how should a commercial information supplier i.e. a publisher, price his subscription services? How much should be given away and what to charge for that which is sold?

Exact Editions: The Optimal Term of Copyright

Copyright Registration for the Arts Community

Copyright Registration for the Arts Community 

 

An affordable way for the arts community to register copyrights.

El Cerrito, CA (Bluehost/PRWEB ) December 14, 2007 -- Artists frequently sacrifice their financial well-being to focus on their artwork. Whether it is a lack of customers or because they funnel any extra money toward art projects, many live on a limited income. As a result, it is not uncommon for artists to forgo spending the fee to register their works with the U.S. Copyright Office, especially if it means getting an expensive lawyer to help.

What these artists do not understand is that by not registering their works with the Copyright Office, they are neglecting to get important legal protections. Critical for artists to realize however, is that these legal protections can be the best shield against copyright infringement.

ProtectMyArt.com is a copyright registration service designed to help artists get the legal protection they deserve. It achieves this mission by making the copyright registration service low-cost, and by working with artists to fit as many artworks as possible on a single copyright application.

ProtectMyArt.com is a website that offers a range of information and materials about copyrights, and can assist the artist with submitting his or her work electronically to the U.S. Copyright Office.

For more information: www.ProtectMyArt.com or

Copyright Registration for the Arts Community

What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means - News and Analysis by PC Magazine 

What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means

by Matt Safford

At the turn of the millennium, Stanford law professor and cyber-law expert Lawrence Lessig had an idea.

In the midst of a Supreme Court case arguing that the latest lengthening of American copyright laws was unconstitutional, Lessig decided that if he couldn't stop the strengthening of copyright law, which was extended by an additional twenty years in 1998, he would help create an alternative.

In 2001, Lessig and a board of directors founded a non-profit organization called Creative Commons, to create legal licenses that expanded the options of traditional copyright laws, enabling users to selectively allow use of their works by others. Loosely based on earlier ideas already popular online, such as open-source software, the first six licenses were released via the Creative Commons website in December of 2002.

Five years later, the Commons pool of content contains more than 60 million individual works. From Bangladeshi blogs to Flikr photos from Fresno, Creative Commons has been embraced by recording artists, filmmakers, code writers, and other content creators who believe that collective culture benefits when creative minds build upon the ideas of others. Siva Vaidhyanathan, a professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia, and author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity, says that Creative Commons' real power is in its ability to inform users.

"It gives creators who never went to law school the vocabulary they need to work through the copyright system," says Vaidhyanathan. "It lets creators understand that copyright is not one right; it's a bundle of rights. And that if you create a work, you have the ability to let the world use it in useful and beneficial ways."

But the concept isn't all free love and file-sharing. Using Creative Commons licenses, content producers can release their work into the public domain, for anyone to cut up, mash up, or mark up. Or they can simply allow people to distribute it as a whole, without the ability to alter it. The other licenses fall somewhere in-between, but all require attribution, so creators get the credit they're due.

That isn't to say all users of Creative Commons give their content away for free. Though many allow for free non-commercial use, they commonly restrict commercial use. And the "sampling plus" license, popular among musicians, lets other recording artists sample pieces of their work, while still allowing the original musicians to sell their albums. But the bulk of Creative Commons-licensed content comes from bloggers, who are largely more interested in traffic and relevance than sales.

"Most text on the web doesn't have a price tag attached to it, so there's no big corporate regime with accountants worried about the idea of giving anything away free," says Vaidhyanathan. "Secondly, it's real easy to tag text on the web with a little Creative Commons [button] and if people are curious about it, they click on it and they find out. It really is remarkably easy for that medium. It's a little bit more challenging for things like video and music."

"Commons' license can mean exposure

Still, many recording artists, frustrated over the way copyright laws have stifled sampling over the last fifteen years, are embracing Creative Commons and releasing their music under a license that specifically allows their music to be sampled.

Chris Randall, former front man of the band Sister Machine Gun and founder of Positron Records, released his last three albums under Creative Commons' Sample Plus license. He lets other artists on his label release content under Creative Commons, and so far has yet to meet any strong resistance from his label mates. In fact, he says, once he explains it to them, they're pretty open to the idea, because it can provide them a different type of exposure.

"People that do internet radio as a hobby, rather than a business, tend to seek out Creative Commons-licensed music," says Randall. "So we do get some exposure that way, that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise."

Contrary to the actions of the major record labels, Positron also uses Creative Commons to expressly allow fans to upload songs onto peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, as long as they are properly labeled, so that the artist gets credit.

Randall doesn't see this as a threat to his sales. Indeed he sells CDs directly on his site, along with digital downloads through iTunes and other download sites. He thinks the major labels that spend millions trying to curb piracy on the internet are fighting a futile battle.

"The way I see it, there are people in this world that pay for things and people that try to get over. And the people of this world that try to get over are gonna get over no matter what you do," says Randall. "So why fight it, you know?"

All the label's albums are released under Creative Commons, and Randall says it's getting easier to convince other musicians to release their music under Creative Commons.

To Vaidhyanathan, this isn't surprising at all. "The artists seem to get it better than the intermediaries," says Vaidhyanathan. "Right now I'm currently negotiating a couple different book contracts, and I'm trying to get my publishers to let me release the works under a Creative Commons license…I have to make those arguments fresh every time. Because a lot of people in those industries are not as well versed in the ways these things work, as, say, the Beastie Boys or David Byrne are."

Film, literature see benefits

Those musicians, along with best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem, are a few of the "stars" that have embraced Creative Commons, or in Letham's case a derivation of the idea. The author is selling film and theater production rights to several of his short stories for $1 apiece, and giving away the film rights to his last novel, You Don't Love Me Yet. With more mainstream talent embracing these ideas, Vaidhyanathan says Creative Commons could become the default method of distributing cultural products.

But until that happens, if it ever does, getting Creative Commons licenses translated into as many languages and legal jurisdictions as possible is the next phase in the process, and it's already well underway. There are currently 34 jurisdiction-specific licenses, with nine other jurisdictions in the drafting process, according to the Creative Commons website.

Countries around the world are beginning to use Creative Commons to promote and distribute content. A Creative Commons photography contest just wrapped up in mainland China. And a Dutch court last year ruled a Creative Commons license legally binding in a lawsuit brought by former MTV host Adam Curry against a Dutch newspaper that printed Creative Commons-licensed photos of Curry's daughter, which were posted on his Flickr account.

Along with the challenge of globalizing the concept, Vaidhyanathan sees people's resistance to Creative Commons as a hurdle, but not an insurmountable one.

"I'm pretty sure that all of this sort of emotional reaction to Creative Commons as some sort of hippy, anarchistic movement, is going to go away," says Vaidhyanathan. "People are going to realize that it is a sort of down to earth business tool that actually helps communities of creators do their work together, and reflects how creativity actually happens. I think that's going to be step number one."

What the Creative in 'Creative Commons' Really Means - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

Macworld | Lawmakers raise questions about copyright enforcement bill

 Macworld | Lawmakers raise questions about copyright enforcement bill

Lawmakers raise questions about copyright enforcement bill

by Grant Gross, IDG News Service

Dec 13, 2007 2:15 pm

A handful of lawmakers, law professors and consumer groups have raised objections to a new U.S. copyright bill that could significantly increase the fines for copyright infringement.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act (or PRO IP Act), debated before a congressional subcommittee Thursday, would allow courts to assess copyright infringement damages for each piece of a compilation or derivative work found to infringe copyright, instead of treating the compilation as one infringement.

The maximum fine for infringing three songs in one compilation would increase from US$150,000 to $450,000 under the bill, introduced Dec. 5, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a consumer rights advocacy group. The fines for infringing five poems in one compilation would rise from $150,000 to $750,000, said Sohn, referring to a letter signed by 25 IP professors.

The bill would also make it easy for courts to forfeit computers and other property alleged to be used for infringement in civil copyright lawsuits, and it would allow the U.S. government to pursue criminal copyright enforcement before the creator registers a work or product with the U.S. Copyright Office.

“While we agree that enforcement of intellectual property laws is essential to encouraging creativity, certain provisions in the proposed act risk undermining this essential goal by threatening consumers with an overbroad and inapposite enforcement regime,” Sohn told the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. “These provisions of the bill …. represent a step away from a rational, realistic copyright regime.”

The bill will hurt the consumer electronics industry, with companies that make recording and copying devices scared to introduce new products because of a fear of lawsuits, added Representative Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat.

“The effect on innovation will be real and it will be adverse,” Boucher said.

But supporters of the bill said it’s needed. Counterfeiting and piracy cost U.S. companies between $200 billion and $250 billion a year, said Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Conyers, the primary sponsor of the bill, tried to dispel criticism that the legislation was targeted only at music and movie piracy. Counterfeit drugs, automobile parts and airplane parts are “placing human lives at risk,” he said.

Copyright theft also costs hundreds of thousands of jobs, added James Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a large trade union. Members of the union deliver DVDs, CDs and video games from legitimate companies, he said. “When pirated DVDs and CDs are sold on a street corner in an underground economy, we lose jobs,” he said.

Government agencies also lose tax revenue through pirated or counterfeit goods, Hoffa said. “Lost tax revenue has a significant and potentially debilitating impact on American working families,” he added. “By most anyone’s calculations, the bridges and roads that our members both build and travel over are in a critical state of disrepair throughout the country.”

While Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, called copyright infringement “massive,” others raised concerns that the bill goes too far. Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from Silicon Valley in California, noted that the bill could increase the penalties for infringing a 10-song CD from $150,000 to $1.5 million. “I think that’s unreasonable,” she said.

Public Knowledge’s Sohn noted that a Minnesota woman was fined $222,000 for 24 songs in a court case that ended in October. She called on the subcommittee to kill the portion of the bill that would increase copyright damages for compiled works.

“I don’t think anybody’s arguing that statutory damages are inadequate,” she said. “I’m not sure that increasing penalties 10 fold or 20 fold does anything other than stop legitimate innovators.”

Macworld | Lawmakers raise questions about copyright enforcement bill

Thursday, December 20, 2007

NIH Public Access Policy Passes Congress!

The NIH Public Access language was included in the FY08 Omnibus Spending Bill approved by Congress early this evening. The Bill is expected to be signed by President Bush in the next few days.

We will do a full press release when the president signs the Bill, and we can officially call it the law.

From:Open Access Working Group [mailto:SPARC-OAGROUP@arl.org]

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Series - The MIT Press

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Series - The MIT Press 

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning examines the effect of digital media tools on how people learn, network, communicate, and play, and how growing up with these tools may affect peoples sense of self, how they express themselves, and their ability to learn, exercise judgment, and think systematically.

Thanks to the generous support of the MacArthur Foundation, open access electronic versions of all the books in this series are available. Follow the links from each title description below to read these editions.

For more on the MacArthur Foundation's digital media and learning initiative, visit http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning - Series - The MIT Press

The Right Chemistry for Open-Access Science - Chronicle.com

The Right Chemistry for Open-Access Science - Chronicle.com 

The Right Chemistry for Open-Access Science

Microsoft is partnering with several universities to create open-access Web sites where chemists, freely and easily, can find details about molecules and atoms. That’s the report today from Peter Murray-Rust of the chemistry department at the University of Cambridge, in his blog.

Murray-Rust notes that Microsoft has financed and developed a software design called Object Re-Use and Exchange “which sees the future as composed of a large number of interoperating repositories rather than monolithic databases.” Using it, he continues, will allow bench chemists and undergraduates to browse libraries of molecular structures to get information they need for research and publications, rather than being restricted to whatever database to which they happen to have a password.

“We shall also be ‘scraping’ (ugly word) any material we can legally access,” Murray-Rust writes.

Partners in the program, besides Cambridge and Microsoft, include Penn State University, Cornell, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the PubChem project, a free database of molecular structures hosted by the National Institutes of Health.—Josh Fischman

The Right Chemistry for Open-Access Science - Chronicle.com

DOJ Blasts New 'Copyright Czar' Bill - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

 DOJ Blasts New 'Copyright Czar' Bill - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

DOJ Blasts New 'Copyright Czar' Bill

12.13.07

by Chloe Albanesius

The Department of Justice on Thursday slammed intellectual property legislation that would re-organize its IP enforcement structure, calling it unnecessary and counterproductive to the work it has already accomplished.

"We have a current structure … that works quite effectively," Sigal Mandelker, deputy assistant attorney general, told the House Judiciary subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property.

Judiciary Chairman John Conyers last week introduced H.R. 4279, which would further crack down on intellectual property violations, and create several new government positions with the power to enforce the new law. It is intended to preserve American economic prosperity, according to sponsors.

The new government positions include an intellectual property enforcement representative who would report to the White House, and a permanent intellectual property division within the Department of Justice.

Those plans would be "ill-advised," Mandelker told the committee. Removing the department's IP division from the criminal division, as the bill proposes, "will disrupt important relationships within the criminal division and will make intradepartmental IP coordination more difficult," she said.

The IP division works closely with the DOJ's cyber crime laboratory, so separating a copyright unit could fracture investigation, Mandelker said. "This close collaboration … could be jeopardized if the IP enforcement component were split off from computer crime and placed into a separate division," she said. "Moreover, it may lead to duplicative administration and training programs."

The DOJ itself has an IP task force and recently implemented 31 recommendations, but "there was never any recommendation to create an entirely new division for IP," Mandelker said.

Copyright controls in the hands of the White House? Bad idea

DOJ was also not pleased with an IP office inside the White House. "We are always going to be concerned when you have somebody at the White House who may be in the position of directing our enforcement or what cases we do or don't do," she said. "That would be contrary to the long-standing tradition of the department making independent decisions regarding law enforcement."

Rick Cotton, executive vice president and general counsel for NBC Universal and chairman of the Coalition Against Counterfeiting and Piracy, suggested that IP issues tend to "fall down the 'to-do' list". Until there are senior policy executives specifically tasked with IP enforcement, he said, "we will not make progress in addressing the issues that are on the table."

Panel members also expressed concern over Section 104 of the bill, which would allow a copyright owner to collect statutory damages for each copyrighted work that is stolen. Detractors fear that this provision could result in protracted lawsuits, expensive settlements, and unintended consequences, especially when it comes to music.

Under current law, for example, someone who pirates a single album will be charged with one crime. Section 104, however, would penalize criminals on a per-song basis, so if someone pirated a motion picture soundtrack that had songs from 12 different artists, the pirate would be charged with 12 separate offenses and be subject to exorbitant fees.

Panelists said that while slapping music pirates with hefty fines may not seem overly problematic, these fines often wind up affecting the parents of kids sharing copyrighted material on their home computers or third-party hardware and software providers more than the operators of sophisticated piracy rings.

Increasing fines "would do little or nothing to deter willful infringers," said Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. "There are already ample statutory damages directed at them."

If anything, an increase in fines could deter innovation, Boucher suggested. Researchers might waver on "whether or not to introduce [a] product and involve themselves in that level of innovation" if the risk of being sued is too high, he said.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., was "deeply troubled" by Section 104. "These statutory damages would provide for $1.5 million damages for a single CD. I think that's unreasonable."

Chairman Conyers was not convinced.

"Damages need to reflect the fact that we live in a world where music is being consumed in bite-sized pieces, not just in albums or whole books," he said.

Conyers was not concerned about opportunistic lawsuits. "We're always watching lawyers that are hustling, so that goes with the turf," he said.

Subcommittee Chairman Howard Berman pointed out that that Section 104 is discretionary and not a mandate, and called on the Copyright Office to hold a serious of meetings with various stakeholders about Section 104 to address any concerns.

Conyers, meanwhile, shot down the notion that a provision allowing for the seizure of equipment used to pirate copyrighted goods would result in the collection of a family's general-purpose computer in a download case.

Bill authors "carefully crafted the language to allow seizure only if the property was owned or predominantly controlled by the infringer," Conyers said. "A warehouse used to store counterfeit goods could be seized, or property used to transfer" pirated good would be the likely target of that provision, he said.

DOJ Blasts New 'Copyright Czar' Bill - News and Analysis by PC Magazine

Marrying Marketing Science with the Front Lines: One Book Publisher's Winning Combination - Knowledge@Wharton

Marrying Marketing Science with the Front Lines: One Book Publisher's Winning Combination - Knowledge@Wharton 

Marrying Marketing Science with the Front Lines: One Book Publisher's Winning Combination

Published: December 12, 2007 in Knowledge@Wharton

 

The rise of the Internet has been a boon to the National Academies Press, or NAP, the book-publishing arm of the National Academy of Sciences. But by the start of this decade, the promise of the web also posed some potential pitfalls.

In 2001, the leading scientists on the board of the Academy were suggesting that NAP executive director Barbara Kline Pope take advantage of new technologies to offer its books on the web in a downloadable PDF format -- free of charge. According to Pope, the scientists told her they wanted the ability to disseminate the scientific information as widely as possible, explaining "that we could give away PDFs for free and it would build knowledge around the world. They were also saying to me, 'Don't worry about your business model because people will still buy printed books.'"

But Pope wasn't convinced. So in 2002 -- as befitting a leading scientific publisher -- she obtained outside funds for hard research, retained two academic marketing experts and called upon the tools of marketing science. The researchers developed a study showing that free online PDF-format books would have cannibalized existing print sales on the order of $2 million a year -- a potentially crippling blow to the publishing house.

Pope and the two marketing experts -- P.K. Kannan from the University of Maryland and Sanjay Jain from Texas A&M -- presented their research at Wharton recently as an entry in the INFORMS Society on Marketing Science (ISMS) Practice Prize Competition, a contest designed to highlight the ways that advanced marketing science can improve the bottom line.

For their development of a strategy on how to price online PDF-format books in a way that would maximize both revenues and book sales, the NAP team was awarded first prize in the competition. The contest used to be a part of the yearly INFORMS convention, but it was held as a breakout event this year at a new Wharton conference called the Practice and Impact of Marketing Science 2007.

The 'Charm' of the Plan

Three finalists had been asked to present their competition entries to the Wharton conference in person. In addition to the NAP group, the conference heard from J.D. Power and Associates' Stephan Schroeder, Jie Du and Lili Xie, who spoke about Optimal Auction Vehicle Distribution System, or ODAV. Also presenting were P&G Asia-Pacific's V. Kumar, Jia Fan, Rohit Gulati and P. Venkat, whose topic was marketing-mix recommendations to manage value growth.

Altogether, some 20 teams entered the competition in which judges evaluated a combination of factors, including the implementation and impact of the marketing research, the originality and innovative use of technology, the difficulty of the problem, the transportability of the solution, and an intangible that event organizers called "the charm" of the marketing plan.

Two of the leading teams in the 2007 competition were tackling a common modern scenario, using the Internet and advanced computer technology to solve thorny marketing problems that center on an age-old issue: how to reach as many customers as possible at the highest attainable price.

In the case of the National Academies Press, located in Washington, D.C., early and successful use of the Internet made developing a new business plan more challenging. This was partly because as web traffic increased, users grew more sophisticated. Pope and her staff needed to decide how much information would be free of charge and how much would be fee-based, and at what price. The same problems have been encountered by newspapers, magazines and other print-based businesses in the Internet age.

As early as 1994, NAP was on the web with a system that allowed visitors to view some 550,000 individual pages online for a small charge, either to gain a nugget of scientific information or to decide whether to order the entire book through "snail mail." That system drove hundreds of thousands of annual Internet visitors, but by 2001, according to Pope, the growth of broadband access and the upgraded PDF format for publishing pages online meant it was now possible for web browsers to download a whole book online.

"It is our responsibility to disseminate these books as far and wide as we can, with the conditions that we need to be completely self-sustaining, and we're non-profit," Pope noted, adding that many of the roughly 200 titles a year published by NAP deal with critical scientific issues facing the country, such as stem cell research and global climate change.

It was the importance of those topics that pressed some of the big-name scientists who sit on the board of the National Academy of Sciences to urge that the PDF files be offered for free over the Internet to ensure widespread availability of the research. But Pope said that more data was critical.

In her Wharton presentation, Pope showed a Berkeley Breathed "Opus" cartoon featuring "Way Wired" Willy -- who downloads To Kill a Mockingbird on his laptop in a matter of seconds -- and Opus, who sleeps at night surrounded by old-fashioned books. She knew that NAP had customers who strongly preferred one style or the other, but there was no hard information on how many buyers were in either camp, or how much to charge for PDFs that saved the distribution costs of a traditional book. "These were questions that all of us in the publishing industry were facing at that time," Pope said. "There was no published data. Everyone was guessing."

With the outside funding, NAP enlisted Kannan and Jain to develop research projects to gauge customer preferences for online PDFs versus printed books, and also to develop a pricing strategy for PDFs and for a so-called "bundle" in which shoppers could buy both PDFs and a hard copy in the same purchase.

The study -- which found that about 65% to 70% of visitors to the NAP site came to view only one page -- sought to divide online shoppers into actual buyers, with a printed book in their shopping cart, as opposed to those who were merely browsing books that had a PDF version available. Once separated by group, the shoppers were asked to fill out a survey and were offered a chance to buy the PDF version, initially at the same price as the printed book and later, at a reduced price.

The two researchers determined that profits for a $23 book -- keeping the book price at the same level -- would be maximized by offering the PDF version for $17.28 and a bundle of the two products for $27.28, which would produce a profit margin per sale of $8.93. They also learned that 46% of traditional book buyers would have taken the free PDF version, which would have produced the $2 million annual shortfall.

Based on this research, the NAP adopted an initial online pricing policy in 2002 of charging 75% of the print price for the PDF product. The actual sales closely tracked predictions, although web sales rose by 14.4%, higher than what had been forecast. Overall sales rose by 10%.

Pope said that because of the success of the pricing model, NAP decided to offer free downloads for users in developing countries and free downloads of titles which were lagging in sales. As Internet downloading popularity has increased, the PDF pricing was raised last year to 85%, Pope said. "The fact that I am still employed and standing in front of you means that we have been financially self-sustaining," Pope noted. "We have taken out profits and invested in the web site." Page views have soared to 18 million a year. Pope has been sharing the NAP findings with other leading booksellers, including Amazon.com, at industry conferences.

Finding Synergies between Academics and Practitioners     

Both the creation of the conference and its spotlighting of the Practice Prize competition were aimed at addressing the same issue: a lack of communication and collaboration between real-world business executives and academics who are developing innovative marketing science that could solve real-world problems. "In the field of marketing, there is a growing divide between those on the front lines and the people who are developing new knowledge," says Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader, a co-chairman of the conference. Many people in the business world, he adds, are put off by the sometimes complex equations that marketing scientists develop as tools, but in a quick-changing, Internet-driven workplace, that knowledge can be highly valuable -- as shown by the NAP case study.

According to Fader, while marketing practitioners are always welcome to attend academic conferences on marketing science, typically such events are dominated by professors. Thus, in designing the Practice and Impact of Marketing Science 2007 event, Wharton -- in conjunction with the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science -- worked from the beginning to achieve an even mix of executives and academics, to foster a dialogue between the two worlds.

Over three days, the conference also featured about a dozen workshops -- led by a combination of professors and executives -- on topics that ranged from social networks and the media to new product development and customer retention.

For many attendees, Fader says, the highlight of the marketing conference was simply the chance for marketing science experts and business practitioners to talk to each other. "You had people coming together in the room who were completely unaware of other people working on the same issue. You had that 'a-ha moment' when a researcher saw somebody who was working on their very problem for the last couple of years."

The Practice Prize competition was the centerpiece of the event. Indeed, Fader notes, the finalists -- by showing how businesses used marketing science to tackle real world business problems -- "epitomized the spirit of the conference."

Marrying Marketing Science with the Front Lines: One Book Publisher's Winning Combination - Knowledge@Wharton

Daily Research News Online article no. 7704

Daily Research News Online article no. 7704 

Copyright Protection Tool Launched

December 12 2007

In Canada, Destiny Media has launched a version of its Clipstream software specifically for protecting clients’ media content from theft, copying or reuse when embeded in surveys.
The new system, Clipstream Video MR, guards sensitive pre-release video, audio, or images against piracy, while allowing respondents to provide feedback from their own homes.
With multiple levels of security built in, the system offers a secure ID which locks content to the authorized host servers, a screen scraper blocker and a watermarketing system that identifies the user on video playback.
According to Michelle Murphy, VP Communications at Harris Interactive, this level of security provides a secure method for handling and testing new campaigns or products, while protecting clients’ collateral. Harris was awarded a patent for developing survey security software in March (www.mrweb.com/drno/news6544.htm ).
John Gammack, VP Operations at Destiny, comments: ‘The release includes an intuitive design and provides out of the box settings and codes to satisfy almost any survey project. This will save on IT labour costs for our customers and save on customer support time for us’.
Vancouver-based Destiny is online at www.dsny.com .

Daily Research News Online article no. 7704

Copyright Clearance Center Launches Copyright Labs

Copyright Clearance Center Launches Copyright Labs 

Copyright Clearance Center Launches Copyright Labs

DANVERS, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the world’s largest provider of copyright licensing solutions, today announced the launch of Copyright Labs (www.copyrightlabs.com), a testing ground for new services, applications and products.

The site launched with three applications already available:

  • a copyright permission utility that makes it easier to license content found when using Internet Explorer
  • a capability for Firefox browser users who want to license content found via Google Scholar
  • a tool that helps publishers implement the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP) standard for communicating access permission rules and rights information to search engines

“CCC is using Copyright Labs to drive even greater innovation,’” said Tom Hamilton, CCC Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “It’s a place where content users and creators alike can interact with our development and product groups. We’re committed to developing a steady stream of services and tools that reflect new ways customers use content, and Copyright Labs will play an important role.”

Tools available at Copyright Labs are free, and some are being released as Open Source applications, providing an open, collaborative environment. Visitors can test-drive prototypes, modify and build on them, experiment with new ideas and suggest improvements.

About Copyright Clearance Center

Copyright Clearance Center creates innovative licensing solutions for the seamless sharing of knowledge. CCC’s licensing services, combined with its Web-based applications and tools, allow tens of millions of people in corporations, universities, law firms and government agencies to use and share published information with ease. Since its founding as a not-for-profit company in 1978, CCC has created and expanded the markets and systems that facilitate content reuse and the distribution of royalties to publishers and authors around the world. By offering rights to millions of the world's most sought-after publications, the company plays a major role in the global knowledge economy and encourages support for the principles of copyright. For more information visit www.copyright.com.

Copyright Clearance Center Launches Copyright Labs

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Free for all

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000551

Free for all

Forget about paying for journal subscriptions. If a new proposal takes hold, particle physics journals would get their funding from labs, libraries, and agencies that sponsor research, and readers could peruse them for free.
By Glennda Chui


The next big experiment in particle physics won’t need an accelerator, detector, or other big machine. It doesn’t even involve subatomic particles—unless you count the electrons that flow through electronic circuits, carrying bits of information from one human brain to the next.

Instead, it will test a new way to circulate the theories, methods, and experimental results that are the lifeblood of science.

If it works, no one will have to pay to read most particle physics results. The journals that publish most of the research in the field will be available free online to anyone, anywhere and any time. Money to run the journals—including the cost of having experts review each article before it sees print—would instead come from funding agencies, laboratories and libraries through a consortium called scoap3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. This would give journals a stable source of funding while reducing the total cost to libraries and readers.

The proposal is the latest twist in open-access publishing, a worldwide movement whose goal is to pull down barriers to the free flow of information while preserving a system that has kept watch over the integrity of science for nearly 350 years.

Physics, with its long history of openly sharing research results, seems an ideal testing ground for such an idea. Fifty years ago physicists began circulating mimeographed preprints, or unpublished papers, as a way of getting results out more quickly. The mimeograph gave way to the copying machine and the computer; today’s physicists post theories and experimental results on arXiv.org, an Internet clearinghouse set up in 1991 to make it easier for them to swap information. Some of these articles have been through the rigors of expert review, but many are fresh from the keyboards of their creators. As of July, arXiv contained more than 430,000 articles in physics, mathematics and computer science, with more than 56,000 new submissions expected in 2007 and more than 45 million full-text articles downloaded per year, according to Paul Ginsparg, the Cornell University physicist who created the service and manages it. As early as 1961, librarians at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California started keeping track of circulating preprints, an effort that evolved into spires, the first searchable database on the Internet.

“A lot of people cite or use papers before they have even been published in a journal,” says Travis Brooks of SLAC, who manages the spires database. “Because of this way of doing things, this field moves at a much more rapid pace.”

But when it comes to extending open access to the journals themselves through scoap3, there are formidable obstacles and worries: Who will pay for publication? Would the funding be stable enough that journals could rely on it?

Further, the consortium won’t work without participation from all the countries where physics is done. The United States is a crucial player, since about a quarter of the published research originates here. Yet its budgetary system is highly complex, with money for journal subscriptions coming out of thousands of separate pockets. If the bulk of particle physics results emanated from a handful of big labs, the situation would be simpler; they could be asked to foot the bill. But 90 percent of the peer-reviewed articles posted in arXiv are written by small groups of theorists, and they’re scattered among many institutes and universities. Proponents say the fact that two major libraries recently expressed an interest in working with scoap3 is quite encouraging.

The price of excellence
Ever since Britain’s Royal Society founded the first scientific journal, Philosophical Transactions, in 1665, journals have played a critical role in the way science is done, one that goes far beyond disseminating knowledge. They do this through a process called peer review, in which research results are scrutinized by experts, and often put through many rounds of back-and-forth fine-tuning, before they’re approved for publication.

It’s an expensive undertaking. For the American Physical Society, a not-for-profit professional organization, the cost of publishing nine journals is about $30 million a year, says Joseph Serene, the society’s publisher and treasurer.


The society gets about 35,000 manuscripts per year and publishes 16,000 to 17,000 of them, he says. It has a list of 50,000 scientists who volunteer to review those papers, and employs 50 full-time editors, all PhD physicists. The final cost of producing an article is about US$2000.

However, the average cost of journal subscriptions has been rising far faster than inflation; between 2003 and 2007, for instance, the average cost of subscribing to 103 physics journals jumped 42 percent, according to the 2007 Library Journal Periodical Prices Survey. Many library budgets can’t keep up. Some have been dumping subscriptions; in October, for instance, the society that runs Germany’s Max Planck Institutes announced that it was cancelling an agreement with Springer that gave the institutes a centralized way to access 1200 Springer journals, adding that it would work with individual institutes to obtain “essential content” at a reasonable price. “Extreme price developments in the supply of information, as well as usage restrictions, are prompting scientific organizations around the world to rethink their policies,” the society said in a statement to the press. “If publishers have the market power to effectively implement such prices and if legislators are unwilling to subject such inappropriate behavior to legal controls, the only way left open to science will be to take matters into their own hands.”

As more institutions pare their subscription lists, there’s a danger that journals will have to raise prices for their remaining subscribers, leading to more cancellations and more price increases that eventually force journals out of business. “The present system is not sustainable.” says Salvatore Mele, a physicist at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland, and spokesman for the scoap3 project. “When we run out of money because the subscriptions are too expensive, we might run out of journals, and our community needs our journals for the evaluation of research groups and individuals, in particular young scientists on the tenure track. Journals are our interface with officialdom; today they are indispensable.”


Green and gold
It didn’t take long after the 1983 birth of the Internet for the first open-access journals to appear, according to a timeline put together by Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College in Indiana and one of the movement’s most active proponents. By the time CERN computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web in 1990, open-access journals had sprouted in the areas of adult education, psychology, communication, computer systems, and postmodern culture.

Today there are more than 2900 open-access journals, including 39 in physics, according to a database maintained by the Lund University Libraries in Sweden. A recent survey that Suber carried out with Caroline Sutton of Co-Action Publishing found 468 scholarly societies publishing 523 journals with various degrees of open access, including those put out by the American Physical Society.

In talking about open access, advocates refer to two basic ways of going about it: the green and gold.

The green road is what physicists have been doing all along—making their work available on the Web, whether on a central repository such as arXiv or on their own home pages. Activists would like to spread these practices to other fields. They celebrated when both houses of the US Congress voted to mandate that research funded by the National Institutes of Health be posted on an open archive within a year of publication; however, President Bush vetoed the measure in November. A publishers’ group called prism, the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, opposes this and any other form of mandatory open access.

Under the gold model, journals make their contents available free, with the cost of publishing generally paid by authors or by their home institutions. Unlike the green road, it explicitly provides a way to pay for peer review. In physics, gold journals include Advances in High Energy Physics and the recently launched PMC Physics A, which posts articles in a way that also allows readers to access and manipulate the underlying data. “We won’t be publishing issues; we’ll just publish articles as they are accepted, so the speed of publication will be that much faster,” says Christopher Leonard, associate publisher of London-based PhysMath Central. “Eventually we intend to launch enough open-access journals to cover the whole of physics and the whole of mathematics.”

A growing number of journals are hybrids: They continue to sell subscriptions, but will make individual articles available free online if the author pays a fee. This model was pioneered by Springer in 2004.

scoap3 offers another alternative.

Noting that 83 percent of published particle physics articles posted on arXiv are from six leading journals, the international consortium proposes to convert five of those core journals to full open access: Physical Review D, Physics Letters B, Nuclear Physics B, Journal of High Energy Physics, and European Physical Journal C. In addition, articles in Physical Review Letters that involve high-energy physics, about 10 percent of the total, would become open access. The consortium is also open to other high-quality particle physics journals.

Each nation that carries out physics research would contribute to the consortium according to how many articles its scientists publish, with special allowances made for developing nations that cannot afford to pay.

One concern raised about open-access publishing is that it might free libraries from the burden of skyrocketing subscription costs, only to force authors to pay fees out of their research grants, reducing the amount of money available for lab equipment, graduate students and other essentials. scoap3 offers a way around that, Mele says, by diverting money now used for subscriptions into the consortium while leaving research funds intact.

At a cost of about US$3000 per article and with about 5000 articles published per year in the field, the maximum yearly price tag for open access would be about US$15 million, he says.

The proposal is making rapid progress, Mele adds: The major European players have already pledged about a third of the needed funding, and there are growing signs of interest from libraries in the United States and both libraries and funding agencies in Asia.

Ivy Anderson, director of collections for the California Digital Library, says the library is exploring the feasibility of becoming a scoap3 funding partner on behalf of the University of California Libraries.

She calls the funding model “both intriguing and innovative,” adding, “Any proposal that holds out promise for placing scholarly publication on a more sustainable and open footing is very welcome.”

Heath O’Connell, information services manager for Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, says his library is “very interested” in redirecting its subscription costs to scoap3 “and many high-energy physics libraries, such as SLAC’s, are thinking in similar ways.”


The publishers
For their part, the biggest publishers in particle physics—Elsevier, Springer, and the APS—all say they’re receptive to the idea, if it can be made to work.

Springer recently announced that until negotiations with the scoap3 consortium are concluded, all of the experimental papers published in European Physical Journal C will be available for free.

“In a way, a publisher has to be agnostic on these things. This is a matter of politics, funding, and science,” says Christian Caron, publishing editor for EPJC. “What is rather clear is the majority of big collaborations in this world have signed petitions saying yes, we are only going to publish in open- access journals.

“We’re totally open-minded. We’re curious to see what will be in the proposal. We will have to all sit down and ponder how sustainable that is, and what is the risk associated with that.”

Even among supportive publishers, there is a fear that the transition to open access could be rough, and might even put them out of business.

“We would be delighted if the scoap3 initiative worked,” says Serene of the APS. “But we would be hesitant to sign onto this thing unless we were really certain it had long-term financial stability,” which is hard to guarantee if the funding comes out of government budgets that change year-to-year.

While subscriptions to the society’s journals have declined over the past decade, he says, “If you look at the numbers, the subscriptions are solid. I will say we worry that we might be sitting on some point of unstable equilibrium and things might change rather rapidly.”

To Suber, though, physics is offering scholarly publishing a model for how to make that transition.

“Somehow physics did everything right,” he says. “Its levels of self-archiving are approaching 100 percent, and its journals have not seen cancellations. In physics we’re seeing the journals convert even when they’re prospering, and they’re doing it through coordinated negotiations with other stakeholders. It’s being done through discipline and reasoning. Nobody is over a barrel. Everybody’s doing it because it looks like a better idea.”

If other fields can move to open access through this kind of “peaceable negotiation, rather than trauma,” he says, “we should do that.”

 

Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance chooses open access

Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance chooses open access

BioMed Central, the world�s largest publisher of open access journals, is pleased to announce that the Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (JCMR) is moving to BioMed Central�s open access publishing platform from the traditional subscription publishers, Taylor & Francis. The move from a subscription publisher to BioMed Central will allow the Society of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance (SCMR) members and JCMR authors to disseminate their research in the burgeoning field of cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging and spectroscopy more efficiently. In addition, BioMed Central�s open access policy ensures that their work will reach not only other SCMR members, but the widest possible global audience.

Beginning in January 2008, JCMR (www.jcmr-online.com) readers will have free, instant online access to all published articles not only on BioMed Central�s website, but also on PubMed Central as well as other open access repositories, free from the constraints of print publication cycles.

�Open access will bring benefits to readers that are of utmost importance to science - free, unfettered and widespread access to all research,� said Dudley Pennell, editor in chief, JCMR. �Authors will benefit from faster publication cycles, and an increase in readership leading to increased citation counts. We�re looking forward to making the switch to open access publishing via BioMed Central.�

The first and only journal devoted exclusively to CMR, Journal of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance� (JCMR) includes basic and clinical research articles, technical notes, review articles, and editorial commentary on the research, design, development, and evaluation of magnetic resonance methods applied to the cardiovascular system.

�We�re pleased that such a highly-regarded society journal has selected BioMed Central to publish its open access journal,� said Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central. �SCMR society members and others publishing in the journal will benefit from rapid publication thanks to BioMed Central's streamlined manuscript submission tools and online peer review system. Our open access platform is the best way for SCMR members to communicate the latest findings and state-of-the-art reviews in their field.�

JCMR is part of a growing stable of society journals now published by BioMed Central. Most recently, Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (JISSN) moved its publishing activities to BioMed Central. Others include Asia Pacific Family Medicine, the regional journal for the World Organization of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians, and Acta Veterinaria Scandinavica, the official journal of the Veterinary Associations of the Nordic Countries.

###

BioMed Central is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science.

Google's Senior Copyright Counsel on the PRO IP Bill

Google's Senior Copyright Counsel on the PRO IP Bill

Noted copyright lawyer William Patry, who is Google's Senior Copyright Counsel and who is the author of the seven-volume Patry on Copyright, has published a trenchant analysis of the PRO IP bill ("What Does It Mean to Be Pro-IP?"). (Note that Patry indicates in his blog that:"The views in this blog are strictly mine and should not be attributed to Google Inc.")

http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/2007/12/11/googles-senior-copyright-counsel-on-the-pro-ip-bill/

Searching for Common Ground on Copyrights

From Inside Higher Ed. 


Searching for Common Ground on Copyrights

In the auditorium once reserved as a studio for Crossfire, CNN’s now-defunct political smackdown showcase, a collection of scholars and copyright specialists gathered at George Washington University on Monday to explore legal issues too complex for a 10-second sound bite.

     

They were there to talk about copyright and its relation to colleges and universities, a combination that spans the traditional hornet’s nest of disputes ranging from peer-to-peer file sharing to fair use in the classroom. In the process, the panelists managed to spar a bit but did come to a consensus on at least one point — the level of uncertainty bred by the current legal status quo.

The forum, “Copyright and the University: An Academic Symposium”, was sponsored by a new nonprofit advocacy group, Copyright Alliance, which promotes strong copyright protection for artists and describes itself as “dedicated to the value of copyright as an agent for creativity, jobs and growth.” While the discussion often tended in that direction, the participants represented views divergent enough to sustain debates on how to define the rights of authors and how industries that are based on creative works should be structured.

Although the planned keynote speaker Rep. Ric Keller (R-Fla.) couldn’t attend, the panelist Marybeth Peters, the United States Register of Copyrights, filled in to provide a broad overview of copyright law as it was originally intended and how it has evolved since. Noting that the Constitution gives Congress the power to secure “for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries,” Peters said that the scope of authors’ rights has expanded — and with that expansion, the balance between artists’ rights and promoting the “Progress of Science and useful Arts.”

In 1966, when she began at the U.S. Copyright Office, the copyright law was 26 pages long. Today, the exceptions alone cover 70 pages. “I look at that [original] law with envy today,” Peters said.

But even as the law has evolved, so have the expectations of consumers and the economic pressures on creators. When people can watch television or listen to the radio free, it can seem just as natural to desire free songs and movies for computers or portable players. “The expectation that an individual has from a work that they get or a device that they purchase is, ‘I want everything and I want it when I want it,’ ” she said.

Another area of agreement in the two panels was the need for better education all around — not only for students, but for librarians and professors as well. Speakers noted that universities were uniquely suited for this role but insisted that they tended not to live up to it. “For the most part, it’s very much finger wagging, it’s very much ‘Here’s what’s going to happen to you if you transgress,’ and you don’t get a lot of buy-in,” said James Gibson, a visiting associate professor of law at the University of Virginia.

Gibson observed a lack of critical engagement with copyright issues at the university level and the result that students often don’t understand the logic behind prohibitions on illegal file sharing. “I find that very much at odds with the university mission in general,” he said, suggesting that better comprehension could lead to better compliance with the law.

That approach to the issue often stems from colleges’ position in the crossfire, as it were, between the recording and motion picture industries on one hand, students on the other and the law peering down from above. The trouble, according to some of the panelists, is that it’s not entirely clear where colleges’ legal obligations begin.

Peter Jaszi, a professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, said the issue of whether colleges can be held liable for students’ actions using the campus network infrastructure is “not necessarily settled.” He suggested (not without being challenged) that a court hearing of the issue — with one unlucky college or university in the legal hot seat — “would not necessarily be unhealthy” as a means to settle some of the blurry responsibilities currently being debated.

Whatever happens in the legal realm, however, students will continue to hold strong views on the availability of easy to access, free creative content. Warren Arbogast, a researcher at Illinois State University’s Digital Citizen Project, offered some basic statistics “to help this part of the conversation to move from anecdote and supposition toward data.”

“Students don’t think they’ll get caught,” he said. “They will stop if they’re caught ... for a few days.”

The discussion also touched on potential solutions, although the only agreement was to form a working group to tackle copyright reform wholesale. The economist Michael A. Einhorn, a director at CONSOR Intellectual Asset Management, contrasted digital copyright to the solutions forged in academic publishing, in which professors can pay license fees for individual chapters to combine into a course packet. “Licensing accommodates a modularity of content, a more open, more porous system where people can grab and buy as they choose,” he noted.

Such clarity doesn’t currently exist for digitally distributed music and movies. “Because the right has been improperly and vaguely defined, that is why we have the mess we have in file sharing now,” he said.

The second panel also veered into fair use, touching on the double-edged sword of that vaguely defined but broader exception to copyright law. While scholars often feel the need to use it, doing so can invite legal scrutiny. So professors often act the same way as their students.

“That’s why the teachers shut the door,” literally and figuratively, said Patricia Aufderheide, a professor at the American University School of Communication.

Andy Guess

Opensecrets.org

"Here’s a fun game: search Opensecrets.org to see what politician has accepted the most music industry money. Obama leads the pack...."

From

RIAA says ripping your own MP3s is copyright infringement

December 11 Nicholas Deleon

http://www.crunchgear.com/2007/12/11/riaa-says-ripping-your-own-mp3s-is-copyright-infringement/

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Bush Administration New Terror Front: Copyright Infringement

Bush Administration New Terror Front: Copyright Infringement

By David Kravets EmailDecember 04, 2007 | 1:16:29 AMCategories: RIAA Litigation  


The Bush administration careened into a new terror front Monday when it urged a federal judge to punish Jammie Thomas -- the nation's first music pirate to go before a jury -- in a bid to deter others from plundering the treasuries of the world's record labels.

In October, a Duluth, Minnesota federal jury dinged Thomas $222,000, or $9,250 for each of the 24 songs she unlawfully made available on the Kazaa file-sharing program. The Recording Industry Association of America, the industry trade group representing the world's biggest music concerns, has sued more than 20,000 people, including Thomas, on accusations of copyright infringement.

Most defendants settle for about $3,000. Thomas, the 31-year-old single mother of two, was the first to go to trial and faced a minimum $750 per violated song, to a maximum $150,000 a track.

In a court filing, (.pdf) the administration demanded U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to uphold the damages award set by a jury which concluded the penalty and her liability in just hours of deliberations.

"In establishing that range, Congress also took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe they will go unnoticed," the administration wrote.

The filing was no friend-of-the-court brief. Instead, the Bush administration moved (.pdf) to intervene in the case "to defend the constitutionality of the statutory damages provision of the Copyright Act."

Thomas maintains the award is unconstitutionally excessive and has sought a reduction and/or a new trial. A ruling is pending.

Writers' Strike: Problems and Solutions

Writers' Strike: Problems and Solutions

From -- http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/storiesView/sid/26018/

Business & FinanceEntertainment Weekly reports: "Talks between the striking Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers resume today after breaking last Thursday. Since then, each side has circulated statements indicating that there remain considerable differences between them."



Washington, D.C. - infoZine - Head writer for "The Daily Show," Steve Bodow's oped "Why I went from punch lines to the picket line" was published by the Daily News: "The execs have argued time and again that television content appearing online is strictly promotional, and under Guild rules, they don't have to pay for promotional uses of our work.

"So I checked this out ... and it was true! I watched last week's episode of 'The Office' over at NBC.com, and it was promotional. It was promoting BlackBerrys and Fidelity Investments and Clorox bleach. Nice of NBC to give those ads away for free ...

"What's that? NBC got paid for those ads? Just like if they ran on TV? It's the same over on the very fine new Web site for 'The Daily Show,' by the way: unlimited clips, sponsored in part by -- get this -- TiVo. I assume that's some ad-sales guy's idea of irony."

Bodow and other New York City-based late-night, and other, writers are picketing Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on Tuesday and NBC on Wednesday.

The Web page for the Writers Guild of America, East is: wgaeast.org; a blog for the writers is at: unitedhollywood.com; a YouTube video "Not The Daily Show" featuring another "Daily Show" writer is at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzRHlpEmr0w .

Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Dean Baker ( dean.baker1@verizon.net ) wrote the paper "The Artistic Freedom Voucher: Internet Age Alternative to Copyrights," which outlines a system that "would allow each individual to contribute a refundable tax credit of approximately $100 to a creative worker of their choice" as an alternative to copyright.

He said: "The writers' strike stems directly from the difficulty of trying to adapt copyright, a relic of the feudal system, to the 21st century economy. The entertainment industry relies on the fees it collects from restricting the free flow of creative material through copyright protection. These restrictions, and the industry's effort to garner the fees for itself, harm both the public and creative workers. It would be far more efficient to develop a system that pays creative workers up front, like a publicly funded Artistic Freedom Voucher system, and then lets their material circulate freely across the Internet." www.cepr.net/content/view/161

Professor of political science at William Paterson University, Stephen Shalom ( shaloms@wpunj.edu ) is author of the essay "In Search of Economic Justice" and is part of the participatory economics group at Zmag.org. He said: "Is there an alternative to an economy based on greed and competition? In fact, analysts and activists have put forward a vision and a rather detailed model of how an alternative economy -- one based on democracy and equitable cooperation -- might operate." www.zmag.org/parecon/indexnew.htm

Nelson Lichtenstein ( nelson@history.ucsb.edu ) is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy. He is the author of "State of the Union: A Century of American Labor," and "Wal-Mart: The Face of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism."

Lichtenstein said: "For years the conventional wisdom has assured us that in the U.S.'s creative new knowledge economy, strikes, unions and labor-management conflict were utterly passe, perhaps a remnant of the old rust-belt, but certainly out of place in the hip world of new media and iPod downloads. But here we are in the second month of a strike by 12,000 TV and film writers, some of the coolest, most imaginative, and certainly post-industrial 'workers' in our technologically innovative economy. If such conflicts can take place in Hollywood, they can happen anywhere."

Colleges Adopt Tough Approach to Copyright Violations

Colleges Adopt Tough Approach to Copyright Violations


From the Chronicle - http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2593/colleges-adopt-tough-approach-to-copyright-violations

Politicians and the entertainment industry complain that colleges are not doing enough to stop students from swapping music and movie files online in violation of copyright law. But a recent survey by Elliot Kendall, a network administrator at Brandeis University, shows that colleges are being strict with these students. His findings, based on responses from 80 colleges, show that most of them cut off students’ network or Internet access after receiving complaints from the entertainment industry that students have violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Other findings from the survey show the following:
°Most colleges penalize students after only one complaint of infringement.
°Most colleges have tried to educate students about infringement.
° More than a third of colleges said their copyright infringement policies were relatively effective in stopping infringement.

In a related survey, Mr. Kendall asked colleges about their bandwidth policies. Most of them said they use packet-shaping software to detect which students are hogging too much bandwidth and to stop the behavior. Students typically use a lot of bandwidth when sharing music and movie files online.—-Andrea L. Foster

Congress' copyright reform: seize computers, boost penalties, spend money

Congress' copyright reform: seize computers, boost penalties, spend money

By Nate Anderson | Published: December 06, 2007 - 01:16 CT

A bipartisan group of Congressmen (and one woman) yesterday introduced a major bill aimed at boosting US intellectual property laws and the penalties that go along with them. While much of the legislation targets industrial counterfeiting and knockoff drugs, it also allows the government to seize people's computers.

The Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP... groan) Act of 2007 has the backing of many of the most powerful politicians on the House Judiciary Committee, including John Conyers (D-MI), Lamar Smith (R-TX), and "Hollywood" Howard Berman (D-CA).

In addition to strengthening both civil and criminal penalties for copyright and trademark infringement, the big development here is the proposed creation of the Office of the United States Intellectual Property Enforcement Representative (USIPER). This is a new executive branch office tasked with coordinating IP enforcement at the national and international level. To do this work internationally, the bill also authorizes US intellectual property officers to be sent to other countries in order to assist with crackdowns there. In addition, the Department of Justice gets additional funding and a new unit to help prosecute IP crimes.

The bill, which will have a committee hearing soon, is supposed to kick-start the copyright reform process talked about for so long. But copyright reform means one thing to the PRO IP sponsors and another to the consumer groups that have been advocating for it.

Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, said in a statement, "seizing expensive manufacturing equipment used for large-scale infringement from a commercial pirate may be appropriate. Seizing a family's general-purpose computer in a download case, as this bill would allow, is not appropriate."

In addition, she protests the increase in "already extraordinary copyright damages" and calls for damages to be linked more closely to actual harm suffered by copyright holders.

The Digital Freedom Campaign, backed by the EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Consumer Electronics Association, was more muted in its criticism, instead choosing to praise the legislation for launching a "conversation" about copyright reform. The Digital Freedom Campaign's Maura Corbett said that meaningful copyright reform "must include limits on statutory damages and the codification of the vital principles of fair use," and she hopes that PRO IP "will serve as a catalyst to larger, more meaningful reform."

Fortunately, at least some members of the Judiciary Committee are at least aware that the consumer groups have legitimate points to make. Berman, who chairs the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property, announced that his subcommittee would hold a hearing next week on the issue.

"As a cosponsor, I obviously feel very strongly that we must strengthen enforcement efforts to fight piracy and counterfeiting," Berman said. "At the hearing, we will be hearing testimony from both industry experts and from labor and consumer advocates to make sure that in doing so, we don't deny appropriate access to America's intellectual property."

Who is thrilled with the bill? The MPAA, for one. MPAA head Dan Glickman, in a statement praising the new bill, said that "films left costs foreign and domestic distributors, retailers and others $18 billion a year," a significant increase from the $6 billion it allegedly costs the studios.

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Digital locks' future questioned

Digital locks' future questioned
By Darren Waters
Technology editor, BBC News website

One of the world's largest hard disk manufacturers has blocked its customers from sharing online their media files that are stored on networked drives.

Western Digital says the decision to block sharing of music and audio files is an anti-piracy effort.

The ban operates regardless of whether the files are copy-protected, or a user's own home-produced content.

Digital activists say it is the latest step in a so-called war on copyright theft that is damaging consumer rights.

The shift to a digital world in which all forms of content, from books, music, and TV programmes to films, can be shared effortlessly around the world between people with an internet connection has produced an unprecedented upheaval in attitudes to media, copyright and consumer rights.

Professional content producers have struggled to adapt to this changing world and deal with rampant copyright infringement that threatens to undermine their businesses.


The most popular method of copyright control in the digital age, Digital Rights Management (DRM), is a software - and sometimes hardware - solution designed to prevent copying and to control how different forms of media are used.

Peter Brown of the Free Software Foundation, a leading anti-DRM campaigner, said: "DRM and filtering attempts by firms like Western Digital are an attempt to take control of our computers.

"DRM is bad for society because it attempts to monitor what we do and how we live our digital lives. It is asking us to give up control of something which gives us some degree of democracy, freedom and the ability to communicate with a large group of people."

Western Digital has blocked users from sharing more than 30 different file types, if they are using the company's software, called Anywhere Access.

Mr Brown added: "DRM is never right because it takes away our rights as citizens."

He said all DRM solutions had been bypassed, rendering the technology useless.


"You can't stop the copying of ones and zeroes - its impossible," he said.

Paul Garland, head of intellectual property litigation at law firm Kemp Little, said it was not possible to say DRM was not working.

"Content creators are struggling to find a way to prevent mass distribution of their creations."

Alexander Ross, a partner at law firm Wiggin, said: "There is fundamentally two types of operation for DRM - to restrict usage, and track usage.

"That second element is essential and will remain essential - particularly for subscription services, which are beginning to take off.

"If we go down the subscription route, there must be control."

The common problem with DRM for many users is one of a lack of interoperability. Many of the world's leading content producers use DRM systems which are incompatible with one another.

The popular example is the majority of music bought and downloaded from iTunes, the world's most popular online music retailer, which can only be played in its original form on iPods, machines running iTunes and Apple's own wireless TV system.

However, iTunes does now sell a selection of music from EMI without DRM.


The BBC has been criticised for using a form of DRM for its TV downloads that means the programmes cannot be played on Apple Macs and PCs running Linux.

"The reason for a lack of standards across the industry is that there's no such thing as the industry," said Mr Ross.

"There is Steve Jobs and Microsoft and the two titans are at odds with one another. Between them they rule the market."

Mr Garland said: "The biggest problem is that it is actually quite difficult as a consumer when downloading content to know what you are able to do with it.

"If DRM is going to survive, there needs to be much greater effort to tell purchasers what they can or can't do with it."

Mr Ross said people had to understand they did not have the rights to do whatever they wanted with digital content.

One solution could be to develop information standards to inform people about the rights and restrictions around DRM, said Mr Garland.

He said: "Content owners are entitled to give you what rights they decide to give you; when you are downloading a piece of music, for example. They are also entitled to restrict you from circumventing the DRM.

"Trying to circumvent the DRM is an offence in itself. DRM is part of the law and a legitimate method of trying to protect your copyright content."

For the music industry the future looks less and less likely to involve DRM, said Mr Garland.

He said: "There is a backlash, people are concerned. The music industry is now talking a lot more about DRM-free products. DRM hasn't been the way to overcome the copyright infringement problem."

Mr Ross said that DRM as a copy protection tool might not last much longer.

"However, DRM as a track and rights management system is here to stay - as long as the music industry exists on a royalty model," he said.

Mr Brown said the industry did not need to use DRM, nor employ laws which prohibit the bypassing of DRM, in order to protect their financial interests.

"Media companies are trying to force people to think about copyright infringement almost in line with murder on the high seas.

"Copyright law is about copying and reproduction of work; that is on the statue books for everyone and is sufficient to tackle the problem.

"Digital restrictions management...is a restriction of our rights and the use we make of media files, that historically and legitimately we have been used to.

"The idea this is somehow protecting someone is untrue - it is an attack on us as citizens."

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Copyright Alliance Proposes Wiki to Help Professors Get Permissions for Classroom Use

Copyright Alliance Proposes Wiki to Help Professors Get Permissions for Classroom Use


From the Chronicle - http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2599

Washington — So a professor wants to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail to her class on British humor, and she wants to check with the film studio to get permission. How would she do that? As it stands, the semester could be over by the time the professor even finds the right person to ask.

A nonprofit group called the Copyright Alliance, whose members include associations for the motion-picture and recording industries, announced today that it would like to help broker such requests. The idea, described briefly at an academic symposium held by the group on Monday in Washington, is to create a Web site where professors could post questions like the the one above and get answers from an industry official. The online resource would take the form of a wiki, a communal Web site that allows visitors to easily post new comments and track the changes that have been made.

Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, said in an interview after the symposium that he had been talking with alliance members from the content industry who were ready to proceed, assuming that colleges want such a system.

“We wanted to know what the temperature would be like in the academic community and felt that this event would be a way to take that temperature,” he said. “I think based on the conversations I’ve had and what I’ve heard on the panels, there’s cautious optimism.”

He said entertainment-industry officials favored setting up such a wiki in hopes that it would answer complaints from professors that industry representatives did not respond quickly enough to requests for educational use of their films and songs.

“They don’t mean to be uncooperative, it’s just that their businesses are not set up to be performing this service,” said Mr. Ross. He said that if another professor looked at the wiki and saw that a particular movie studio generally granted permission for classroom use, he could be assured that he could also use a film from that studio without getting specific permission. “They could go to their general counsel and say this is pretty comparable,” said Mr. Ross.

Patricia Aufderheide, a professor at American University, said in an interview after the event that such a wiki could do more harm than good.

“I’m worried about further copyright misinformation,” she said, noting that many times presentation of movie clips in classrooms falls under fair use, so that no permission is required.

She also disagreed with Mr. Ross over how useful the wiki would be as a source of guidance. “Having NBC saying I won’t sue you if you do this really won’t help the next guy because the situation will be different,” she said.

Mr. Ross said he planned to meet with key university officials working on copyright issues to see whether such concerns could be overcome.

“There’s going to have to be trust won on both sides, I think, for this to succeed,” he said. —Jeffrey R. Young