Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Judge delays Google books hearing - San Jose Mercury News

 Judge delays Google books hearing - San Jose Mercury News

Judge delays Google books hearing

By Elise Ackerman

Mercury News

A federal judge Tuesday postponed a hearing to determine the fairness of the Google Book Search settlement, a landmark court case involving Google and a group representing the nation's authors and publishers.

U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in New York said he was moving the date of the hearing from June 11 to Oct. 7. He said he would also extend the deadline for authors and publishers to opt out of the settlement from May 5 to Sept. 4.

A group of authors that included the sons of John Steinbeck and musician Arlo Guthrie had requested the four-month extension, saying they needed more time to consider the settlement. In an interview, Gail Knight Steinbeck, chairwoman of the Creative Property Rights Alliance, said she didn't want to miss the opportunity represented by the settlement but that she was also concerned the deal could help Google assemble an information monopoly over media such as books, movies and music.

The settlement provides a mechanism for Google to compensate authors and publishers for including digital copies of their work in a giant database. It also gives Google a license to copy works whose copyright was previously considered in dispute — so-called orphan works that appeared to have been abandoned by owners of their copyrights.

An increasing number of authors, copyright specialists, academics, law professors and public interest groups have opposed the 134-page settlement, saying that it goes too far. "It is clear to us that the settlement, if approved, will shape the future of reading, research, writing and publication practices for decades to come," Professor Pamela Samuelson of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law wrote in an April 27 letter to the judge.

Neither Google nor the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, which had sued Google for copyright violations, objected to the extension.

Separately, Reuters and the New York Times reported Tuesday that the Justice Department has begun an antitrust inquiry into the implications of the deal, although it was unclear what steps if any the department would take.

Contact Elise Ackerman at eackerman@mercurynews.com or 408-271-3774.

Judge delays Google books hearing - San Jose Mercury News

Sour Apple: EFF, Wiki Site Sue Over Copyright Claim - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Sour Apple: EFF, Wiki Site Sue Over Copyright Claim - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness 

The Channel Wire

April 28, 2009

Sour Apple: EFF, Wiki Site Sue Over Copyright Claim

Whose software is it anyway? Tired of what it calls Apple's "bogus" legal threats, The Electronic Frontier Foundation and OdioWorks Monday filed suit against Apple, claiming that the company is trying to suppress discussions about iPods and iPhones software on a hobbyist Wiki site.

The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern California, alleges that Apple made legal threats against OdioWorks, the owner of the BlueWiki site, after its users talked about making some iPods and iPhones interoperate with software other than Apple's own iTunes.

Last year Apple lawyers "demanded" that BlueWiki take down three sites created by Apple enthusiasts: Ipodhash, iTunesDB and IPodHash _ test_data _contribution, according to the suit. Apple claimed that the software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that guards against copyright infringement. The software, however, actually never succeeded in jail-breaking the iPhone or iPod.

The suit also pointed out that in addition to Apple's iTunes software, there are several third-party media management software products, such as Songbird, Rockbox, Banshee and Winamp, that can write to the iTunesDB file to sync media files.

OdioWorks said that it complied with Apple's request, fearing legal action. But now it wants to be able revive the discussion on its Wiki site.

"Apple's legal threats against BlueWiki are about censorship, not about protecting their legitimate copyright interests," said EFF senior staff attorney Fred von Lohmann, in a statement." It's legal to engage in reverse engineering in order to create a competing product, it's legal to talk about reverse engineering, and it's legal for a public Wiki to host those discussions."

Posted by Michele Masterson at 10:30 AM

Sour Apple: EFF, Wiki Site Sue Over Copyright Claim - The Channel Wire - IT Channel News And Views by CRN and VARBusiness

Friday, April 24, 2009

Journal Covers the Science and Application of Deformation and Flow Properties of Biological Materials

 Journal Covers the Science and Application of Deformation and Flow Properties of Biological Materials

Journal Covers the Science and Application of Deformation and Flow Properties of Biological Materials

Starting in May 2009, Springer will publish the Journal of Biorheology, the official publication of the Japanese Society of Biorheology. This international, peer-reviewed journal provides a platform for biophysicists, physiologists and materials scientists to exchange and discuss their ideas and scientific research.

The Journal of Biorheology covers the science and application of deformation and flow properties of biological materials, including food materials. The biannual journal includes original articles, brief communications and authoritative review articles and will be published both in print and electronically. Basic science and its applications in the broad field of biorheology will be covered, including the rheology of macromolecules as well as cell, tissue, organ and food rheology. Coverage also includes biorheological analysis of pathological processes and their clinical implications, including basic clinical research on hemodynamics and hemorheology and scientific research between the fields of engineering and medicine.

Editor-in-chief Naoki Sasaki, professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, said, “The Journal of Biorheology will publish high-quality articles in this interdisciplinary field on topics dealing with biology, rheology, physiology, medical science, biophysics and food science. Through the association with Springer, the Journal of Biorheology is certain to attract excellent manuscripts by authors from all over the world.”

Dr. Dieter Czeschlik, Editorial Director for Life Sciences at Springer, said, “Springer is delighted to welcome the Journal of Birorheology to its portfolio. The journal deals with areas bordering on biology, medicine and materials science and thus touches fields in which Springer is already well positioned. We look forward to working with the Japanese Society of Biorheology to guarantee even better, truly international visibility of their high-quality articles."

Fast publication in Online First™ will provide immediate access to new research results in the Journal of Biorheology on www.springerlink.com, Springer’s online information platform. In addition, all authors, via the Springer Open Choice™ program, have the option of publishing their articles using the open access publishing model. Cross Reference Linking and Table of Content Alert services will be fully implemented for the journal.

The Japanese Society of Biorheology  was established in 1977. The aim of the society is to contribute to the development of biorheology-related fields by providing a forum for the exchange of ideas among a wide range of professionals.

Journal Covers the Science and Application of Deformation and Flow Properties of Biological Materials

TV: Government given five-year TV and film piracy warning | Technology | guardian.co.uk

 

Government given five-year TV and film piracy warning

TV: Government given five-year TV and film piracy warning | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Industries will fade into insignificance if more is not done to stamp out illegal copying, trade body warns

A still from an advert emphasising how cinema ticket and DVD sales help fund the film industry

The UK's film and TV industries will fade into insignificance in five years unless the government rapidly steps up its anti-piracy efforts, a leading trade body warned today.

In a survey of more than 30 directors of TV and film companies, the Industry Trust found that 94% believe the damage cannot be repaired without stronger support from government and more action from internet service providers, who have been accused by some critics of failing to act against web users who illegally download audio and video files.

The trust's director general, Liz Bales, said that although the film industry is not suffering as much as the music sector, the proportion of illegal film and TV content distributed globally online is heading towards 90% of the totall, as experienced by the music industry.

In 2007, 95m films were downloaded illegally in the UK, compared with just 158,000 legally, according to the trust.

The government's interim Digital Britain report has laid out proposals for improving broadband speeds across the UK, which will make it possible to download entire films in a few minutes.

Commissioned by the UK Film Council, the trust's survey also found that 91% think the industry needs help encouraging consumers to use legal online content services, while 60% think ISPs need to play a bigger role in supporting legal content initiatives.

"If the current framework hasn't changed in five years, the UK industry will have become insignificant," Bales said.

"This is a wakeup call for government as well as industry. Digital Britain proposed creating a massive hub in the UK of innovative content creators and publishers, and net-savvy civilians backed up by digital literacy," she added.

"But in opening the floodgates for business, we need to make sure we are not enabling illegal businesses. We need to clear the undergrowth, in the government's own language."

The survey coincides with the Industry Trust's conference today, which will explore specific proposals for encouraging takeup of legal online content services while discouraging illegal downloads.

Proposals include watermarking legal content, more research into legal alternatives and increased collaboration to limit the availability of illegal content. Media firms also want to discuss bringing more legal alternatives into the market.

Bales said that positive moves for the industry will include the launch of the NBC Universal and Fox web TV service Hulu in the UK, which is expected later this year, a new streaming service by Lovefilm and uptake of FindAnyFilm, which has built up 1 million users in the 10 weeks since it launched.

She added that the industry is moving away from the anti-piracy campaigns based around social stigma, such as "Knockoff Nigel", with a more positive campaign called "You make the Movies" launched earlier this month emphasising that DVD sales and cinema tickets are part of the funding process for high quality content.

The trust has also supported a new site called Find Any Film that aggregates to legal download services, cinema listings and archive information, but is looking to the government for significant regulatory support.

Bales said the model should be similar to that of Ofcom, which helps to police the largely-self regulatory media industry.

"The film industry is not interested in end user litigation," she added. "Consumers deserve consistency and to know what the framework is. ISPs need to be more proactive in identifying those people infringing copyright and have a simple, measured system of graduated response."

Bales said that despite the attention given to the Pirate Bay, the site was "not particularly innovative" but had used the same principle as Grokster and Kazaa to create "a very lucrative business".

The Pirate Bay was not concerned with the quality of content, the value for consumers or in creating a business model, she added.

• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.

TV: Government given five-year TV and film piracy warning | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Copyright lobby targets Pirate Bay for textbooks

 

Copyright lobby targets "Pirate Bay for textbooks"

21 April 2009 8:54 by Petteri "dRD" Pyyny | 23 comments

Finnish book rental service Bookabooka is being threatened by national copyright lobby organization TTVK for running a service the lobby group calls "Pirate Bay for textbooks".
Bookabooka doesn't host any e-books on its site, but instead allows students to rent their textbooks to their peers. Renting is conducted via traditional "snailmail" (i.e. postal service) and it is mandatory that the textbooks are originals (not xeroxed copies). Bookabooka acts only as an intermediate, connecting the students together and doesn't handle the shipping or returns of the textbooks.
Despite these "small" differences between TPB and Bookabooka, The Finnish book publishers' association (Suomen Kustannusyhdistys) is convinced that Bookabooka is breaking the copyright legislation and threatening their business. Annual school textbook sales in Finland were worth more than €100M in year 2007.
TTVK demands (PDF, in Finnish) that the service must be shut down by Friday this week or they'll sue the company. Bookabooka's founders have already stated that they wont respond to the threats, but instead will keep the service running.

Copyright lobby targets Pirate Bay for textbooks

MediaPost Publications Copyright Lawsuit Allowed To Proceed Against YouTube 04/23/2009

MediaPost Publications Copyright Lawsuit Allowed To Proceed Against YouTube 04/23/2009 

Copyright Lawsuit Allowed To Proceed Against YouTube

by Wendy Davis, Yesterday, 7:00 AM

A federal appellate court has rebuffed a request from Google's YouTube to dismiss a copyright infringement lawsuit on the narrow ground that the plaintiff in the case, videographer Robert Tur, voluntarily withdrew the lawsuit in order to join a pending class-action in New York.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week that Tur's decision to drop the California case rendered Google's appeal moot. Google had argued that the court should decide the matter because a favorable ruling could scuttle Tur's claims in New York.

The appellate court also denied Google's request that Tur pay the company more than $370,000 -- the amount Google said it spent defending itself in the California matter. The 9th Circuit ruled that Google had not adequately documented its legal costs. "The district court had no way to distinguish between useful and non-useful work based upon the conclusory affidavit submitted by YouTube's counsel," the appellate court wrote.

A Google spokesperson said the company was disappointed with the decision. "We are disappointed that Tur was given a second chance to pursue his frivolous claims in another venue, but we remain confident that they are without merit and we will continue to defend against them vigorously," the company stated.

Three years ago, Robert Tur, who owns the Los Angeles News Service, became the first person to sue YouTube for copyright infringement after a video of the beating of Los Angeles truck driver Reginald Denny surfaced on YouTube.

YouTube moved for summary judgment on the ground that it was immune from liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provisions. Those portions of the law say that sites like YouTube usually can't be found liable for copyright infringement based on material uploaded by users, as long as the sites remove infringing material at the owners' request.

U.S. District Court Judge Florence Marie-Cooper denied that request in June 2007, stating that she needed more information to determine whether YouTube qualified for the safe harbor provisions. "There is insufficient evidence regarding YouTube's knowledge and ability to exercise control over the infringing activity on its site," she wrote.

Tur is now one of the plaintiffs in a potential class-action lawsuit pending in New York against Google/YouTube. Others include a U.K. soccer organization, a French tennis association and the National Music Publishers' Association. For now, that lawsuit is proceeding side-by-side with Viacom's copyright infringement case against YouTube.

Google has said that that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act doesn't require it to proactively seek out infringing clips and remove them. Rather, it argues, the law only requires Google to remove copyrighted material upon request.

But content owners say that Google is in a better position than them to know what's on the site and delete infringing clips. "The major hurdle facing our clients is that the cost of monitoring the huge YouTube Web site is prohibitive," said Tur's attorney, Hal Shaftel, a partner at Proskauer Rose.

MediaPost Publications Copyright Lawsuit Allowed To Proceed Against YouTube 04/23/2009

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar - Ars Technica

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar - Ars Technica

"I had hoped that having a Dem in office would delay or roll back this stuff I guess $$$ counts more than the public good no mater what party you're from -- HSM"

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar

The MPAA hosted its latest DC lobbying event, featuring a dinner at which Vice President Biden promised the group that it will like the person Obama will eventually pick for the administration's chief copyright policy position.

The Obama administration's stance on copyright enforcement has already attracted an open letter in which a variety of public advocacy groups voiced concerns that there seemed to be a bias towards content owners in the initial round of appointments. Those worries are unlikely to go away any time soon, if this week's events are any indication. The Motion Picture Association of America came to town, armed with lobbyists and figures that suggest it functions as a one-industry, nationwide job stimulus, and it heard exactly what it was looking for from Vice President Biden.

The MPAA hosted a series of events in Washington on Tuesday, during which it pressed both Congress and the administration for action on piracy. Its justification: a new report which presents the entertainment industry as one of the US' big success stories in recent years, one that's creating jobs nationwide. The report focuses on how the industry is one of the few portions of the economy that is running a trade surplus, and that it's able to create jobs in nearly every state.

Some of the self-promotion is undoubtedly true. A single film shoot can spread the wealth to a wide variety of peripheral jobs, from caterers to security to the carpenters and technicians that build sets and provide lighting. Nevertheless, many of these jobs are transient, at least outside of states like New York and California where filming and production runs year-round. It's not clear, for example, how much South Dakota's state economy benefited from the fact that the "Dinosaur Dig" TV show was filmed there, as highlighted by the MPAA report.

The report also relies on some statistics that probably aren't very informative. For example, it brags that "the average salary of those employed in the core production-related industry was just under $75,000 in 2007." Given the oversized salaries of leading actors, that's probably a bit like highlighting the average salary of jobs hosted at Yankee Stadium.

This sort of stretching also occurs in the section of the report entitled "Investing in infrastructure and community development." The language seems chosen to parallel that of a lot of the stimulus spending, which is supposed to help improve the national infrastructure. A careful look at the projects listed by the MPAA, however, suggests that the group considers studios, sound stages, and office buildings "infrastructure."

The industry (as its report notes) does well in selling overseas, and probably would do even better without piracy and counterfeiting. The report is simply meant to give legislators leverage when they agitate for changes in copyright enforcement through either national laws or international treaties; as we've seen in the past, said legislators don't really seem to care how precise these sorts of figures are.

In any case, the day's events wrapped up with a dinner that featured Vice President Joe Biden as a speaker. According to reports of his speech, Biden blasted piracy as "pure theft" and singled out China for failure to enforce intellectual property laws. He also promised that the administration would "find the right person for intellectual property czar." It was left unsaid whether that was "right" in the sense of "best person for the job", or "right" in the sense of "someone the audience would be happy with."

 

Biden to MPAA: you'll like Obama's pick for copyright czar - Ars Technica

Pirate Bay judge accused of conflict of interest | Digital Media - CNET News

 Pirate Bay judge accused of conflict of interest | Digital Media - CNET News

Pirate Bay judge accused of conflict of interest

by Mats Lewan

The judge who ruled against The Pirate Bay defendants on Friday is a member of two copyright organizations, an alleged conflict of interest that could require the case to be tried again, Swedish press reported Thursday morning.

 

If the judge is formally found to have a conflict of interest, the case would have to be sent back to the district court. The issue is to be evaluated by the high court of justice, Svea Hovrätt (in Swedish), which is now also looking at appeals from the defendants on other grounds.

"In my appeal, I will urge that the verdict of the district court will be obviated due to conflict of interest," attorney Peter Althin, who is defending Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, told the Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Sunde, along with Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Fredrik Neij, and Carl Lundström, were convicted Friday of having assisted in making 33 copyright-protected files accessible for illegal file sharing, and sentenced to one year in prison.

Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association and the Swedish Association for Industrial Legal Protection. Both organizations say their goal is to educate about copyright issues. Among the members of the first organization are also Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky, and Monique Wadsted, all three of whom are lawyers who represented the plaintiffs during The Pirate Bay trial.

Norström denies accusations that the memberships would make him biased.

"Every time I take a case, I evaluate if I consider myself having a conflict of interest. In this case I didn't find to have one," Norström told Sveriges Radio, the national Swedish radio network that first exposed the issue on Thursday morning.

Norström also denies that he met privately with Wadsted, who represents several American media giants in the case. Both are also members of a separate professional group of a dozen law experts helping to resolve disputes on domain names under Sweden's top domain, .se.

Norström was asked to compare his situation to one with a potential jury member who declined to participate in the case because of a membership in a composers' association. In response, Norström told Dagens Nyheter that the Swedish Copyright Association only promotes knowledge about copyright, and that he is a member so he can follow related debate and development.

Wadsted also said that all jurists in Stockholm who deal with intellectual property are members of the The Swedish Copyright Association.

Still, Eric Bylander, a procedural law instructor at the University of Gothenburg finds the judge's situation questionable. "A membership here and a working community there would each maybe not be enough to constitute conflict of interest, but together they can," he told the Swedish national news agency, TT.

Mats Lewan, IT and telecom editor at Swedish technology weekly Ny Teknik, has joined CNET News as a 2009 fellow with Stanford University's Innovation Journalism program. E-mail Mats.

Pirate Bay judge accused of conflict of interest | Digital Media - CNET News

MEPs back 70-year copyright | Policies | Information society | Media | European Voice

MEPs back 70-year copyright  |  Policies  |  Information society  |  Media | European Voice 

MEPs back 70-year copyright

By Jim Brunsden

23.04.2009 / 20:23 CET

European Parliament's compromise proposal would extend copyright by 20 years.

The European Parliament today voted to extend copyright on music recordings from 50 to 70 years. Supporters say that the extension will protect Europe's creative talent. Opponents argue that it will benefit only major record companies and top-earning performers at the expense of consumers.

The European Commission proposed last year that copyright should be extended to 95 years, but MEPs opted for 70 years to smooth negotiations on the draft legislation with member states. Several national governments have expressed concerns that the Commission's proposal will have negative repercussions.

MEPs voted that record producers should be required to place 20% of the extra revenue they gain from the copyright extension into a fund for session musicians. They also approved a ‘use it or lose it' clause allowing performers to recover their rights to a recording after 50 years if the record label does not market it. 

Charlie McCreevy, the European commissioner for internal market, welcomed the vote. “Talking to the performers, not the superstars, made me realise that something needed to be done,” he said. The Commission has said the extension is needed to “bridge the income gap the performers face when they turn 70”, which it describes as “the most vulnerable period in their lives”.

The IFPI, an international association representing the recording industry, has argued that the current 50-year limit is lower than in many other countries and places Europe at a creative disadvantage.

Jacques Toubon, a French centre-right MEP, said the legislation is needed to “strengthen intellectual property” and support creative talent.

The European Parliament's liberal and green groups have both criticised the outcome of the vote. Caroline Lucas, a UK green MEP, said the extension “will fill the pockets of a limited number of powerful corporations and harm performer rights and artistic creativity”. She added that disc-jockeys who want to use samples from different songs will be “hit by a more restrictive choice of music in the public domain”. Sharon Bowles, a UK liberal, said that the vote “leaves recording companies with the lion's share of everything”.

National governments have yet to reach agreement among themselves on the draft legislation. A diplomat said that Belgium, Slovenia, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia and Romania are all opposed to the extension. A Czech official said that discussions in the Council of Ministers are ongoing, but that a first reading agreement with parliament is unlikely.

MEPs back 70-year copyright  |  Policies  |  Information society  |  Media | European Voice

The Associated Press: Hollywood, RealNetworks square off on DVD copying

The Associated Press: Hollywood, RealNetworks square off on DVD copying 

Hollywood, RealNetworks square off on DVD copying

By PAUL ELIAS – 12 hours ago

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hollywood calls it "rent, rip and return" and contends it's one of the biggest technological threats to the movie industry's annual $20 billion DVD market — software that allows you to copy a film without paying for it.

On Friday, the showdown over the issue will take place in federal court in San Francisco, where an army of lawyers representing Hollywood will argue that RealNetworks Inc.'s DVD "ripper" is an illegal digital piracy tool.

The company, in turn, will say the $29.99 software that allows DVDs to be easily copied to computer hard drives is legitimate.

The same federal judge who shut down music-swapping site Napster in 2000 because of copyright violations will preside over the three-day trial, which is expected to cut to the heart of the same technological upheaval roiling Hollywood that forever changed the face of the music business.

The movie studios fear that if RealNetworks is allowed to sell its RealDVD software, consumers will quickly lose interest in paying retail for DVDs that can be rented cheaply, copied and returned.

Their lawyers argue the software violates a federal law known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that makes software and other tools that enable digital piracy illegal. They also contend shoppers will widely condone such illegal behavior if RealNetworks' product is allowed on the market.

For its part, the Seattle-based company says its RealDVD product is designed to simply let customers back up a purchased DVD and that the software allows for only one copy to be made.

The company argues that the contract it signed with the DVD Copy Control Association, which equips DVD player manufacturers with the keys to unscrambling DVDs, allows RealDVD because the software doesn't alter or remove anti-piracy encryption on DVDs like illicit software that is easily obtained for free online.

RealNetworks says its product legally fills growing consumer demand to convert their DVDs to digital form for convenient storage and viewing.

In October, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel temporarily barred sales of RealDVD after the product was on the market for a few days. At the time, the judge said it appeared the software did violate federal law against digital piracy, but ordered detailed court filings and the trial to better understand how RealDVD works.

The industry's lawsuit has incurred widespread wrath from bloggers, digital rights advocates and groups on both sides of the political spectrum, including former Republican congressman and Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr and the left-leaning Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The industry's critics accuse the studios of stifling innovation as they attempt to develop their own copying software.

"It's all about control," said Cato Institute scholar Timothy Lee. "No one is allowed to innovate in the DVD space without industry permission."

The industry, through the Motion Picture Association of America, counters that its goal is to stamp out piracy. It says it welcomes legitimate attempts at innovation.

"RealNetworks acted in bad faith by taking a license to build a DVD player and instead built a copier that violates the circumvention rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by enabling consumers to copy DVDs illegally," said Greg Goeckner, the MPAA's top lawyer. "Our objective is to get the illegal choices out of the marketplace and instead focus constructively with the technology community on bringing in more innovative and flexible legal options for consumers to enjoy movies."

Regardless of the trial's outcome — and the judge isn't expected to rule immediately — some predict that Hollywood control over digital copies will continue to wane because of the proliferation of illegal software online.

"If Hollywood wins, I don't think much changes in the real world," said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Anybody who wants DVDs copied can download software for free in 10 minutes."

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The Associated Press: Hollywood, RealNetworks square off on DVD copying

UK PubMed Central Blog: RCUK - further support for open access

UK PubMed Central Blog: RCUK - further support for open access 

RCUK - further support for open access

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs.
The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in light of national and international trends. This included the impact of open access on the quality and efficiency of scholarly outputs, specifically journal articles. The report presents options for the Research Councils to consider, such as maintaining the current variation in Research Councils’ mandates, or moving towards increased open access, eventually leading to Gold Standard.

Welcoming the study, Professor Ian Diamond, Chair of the RCUK Executive Group said: "This excellent study sets out a way forward for the UK Research Councils in relation to open access, building on the extensive activities already supported through repositories such as UK PubMed Central and ESRC Society Today. The Research Councils look forward to working with their partners across the research community to consider the options."

In response to the study, the Chief Executives of the Research Councils have agreed that over time the UK Research Councils will support increased open access, by:

  • building on their mandates on grant-holders to deposit research papers in suitable repositories within an agreed time period, and;
  • extending their support for publishing in open access journals, including through the pay-to-publish model.

UK PubMed Central Blog: RCUK - further support for open access

The Diamondback - Faculty sens. battle over open access

The Diamondback - Faculty sens. battle over open access 

Faculty sens. battle over open access

By: Tirza Austin
Posted: 4/24/09
An unforeseen debate erupted at the University Senate meeting yesterday about where faculty members should be encouraged to publish their research.
After more than half an hour of debate, the senate voted against a resolution that called for faculty members to publish their work in free online databases. Despite the potential savings open-access journals could bring to the university, the senate voted the resolution down in a 37-24 decision, due to perceived impositions on academic freedom.
"[The cost of scholarly journals] has to be one of the most challenging issues we have at this university," Senate Chair Ken Holum said.
The defeated resolution, proposed by the senate's faculty affairs committee, laid out four specific suggestions: for university President Dan Mote to advocate for open-access journals on a national level, to urge the libraries to educate faculty on the cost of journals and to encourage faculty to publish their research in open-access journals and deposit findings in open-access databases whenever possible.
Because so many faculty members are published in research journals that require subscriptions, the university has to pay for access to numerous journals every year. Dan Falvey, the chairman of the committee that authored the resolution, emphasized the proposal was not a university policy and didn't mandate any changes, but was rather intended to spark discussion about other options for journal access. But, Holum said, the discussion it sparked was largely "gloom and doom."
"Open access will kill the journals you need during your career," women's studies professor and university senator Claire Moses said. "It's as simple as that."
While everyone acknowledged that the high cost of scholarly journals and slimming library budgets needed to be addressed, many felt it was too soon to instate anything resembling university policy.
Terry Owen, a librarian who is a university senator, defended open-access publications, saying that because the publications do not require authors to assign copyright to a publisher, scholars can retain the rights to their own work.
"The final goal is to make information more accessible and available," Owen said.
But Moses, who has served as editorial director of the journal Feminist Studies since 1977, said any action promoting publishing only in open-access journals would harm the visibility of the university and its faculty members - especially its tenured faculty members.
Senators criticized the proposal for its language, which they said did not accurately characterize the variations that exist between departments. Throughout the debate, science professors faced off against humanities professors - a rift caused by the vast differences between scientific journals and humanities journals.
"This is a proposal that does not take into account the needs of different disciplines," history professor Gay Gullickson said. "[Open access] applies well to some disciplines and hurts others."
Both Moses and Gullickson argued the resolution's language was too strong to count as a mere suggestion and would eventually lead to university policy.
"This does not call for discussion - it urges the president to take action," Gullickson said.
But Holum predicted this will not be the last time the senate discusses the issue of open-access publications.
He added the situation facing the libraries will have to be addressed in the near future.
Arts and humanities Dean James Harris, who also served as the chairman of the search committee that will help elect a new dean of the library system, said every candidate he has encountered expressed concern over the state of scholarly publications, noting students turn to online search engines like Google rather than going to a library. Harris added that libraries are slowly becoming virtual and the university will eventually have to transition with them.
"This is happening," Harris said. "The train has left the station."
taustindbk@gmail.com
© Copyright 2009 The Diamondback

The Diamondback - Faculty sens. battle over open access

PhysMath Central Blog : SOAP: Providing a clearer view of the potential of OA

 PhysMath Central Blog : SOAP: Providing a clearer view of the potential of OA

SOAP: Providing a clearer view of the potential of OA

 

Last month I visited CERN (that's me in front of the CMS experiment) to attend the kick-off meeting of the SOAP project. SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) is a 2-year, EU-funded project to study current open access business models and perform a comprehensive survey of attitudes to open access from researchers across all disciplines.

The project will address the need for fact-based evidence of what might and what might not work. The goal of the SOAP project is to document different paths leading to an orderly transition to open access publishing and delineate a number of directions along which publishing may evolve in the future.

This study is being coordinated by CERN, along with the Max Planck Digital Library, Science and Technology Facilities Council and commercial publishers such as Sage, Springer and BioMed Central. Results will be made public in early 2011.

PhysMath Central Blog : SOAP: Providing a clearer view of the potential of OA

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So. 

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.

by Erick Schonfeld on April 21, 2009

As newspapers and other publishers watch their revenues diminish, one common refrain among them is that maybe they should somehow go after Google or Yahoo for aiding and abetting the destruction of their businesses and sometimes the wholesale theft of their content. We’ve seen how the Associated Press wants to handle this: by aggressively going after anyone who even borrows a headline. Today, a consortium of other publishers including Reuters, the Magazine Publishers of America, and Politico are taking a more measured approach, but one which will no doubt still be controversial. They are forming the Fair Syndication Consortium, which is the brainchild of Attributor, the startup which tracks the reuse of text and images across the Web for many of these same publishers.

The Fair Syndication Consortium is initially trying to address a legitimate problem on the Web: the proliferation of splogs (spam blogs) and other sites which do nothing more than republish the entire feed of news sites and blogs, often without attribution or links. There are tens of thousands of these sites, perhaps more. Rather than go after these sites one at a time, the Fair Syndication Consortium wants to negotiate directly with the ad networks which serve ads on these sites: DoubleClick, Google’s AdSense, and Yahoo primarily. For any post or page which takes a full copy of a publisher’s work, the Fair Syndication Consortium thinks the ad networks should pay a portion of the ad revenues being generated by those sites.

I know a little bit about this because in January I was invited to a meeting at the A.P.’s headquarters with about two dozen other publishers, most of them from the print world, to discuss the formation of the consortium. TechCrunch has not joined at this time. Ironically, neither has the A.P., which has apparently decided to go its own way and fight the encroachments of the Web more aggressively (although, to my knowledge, it still uses Attributor’s technology). But at that meeting, which was organized by Attributor, a couple slides were shown that really brought home the point to everyone in the room. One showed a series of bar graphs estimating how much ad revenues splogs were making simply from the feeds of everyone in the room. (Note that this was just for sites taking extensive copies of articles, not simply quoting). The numbers ranged from $13 million (assuming a $.25 effective CPM) to $51 million (assuming a $1.00 eCPM).

 

Then they put up a slide with a pie chart showing which ad networks were serving ads on all of the abusive sites. It turns out a full 94 percent of the sites in question were serving ads from three ad networks: DoubleClick (45 percent), Google AdSense (24 percent), and Yahoo (24 percent).

 

Go after those three ad networks, and the majority of the problem could be solved. There is certainly precedent for this type of approach. Look at YouTube’s Content ID program, which splits revenues between YouTube and the media companies whose videos are being reused online. Except this proposal would take money that would otherwise be distributed to the splog sites themselves, and give a portion of it to the publisher as an automatic syndication fee without the consent of the site owner.

How would the ad networks know that the content in question belongs to the publisher? Attributor would keep track of it all and manage the requests for payment. The consortium is open to any publisher to join, including bloggers. (Attributor runs a free version of its service called FairShare to give publishers a sense of how much of their stuff is being copied without attribution). It is certainly better than sending out thousands of takedown notices, but many issues still need to be worked out.

I’ve seen some of the data for TechCrunch, and there is no doubt that Attributor catches a lot of abuse, not fair use. But some of the sites that fall within Attributors net might still fall within fair use. For instance, I can imagine, a short post two or three paragraphs long being copied in its entirety and being surrounded by commentary. (Although, a minimum 125-word-count limit and exclusion of content clearly in quotes is meant to address such a scenario). Also, I am not sure that demanding payment is the way to go. For the most part, a link and attribution is good enough for us. But if the Fair Syndication consortium gets the ad networks on board and they take a conservative approach to asserting copyright, we might take another look. What do you think, should we join?

Should Ad Networks Pay Publishers For Stolen Content? The Fair Syndication Consortium Thinks So.

Obama, Keep Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders | Threat Level from Wired.com

 Obama, Keep Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders | Threat Level from Wired.com

Obama, Keep Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders

By David Kravets EmailApril 21, 2009 | 7:35:12 PMCategories: Intellectual Property

 

The content industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America, are applauding President Barack Obama's appointments of at least five RIAA lawyers to the Justice Department.

They urged him to continue the trend.

"The hallmarks of your administration's appointees have been competence, substantive expertise, and a commitment to your administration's agenda," the Copyright Alliance, a group of three-plus dozen content owners, wrote the president Monday (.pdf). "We have every confidence these hallmarks will be demonstrated in your future IP policy appointments."

The presidential letter comes as the United States negotiates a global intellectual property treaty and as the president mulls whom to choose as the nation's first copyright czar.

The communication was also in response to a letter the copyleft, represented by about two dozen public interest groups, sent Obama three weeks ago. That missive urged the president to stop tapping RIAA insiders to his administration.

That letter by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge and others fell on deaf ears. Last week, Obama tapped his fifth RIAA lawyer to the Justice Department. The department just wrote in a peer-to-peer music file sharing case that the administration supports monetary damages of up to $150,000 per copyright infringement.

Obama, Keep Filling Administration with RIAA Insiders | Threat Level from Wired.com

Pirate Bay Case on Its Way to the Court of Appeal - PC World

Pirate Bay Case on Its Way to the Court of Appeal - PC World 

Pirate Bay Case on Its Way to the Court of Appeal

Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service

A lawyer for one of the defendants in the Pirate Bay case has already filed an appeal against the guilty verdict handed down by a Stockholm court on Friday, and lawyers for the other three defendants are gearing up to do the same.

The district court received an appeal on Friday on behalf of Carl Lundström, a spokeswoman at the court said.

Lundström was sentenced to a year in prison, like the other three defendants Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and Peter Sunde. The court also ordered the four jointly to pay around 30 million Swedish kronor (US$3.6 million) in damages.

The appeal was filed quickly to make a statement about how wrong the sentence is, according to Stefan Jevinger, one of Lundström's two lawyers.

There are a number of things wrong with the sentence, according to the written appeal. For example, the appeal claims that in its grounds for the decision the district court wrote that it hadn't been shown that Lundström knew about the main crime -- yet he was still sentenced for being an accessory to crimes against copyright law. The appeal maintains that you can't be sentenced as accessory to a crime you don't know about.

The lawyers for the other three defendants have until May 8 to file their appeals. The prosecutor then has a week to respond, and then the case will be forwarded from the district court to the court of appeal.

Jonas Nilsson, who represents Neij, is aiming to file an appeal this week or next, and Ola Salomonsson, who represents Warg, said he will file an appeal before the deadline. Peter Althin, Sunde's lawyer, wasn't available to comment, but Sunde has made it clear he wants to appeal.

Nilsson expects the appeal will be heard in the first half of next year.

That timeline sounds reasonable, according to Salomonsson. "This is a bit more complicated than your ordinary bank robbery, and therefore it will take time," he said.

While all this takes place, The Pirate Bay site will continue to live on, according to Sunde.

Pirate Bay Case on Its Way to the Court of Appeal - PC World

Business Feed Article | Business | guardian.co.uk

Business Feed Article | Business | guardian.co.uk

"Same poor musician in the retirement home loosing their income as before -- then why not life of the performer rather than a set time....HSM"

EU lawmaker confident of music copyright deal

By Huw Jones

STRASBOURG, France, April 21 (Reuters) - A deal that will win over a blocking minority among European Union member states and extend copyright for musicians and producers in the EU is close to being agreed, a senior lawmaker said on Tuesday.

EU Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has proposed prolonging copyright for musicians and producers to 95 years, from 50 at present, putting them on an equal footing with authors.

Brian Crowley, the Irish lawmaker who is steering the measure through parliament, told Reuters: "I think to get agreement with EU states we have to come down to 70 years, and I think we can get a majority in parliament on that."

Such a deal would ensure that early hits by singers such as Britain's Cliff Richard would remain protected during his lifetime. The European Parliament and EU states have joint say on adopting the measure into law.

"We are hoping to get a first reading deal. I am very confident, as we have taken many of the concerns of member states on board," Crowley said.

"When you look at the human aspect, the arguments are very convincing," he said.

Several countries such as Britain, Romania, Bulgaria and the Czech Republic have held out against the extension, arguing it would restrict creativity or pull non-copyright material back under copyright rules.

McCreevy has said it was unfair that musicians, particularly session musicians, lose rights after 50 years and face a cash-strapped retirement when authors enjoy protection and continued royalties for much longer.

The rules would also set up a new fund for session musicians. For example, the person who played the cello on the famous Beatles track, Eleanor Rigby, would benefit from the new rules, Crowley said.

"If there is a united voice in parliament, the council (of EU states) will have no other option but to respond in a positive way and endorse the agreement in parliament," Crowley said.

The new rules would also give musicians the same rights as producers.

Parliament will debate the measure on Wednesday evening and holds its vote on Thursday.

"The reality is if we don't get a majority in parliament, then the proposal will ultimately die," Crowley said. (Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Andrew Macdonald)

Business Feed Article | Business | guardian.co.uk

PRS Copyright 'Investigators' Actually Sales People | Techdirt

PRS Copyright 'Investigators' Actually Sales People | Techdirt 

PRS Copyright 'Investigators' Actually Sales People

from the no-wonder-they-go-after-horses dept

PRS, the UK's music licensing agency, recently reached out to us after a series of posts we wrote which (to say the least) portrayed their organization negatively. We had a cheerful email exchange that basically left off with us disagreeing on just about everything -- but especially over PRS's tactics, such as demanding a woman running a stable pay for a license because she played music to her horses, just because a few other employees (who didn't listen to the music) occasionally stopped in. Then there's the demands against auto mechanics and police stations because employees were listening to music (in private areas) loud enough that it could be heard in other rooms where the public might visit. Oh, and then there was the demand that a children's charity pay up for singing Christmas carols. And, then there's my personal favorite: calling up small businesses, and if music is heard in the background, demanding the purchase of a license.
If you want to understand the sort of incentives that create such ridiculous and self-defeating PR nightmares, take a look at a recent job posted by PRS (thanks to Kaden for alerting us to this). Officially, the organization is looking for a "copyright investigator," but the actual job is in "sales." These "investigators" have "revenue targets" and can earn a bonus for bringing in excess revenue beyond their targets. That's not creating a situation where these investigators are told to go find violators. It creates a scenario where they're encouraged to find anyway humanly possible to squeeze pretty much anyone for cash.
The PR guy from PRS who contacted us tried to make the case that PRS is just a little non-profit looking out for the best interests of musicians, but when it's setting up its sales people with incentives to come up with any bogus reason to pressure everyone into purchasing a license to listen to music they already legally purchased, something is clearly wrong. This is a group that's effectively been handed a monopoly in the UK and appears to be abusing its power, not as a little harmless non-profit, but as an organization that handles an awful lot of money and has empowered its sales people to threaten small businesses if they don't pay up.

PRS Copyright 'Investigators' Actually Sales People | Techdirt

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily

"I know its a little old but I love her site -- it kept me sane durring the WGA strike and I follow-it for the SWG strike to come" HSM

EXCLUSIVE: Fox News Fires Showbiz Columnist For "Promoting" Piracy

Updates FBI Joins Fox In Hunt For Stolen 'Wolverine' Pirated On Web

 

SUNDAY UPDATE: News Corp issued the following statement from Los Angeles today confirming my reporting from Saturday -- "Roger Friedman’s views in no way reflect the views of News Corporation. We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. When we advised Fox News of the facts they took immediate action, removed the post, and promptly terminated Mr. Friedman."

SATURDAY PM EXCLUSIVE: News Corp like all major Hollywood studios takes the crime of piracy very seriously. Nor will the Fox parent company tolerate it if its employees don't. Especially after a stolen, early and unfinished work print of 20th Century Fox's big summer blockbuster X-Men Origins: Wolverine was put onto the Internet illegally this week in a major scandal that the FBI is now investigating. So there was universal shock on Friday when long-time "Fox 411" freelance columnist Roger Friedman wrote what I'm told his bosses felt was a blatant promotion of piracy on his Fox News web outlet. Besides writing a review from watching the purloined print of Wolverine, Friedman posted, “I did find the whole top 10 [movies in theaters], plus TV shows, commercials, videos, everything, all streaming away. It took really less than seconds to start playing it all right onto my computer. I could have downloaded all of it but really, who has the time or the room? Later tonight I may finally catch up with Paul Rudd in I Love You, Man. It’s so much easier than going out in the rain!” I'm told that Fox News' actions were swift and severe. First, Roger Ailes, who oversees Fox News, deleted the offending post after he was contacted by 20th Century Fox about it. And then Ailes fired Friedman as a freelance Fox News entertainment writer. I hear the move was done with the full support of News Corp. "He promoted piracy. He basically suggested that viewing a stolen film is OK, which is absolutely intolerable. So we fired him," a source told me Saturday. "Fox News acted promptly on all fronts."

Friedman has written his gossip column, "Fox 411", for FoxNews.com for more than a decade and peppers it with celebrity items, industry news, and off-the-cuff movie reviews. He has long been a controversial writer who quite frequently angers the publicity machine surrounding actors, directors, producers, studios, celebrities, movies and TV. Occasionally he has scoops, especially about the music biz. Still, how could he not have known that his writings Friday would hit a nerve with his employers. After Friedman's column on FoxNews.com appeared, both News Corp and Fox condemned it as "promoting a pirated version of Wolverine".

News Corp issued this statement: “Roger Friedman’s views in no way reflect the views of News Corporation. We, along with 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, have been a consistent leader in the fight against piracy and have zero tolerance for any action that encourages and promotes piracy. Once we learned of Roger Friedman’s post we asked Fox News to remove it, which they did immediately.”

And Fox said, "We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com – an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox -- watched on the internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Orgins: Wolverine. This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically -- whether the review is good or bad."

UPDATE: I did reach Friedman for comment. He emailed back only that he was at the Paul McCartney concert.

Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily

Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » The Scourge of Scandinavia: The Dread Pirate Bay

 

The Scourge of Scandinavia: The Dread Pirate Bay

by Mark McKinnon

It wasn’t much of a surprise when the New York Times reported that one of the most highly anticipated movies of the year-X-Men Origins: Wolverine-had been leaked a month before the film’s release date and was available for download on illegal file-sharing sites.  Stories like that are all too common, unfortunately, with the ease of illegal file trafficking over P2P sites like Pirate Bay.  The Wolverine leak is particularly troubling because the leaked version was unfinished, missing several key scenes, music, and special effects. As the film’s star Hugh Jackman said, “It’s a serious crime and there’s no doubt it’s very disappointing. I was heartbroken by it. It’s like a Ferrari without a paint job.”

What was surprising however, is that this time, the leak was universally condemned by Wolverine’s online fan community, bloggers, movie buffs and comic book fans.  Several movie blogs are refusing to run reviews of the raw footage (FoxNews.com’s Roger Friedman was fired for writing a review of the pirated copy), while others such as Dark Horizon have condemned the uploading of the pirated copy as an “act that cruelly robs thousands of people of not just months of hard effort, but their livelihood as well.”  The New York Times was even spurred to ask whether Internet access is a fundamental human right, or a privilege, carrying with it a responsibility for good behavior.

Could the leak of Wolverine be the seminal moment when online piracy jumped the shark?  That’s doubtful, but the tide of public opinion does seem to be starting to turn.

Sweden has a particularly bad reputation when it comes to digital piracy.  It is the home of Pirate Bay-the self-proclaimed world’s largest bittorrent tracking site-but its bad reputation is well-deserved for other reasons too: the country’s main statistics agency recently estimated that 8% of the Swedish population uses P2P networks, and even major party political candidates there have supported decriminalizing “non-commercial” file-sharing. (Just how transfers of complete creative works can be considered “non-commercial” is befuddling: there is certainly a commercial impact on the creators, artists, and musicians who are not being compensated.  It’s a bit like saying that people who knowingly swap or receive stolen goods aren’t actually doing anything wrong, which is a bit of a head-scratcher.)

Even more stunning evidence of Sweden’s illegal file-sharing problem came last week when a new law aimed at curbing piracy took effect. The law, based on the EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED), requires ISPs to divulge information about illegal file-sharing activity, allowing copyright holders to take legal action against infringers. The day after the law took effect, Internet traffic in Sweden plummeted by over thirty percent in the first 24 hours, and there’s little doubt as to why. 

But were the file-sharers suddenly scared straight?  It seems unlikely that that’s the case given the overwhelming sense of entitlement many Swedes seem to feel towards their “free” digital content.  As the BBC reported, Kjell Bohlund of the Swedish Publishers’ Association said an incredible 80 percent of Swedes don’t think copyright holders should take action against P2P users. Christian Engstrom of the Swedish Pirate Party-a political party working for copyright “reform” in Sweden (i.e. decriminalizing file-sharing)-agrees that the majority of file-sharers haven’t simply given up or seen the error of their ways.  Engstrom told the BBC, “Experience from other countries suggests that while file-sharing drops on the day a law is passed, it starts climbing again. One of the reasons is that it takes people a few weeks to figure out how to change their security settings so that they can share files anonymously.”

Turns out, he was right.  In response to the new law, Pirate Bay launched a new service just a week after IPRED took effect called (mockingly) Ipredator, which anonymizes users’ IP addresses so they can continue to share files without fear of legal action.  The service will also make it next to impossible to find identity thieves and other cyber-criminals who can now use the service to anonymously carry out even more online mayhem, but as long as illegal file traffickers can continue to get their “free stuff” this is apparently an acceptable price to pay. Before the service even went live, over 100,000 people had signed up, roughly 80 percent of them Swedes, a Pirate Bay spokesman told a Swedish news agency.

Speaking about the sense of entitlement Swedes seem to feel, Bohlund of the Swedish Publishers Association remarked, “Ultimately we have to change people’s perception on file-sharing” so that they understand they’re “taking money out of the pockets of musicians, authors or artists.” In the U.S. this education process is now underway. Several ISP’s here are now sending notices to copyright infringers along with standard cease and desist letters from copyright owners.  CNET reported that these cover letters “inform the customer that downloading unauthorized copies is illegal,” but noted that ISP’s have no intention of cutting off subscribers for repeat offenses, as would happen under a “three-strikes” rule. According to ISP’s, even without a three-strikes threat, the letters seem to be working; there have been few repeat offenders.  While it’s still early, the evidence so far seems to suggest that U.S. Internet users don’t want to contribute to the growing trend of online lawlessness and are responsive to educational efforts discouraging it. With the explosion of free and inexpensive content online-subscription based service like Netflix, ad supported like Hulu, or pay-per-download like iTunes-getting users to switch from illegal P2P downloads to legal options isn’t a tough sell.  As Billboard.biz reported earlier this month, P2P use among American teens is on the decline as they move to streaming sites that increasingly provide safe, legal, licensed content.

That’s good news, but in other parts of the world, there’s a lot more work to be done.  But with collaboration between technology companies and copyright owners-plus flexible policies that allow those companies to find innovative new ways to deliver content legally-public opinion is shifting. As Internet consumers increasingly have other legal options to enjoy content online, sites like Pirate Bay that relish thumbing their noses at the law are starting to look like the irresponsible Internet citizens that they are.

Big Hollywood » Blog Archive » The Scourge of Scandinavia: The Dread Pirate Bay

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387 

Latest Laboratory News from Laboratorytalk

Written by the Laboratorytalk editor Apr 21, 2009

I'm delighted to see two announcements this week which offer small but worthwhile fillips to the open access movement. It seems to me hardly worth stating that knowledge should be free, and in these days of easy and cost-free digital communications there is less and less justification for the stranglehold on knowledge maintained by the old-school academic journals. The arguments are well-rehearsed: a great deal of scientific research is financed with public money, and therefore the fruits of that research should be freely available to the public.

In the bad old days before the global availability of the web, the only practical way to keep up with research was to subscribe - at significant cost - to the these journals. That is no longer the case, but the inertia in the system and the residual prestige of the august organs of knowledge have allowed the profiteering to continue. Slowly and steadily, though, open access is gaining ground. It is a development we welcome and one we would like to see accelerate.

The first news here is from Cambridge Journals, which has just published the journal European Review on behalf of the Academia Europaea, an association of scientists and scholars which aims to promote learning, education and research. European Review is an open access journal all about, err, open access publishing. It includes a series of articles that examine technology developments and what they mean for publishing academic research. Theo D'haen, editor-in-chief of European Review says: "These articles are vital for anyone with an interest in open access and what it means for the future of scholarly publishing. The authors come from a range of disciplines and so are able to present the arguments from a range of viewpoints. The philosophy of Open Access is discussed along with the practicalities of how it can work in a business environment."

To view the articles free of charge, go to: journals.cambridge.org/erw/17:01

The second news item is a little closer to home: the US-based Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) has had a change of heart regarding open access, and announces that the scientific content published in its official peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA), will become freely available via (Link) two years after its initial publication. Non-scientific content will continue to be available online immediately upon publication.

While these are both steps in the right direction, they are also of limited impact: the navel-gazing approach of Cambridge Journals allows only the topic of open access to be discussed under open access, while all actual new scientific knowledge remains locked behind an expensive subscription. ALA's toe in the water is encouraging, but the two-year delay makes the policy change somewhat half-hearted. Even so, the days of the exhorbitantly-priced journal subscription must be numbered.

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387

Copyright? What Copyright? | newmatilda.com

 Copyright? What Copyright? | newmatilda.com

google books

21 Apr 2009

Copyright? What Copyright?

By Jess Hill

Authors have until 5 May to tell Google to get their money grubbing hands off their books, writes Jess Hill. After that, they can be scanned and uploaded to Google's virtual library

Those sly dogs.

Gloved and hunched over scanners, librarians from some of the biggest libraries in the world have spent the last five years digitising each and every page of millions of books — five million of them still under copyright.

They did it to democratise information, they said, to preserve the corpus of human knowledge for generations to come. They did it without permission from the copyright holders.

They did it for Google. Or, more specifically, for the Google Books Library Project, a virtual database containing the scanned pages of millions of the world's books.

Originally, back in 2004, the partnership between Google and America's great libraries was conceived to digitise the 15 per cent of library books that were in the public domain — golden oldies like Wuthering Heights and David Copperfield. In America (and Australia, thanks to the Fair Trade Agreement), a book enters the public domain 70 years after the author's death (in Australia it used to be 50), or if it was published prior to 1 January 1923.
That left 85 per cent of library books unscanned — 10 per cent of which are still in print and on bookstore shelves, and the remainder of which are "orphans" (books out of print but still in copyright). But because Google are uppity little nerds who consider the world as theirs to metatag, they decided to scan them all, regardless of legal status.

Arm-in-arm with librarians, Google declared they would have 15 million books digitised in under a decade. In other words, almost half of the 32 million books that humans have published.

Using the Elphel 323 — a digital camera that can scan 1000 pages per hour — librarians and Google began to scan the full texts of every book in five major university and public libraries: Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library. Google archived the entire text of each book, indexing it to be responsive to search requests. Users got a few lines of text as their search result — a "snippet" — which Google claimed was "fair use", the same way a review might quote a few lines of a film or book.

The reaction from authors and publishers was a unanimous "Wtf?". Their outrage was two-fold — that Google would have a virtual copy of these books on its server, and that a bunch of IT nerds could presume to scan first, ask later.

In Australia, Google would have been shut down before they had the chance to turn the power on. The main exceptions to our copyright laws come under the "fair dealing" exception, which must fall within a range of very specific uses. America's "fair use" exception allows any use, regardless of purpose, as long as it is "fair". This is an open-ended exception which can only be interpreted by the courts. Which means that giants like Google can scan first, and fight later.

After 10 months of tense negotiation with Google, authors and publishers united in their resolve. The Authors Guild kicked things off, launching a class action against Google on behalf of all authors in September 2005, claiming "massive copyright infringement". One month later, five major publishers claimed the same, and launched the McGraw-Hill civil lawsuit.

With typical pluck, Google continued to scan. Librarians were champing at the bit. Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan, called the project "legal, ethical and noble", predicting that it would change the world.

The prospect of a universal library is revolutionary, and sometimes revolutions require a little bloodshed. The arguments supporting Google's flagrant disregard for copyright are lofty. There's the prospect of storing the world's books in one place, available to the one billion people on planet Earth with access to the internet. Digitise these works and man's knowledge is preserved for time immemorial, kept safe from political revolution — like the Khmer Rouge's burning of Cambodia's national library — and natural disaster, like the loss of government documents in Louisiana's Tulane University during Hurricane Katrina. And for authors, many of whose out-of-print books are likely to have sunk into obscurity, Google's online library would make their masterpiece available to the world again.

Google weren't the only ones scanning. Beijing-based company Superstar has already scanned every book in 200 of China's libraries, a total of 1.3 million titles which, according to Superstar, is approximately half the number of books published in China since 1949.

As you'd expect, scanning a book in China is a lot cheaper than doing it at Stanford — a third of the price, actually, $10 instead of $30. In 2004, just as Google was beginning its book project, Raj Reddy, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, shipped out tens of thousands of volumes from the Carnegie Mellon and Carnegie library to China. Reddy's scanning enterprise, the Million Book Project, is now being made possible by assembly lines of Chinese and Indian workers, who are cranking out 100,000 pages per day. Most of the books are in the public domain, and permission has been acquired to include over 60,000 copyrighted books. As of November 2007, 1.5 million books had been scanned.

And then there's Microsoft, who always seem a little slow off the mark these days. It started a copycat Google Books project in 2006 called Live Search Books, which was ditched in May 2008.

In March 2007, Thomas Rubin, associate general counsel for copyright, trademark, and trade secrets at Microsoft, accused Google of violating copyright law with their book search service. Specifically, he criticised Google's policy of copying work until notified by the copyright holder to stop.

Meanwhile, that March, as negotiations continued in the courts, Google had 20 libraries on board, and according to the New York Times, had scanned one million books at a cost of around $US5 million. Barely 18 months later, in October 2008, Google claimed to have seven million books archived: one million in the public domain, another million scanned by their 20,000 publishing partners, and five million still under copyright.

That October, authors and publishers got what they wanted: an out-of-court settlement valued at US$125 million. This gets split three ways: US$34.5 million for notice and administration costs, and to establish the Book Rights Registry, which authors can search to see if they can make a claim; US$45 million to resolve existing claims by authors and publishers; and the rest goes to the publishers' legal fees. This last figure might be way underestimated. Harper Collins CEO Jane Friedman declared, "I don't expect this suit to be resolved in my lifetime".

So what did they win?

Copyright holders now have the right to decide whether or not they want to be in Google's online library. For books out of print, copyright holders can opt in or out; for books in print, the publisher must make this decision with the consent of the author.

The time available to opt out or object is ridiculously short — written notification must be sent to Google by 5 May 2009.

For those that want in, there are a number of compensations. The first is a one-off payment of US$60 for each book. If the book is still in print, this gets split according to profit-share agreements between publishers and authors. Google will pay the full $60 to the copyright holders of books out of print. If Google runs advertising on a page featuring just the one book, 63 per cent of revenue will go to that book's copyright holder, and 37 per cent to Google.

The deadline for authors to opt in is not much better — 5 January 2010. Any authors who have not made a claim by that date will get no profit from the digitising of their book, and will have no say over what percentage of the text Google makes available online. Google is no doubt banking on the likelihood that only a fraction of authors and publishers will lodge a claim; the settlement requires that Google pay a paltry minimum of US$45 million. To compensate all five million books in copyright would cost Google US$300 million.

So for the total sum of US$125 million, Google has the right to digitise almost all books published on or before 5 January 2009.

For now, Google can show 20 per cent of a book's text. However, according to Jeremy Fisher, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors, the devil is in the detail. The settlement vaguely stipulates that Google can make "other specified uses" of texts, suggesting that Google may eventually make the text of all its scanned books available.

The settlement remains subject to a final fairness hearing, which is scheduled for 11 June. Regardless of what the court decides, Google has more than just thrown down the gauntlet to the traditional business model that gets books from authors to readers. The onus now is on creators to rethink the way they make money before companies like Google decide it for them.

Copyright? What Copyright? | newmatilda.com

Monday, April 13, 2009

Harvard and APS Reach Accord on Journal Publications

[PAMNET] Harvard and APS Reach Accord on Journal Publications


The Harvard Office for
Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society (APS)
announced jointly today that they have entered into an agreement to
facilitate faculty compliance with the University’s open access policies
when Harvard faculty members publish in the APS journals, comprising
Physical Review, Physical Review Letters, and Reviews of Modern Physics.
As a result of the new agreement, APS recognizes Harvard's open access
license and will not require copyright agreement addenda or waivers, in
exchange for Harvard's clarification of its intended use of the license.
In general terms, in exercising its license under the open access
policies, Harvard will not use a facsimile of the published version
without permission of the publisher, will not charge for the display or
distribution of those articles, and will provide an online link to the
publisher's definitive version of the articles where possible.  The
agreement does not restrict fair use of the articles in any way.
Three of Harvard’s ten faculties have passed open access resolutions
within the past 14 months, most recently Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government. The main beneficiaries of the Harvard-APS agreement will be
physics faculty members, who are no longer obliged to acquire waivers of
Harvard’s prior license. In addition, other institutions and their
authors may find the agreement to be a useful model in their
interactions with APS and other scholarly publishers.
According to Professor Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis Professor of
Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the Harvard Physics Department and
Chair of the 2008 Publications Oversight Committee of the American
Physical Society, “Harvard’s open access legislation was always
consistent in spirit with the aims of the APS publication policies, but
there were differences in detail that would have required faculty
members to request a waiver for every article published in an APS
journal. It is a credit both to Harvard and to APS that these
differences have been worked out.  Since APS journals include, arguably,
the most important journals in the field of physics, the fact that
faculty will now be able to continue publishing in APS journals without
seeking a waiver from Harvard’s policies will strengthen both Harvard
and the goal of promoting open access to scholarly publications
worldwide.”
Joseph Serene, Treasurer/Publisher of the American Physical Society,
agreed with Halperin. “Guided by the APS mission to advance and diffuse
the knowledge of physics," he said, "We have since 1996 allowed authors
to post their APS-published papers on their own websites, and their
manuscripts on arXiv and other preprint servers, without embargoes or
other restrictions.  We also permit these postings on their employers'
websites. Hence we applaud the spirit of the new Harvard open access
policies, which we recognize as sharing our fundamental goals for
scientific communication, and we are delighted that we and our
colleagues at Harvard have reconciled the differences in our policies,
to the shared benefit of Harvard authors and of the wider scientific
community."

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney « Just TV

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney « Just TV 

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney

My textbook, Television and American Culture, has hit the streets (or at least the postal system - order yours now!). I received my first copy yesterday, and am happy to say that it looks great. This is due not to my own work (I’m solely to blame for the content), but the excellent staff at Oxford University Press who made the design and editing process a pleasure, with great results as well.

One decision that my editor and I made early in the process was that the book’s internal illustrations would be frame-grabs from DVDs and over-the-air broadcasts, and that we would claim fair use for these images instead of seeking permissions. This is in keeping with a longstanding position articulated by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies back in 1993 (I’m a member of the SCMS Public Policy Committee and we are currently working to update this position statement for the digital age). As far as we know, the use of frame-grabs as fair use has never been challenged in court - if a publisher supports this right, they will not bend to pressure from copyright holders. And OUP has certainly been supportive of our fair use rights in this regard, encouraging me to use dozens of images (and using high-quality paper to make them look great).

The use of images becomes complicated regarding cover art. Fair use applies within books and articles, as the function of the illustrations is educational and critical, used to deepen and support analysis. Cover images can have that function, but they also help market the book. So the tradition is that publishers (or authors) license rights for images on book covers for a fee. The book’s cover design, which I love, features seven screens in need of content - the designer selected images that connect to examples discussed in the book, creating a wonderful visual collage of devices and programming. OUP’s staff set-out to license these images, after which the book went to press.

The problem emerged when ABC-Disney, who’d agreed to license the image of Lost in the center of the cover, asked what other ABC-Disney illustrations were in the book. OUP replied that the others were frame grabs under fair use provisions, and thus required no permissions. ABC-Disney then maneuvered into what my SCMS colleague and fair use guru Pat Aufderheide termed “a hostage situation”: they said that they would not agree to license the cover image unless we paid for the internal illustrations. The book was already at the printers, so nothing could be changed except at great cost. OUP paid the ransom for the internal images, and the book came out as designed.

To be clear, ABC-Disney did nothing illegal - they own the image of Lost, and we were required to pay for its use on the cover on their terms. The terms they stipulated had strings attached that, while morally wrong and based on a misreading of copyright law, are within their rights to demand. We paid for the internal images not because of copyright, but because ABC-Disney demanded it in exchange for the cover image. They made the decision to hijack fair use in exchange for a fee of less than $1,000, petty cash for a corporation like ABC-Disney. This was not the only option, as NBC-Universal had rights to the majority of cover images and licensed their use with no strings attached.

So what are the lessons to be learned here? Many media companies want to assert their copyright privileges beyond legal limits - not for petty cash, but for petty power. They aim to establish the precedent that they are in control, regardless of their legal standing. I’d guess the last thing ABC-Disney would want is to sue me or OUP over the frame grabs, as a loss in court would firmly establish the limits of their claims (and an unlikely win would yield little in revenue anyway). What they really want is bully power, the ability to make outsiders assume that rights holders also hold all the power. Unfortunately because the book was already in press, we had to yield - if we were able to, both my editor and I wanted to swap out the cover Lost image to avoid having to pay for the frame grabs that we had the right to use, thereby implying that fair use did not apply.

We do have some power here to push back. ABC got some of OUP’s money this time around, but I can say that no future editions of Television & American Culture will have ABC-Disney images on the cover. Instead we’ll use many ABC-Disney framegrabs without paying, via our fair use rights - and I encourage fellow scholars to follow suit. And I’ll use my own bully pulpits of this blog, my work with SCMS, and the tight-knit community of scholars interested in fair use to spread the word that ABC-Disney is willing to hold a non-profit academic press hostage over a tiny amount of money. Hopefully that kind of publicity offsets the pittance they received from us.

Fair Use Held Hostage by ABC-Disney « Just TV