Yesterday was the 2010 Scholarly Communications Symposium entitled “Inspiration, Derivation or Appropriation? Defining Ownership in the Arts” held at Drexel University (and organized by my colleagues).  The sessions featured talks and discussions between academics, artists and attorneys covering issues of legality and ownership when it comes to visual and performing arts and artists.

I found the sessions to be compelling — good discussions of what kinds of issues become important when dealing with copyright outside of the printed word.

The recordings will be posted soon on the conference website.

EDUCAUSE is hosting a free online copyright seminar January 13th, 2009 from 1-2 pm, covering best practices in applying fair use. Here’s more information, and registration details.

From the site:

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, and the topic will be “Copyright Balance and Fair Use in Networked Learning: Lessons from Creators’ Codes of Best Practices.”

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

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

A couple months ago, there was a short thread on the LITA listserv that caught my eye.  A library school student was asking for suggestions on “tech trends” to investigate.   There were several responses, and I’ve distilled some of the feedback below.

There were several practical skills suggested, but others suggested adjusting one’s approach toward newer ideas and skills — “becoming a lifelong learner” and getting familiar with ways to apply trends to the library setting.  I think this is an essential skill for successful librarians, and for successful libraries.

The overview:

• XML
• XSLT
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web Services
• Cloud and super computing
• Relational databases and Indexing
• eInk and eReaders
• Digital preservation
• Copyright management
• Techniques in distance education technologies (i.e., Wimba, CMS, etc.)
• Assimilating new technologies into your work life
• Writing about your experiences
• Become familiar with how you learn technology and skills — becoming a lifelong learner

There were also links to two Library Journal articles by Roy Tennant that get at this point.

ALA & ARL published this useful 23-page PDF document outlining the details of the Google settlement.  One of the interesting parts was a bulleted list of paid/free user services under the terms of the agreement.  Here are some excerpts from the list of free user services, starting on page 4 of the document.

• All users in the United States will have the ability to search Google’s entire search database for digitized books responsive to their queries.

• For a public domain book, Google will display the full text.

• For an in-copyright, not commercially available book, the default rule is that
Google will display up to 20% of the book’s text.

• Although under this “standard preview” Google can display up to 20% of a
book’s text, for most non-fiction works Google generally can display no more
than five adjacent pages at a time. Thus, when a user lands on a given page from
a search, the user can see four pages adjacent to that page.

• Different default rules apply to works of fiction for the amount a user can see in
response to a single command. Each time a user lands on a page of a fiction
book, Google can display 5% of the book or fifteen adjacent pages, whichever is
less.

• Still different default display rules apply to other categories of works. No text
display is allowed of anthologies of drama and fiction by multiple authors, or
collections of poetry or short stories. And for dictionaries, drug reference guides,
encyclopedias, price/buyer guides, quotation books, test preparation guides, and
thesauri, Google will provide only a “fixed preview”—it will display the same
pages regardless of the user query, up to 10% of the book.

• For an in-copyright, commercially available book, the default rule is that Google
will display only bibliographic information and front material, such as the title
page, the copyright page, the table of contents, and the index. For books in this
category, Google will no longer display even snippets, as it currently does, unless
the rightsholder so authorizes.

• As noted above, a rightsholder can vary the default rules for its book. Moreover,
the settlement allows the rightsholder of a work contained within another
rightsholder’s book to exercise its rights under the settlement independently.
However, unlike a book’s rightsholder, an insert’s rightsholder cannot insist that
the insert be removed altogether from the Google Library Project. Thus, so long
as a book’s rightsholder does not remove the book, all inserts within the book
will be searchable, even if their rightsholders exclude them from any displays.

I got this notice about an additional copyright workshop, if anyone is interested.

Only 20 online seats are remaining for the second workshop in the 08-09 Workshop Series; join us! Early registration ends next week on October
26th:

THE SECTION 108 STUDY

http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa/

November 10-20, 2008
Moderated by Laura (Lolly) Gasaway
Learn about recent legal updates that allow libraries to provide access to copyrighted works for faculty and students.

Please see linked website for a detailed description & course objectives
- http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa/workshops.shtml#section108

SIGN UP TODAY: http://tinyurl.com/6b5f9x [Secured Server].
Take 6 Package – $750.
Take 3 Package- $375.
*Individual Early Bird Rates $150 each.

At last week’s Institute, one of the presenters was talking with faculty about copyright and mentioned that the librarians (us!) are the resident copyright experts on campus.  Then I read a notification on the LITA list serv about an online copyright workshop and the synchronicity was just too obvious, so I thought I’d post the details.  I also wanted to post a link to Ohio State’s Copyright Center, which is managed by the library and offers some basics, resources and other information.

Copyright Law and Integrated Access to Digital Course Materials(revisited)

http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa

October 27-November 7, 2008

Early Registration Deadline: October 12, 2008

Moderator: Georgia Harper

This workshop will explore how an integrated approach to the various methods our campuses use to provide access to digital educational course materials can facilitate institutional compliance with copyright law.

We’ll start with a high-level discussion of fair use and review the role it plays in enabling access to certain types of materials. Most importantly, these explorations will underscore the fact that creating and operating access systems for digital materials, and the copyright issues involved, are institutional concerns and not just a matter of library services.

Goals:

When you have completed the course, you will be able to:

• Identify and understand each of the legal authorizations available to faculty to use others’ materials
• Licensed materials
• Materials available freely on the web (creative commons and implied licenses)
• Orphan works
• The role of fair use, the limits on that role, and the importance of knowing your institution’s risk tolerance in order to decide how to apply the fair use test for small, medium and large-scale course materials access operations
• TEACH Act
• The role of Copyright Clearance Center’s transactional permissioning and campus-wide subscription licensing *Identify the features of an integrated approach to digital materials access that promote its acceptance and use among faculty and graduate students *Identify the institutional units on your campus that would need to be involved in creating an integrated system for providing digital access to course materials *Participate in discussions on your campus of the need and methods for achieving an integrated approach to access to digital course materials.

If you have sites or links you use for copyright information, let me know, or post a comment.