Here are some brief references to a few of the things we talked about in class today:
Google Books:
Authors, Publishers, and Google Reach Landmark Settlement
Copyright Accord Would Make Millions More Books Available Online
NEW YORK, NY (October 28, 2008) – The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and Google today announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. See for more details --- http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20081027_booksearchagreement.html
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/
There is a May 5 deadline for the public to comment to the court on the proposed settlement. Motions to intervene in the case have been filed by several groups, ranging from the American Library Association, to a group of Harvard Law professors, and group of University of Chicago Law professors, and others concerned with issues ranging from fair use, to antitrust
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opposition-to-google-books-settlement/?em
A few other alternative (to traditional copyright enforcement) licensing models:
A compulsory copyright license is an exception to copyright law that is usually philosophically justified as an attempt by the government to correct a market failure. As an exception to copyright, another party can exercise one or more of the copyright's exclusive rights without having to obtain the copyright holder's permission (hence "compulsory") but will have to pay a licensing fee.
Some compulsory licenses protect those who wish to use a work for educational or non-commercial purposes. In cases when it is judged too burdensome for scattered or small-scale buyers and sellers to find one another and negotiate a price, governments sometimes issue a compulsory license for the use so that the relative difficulty of obtaining permission for it does not extinguish it.
There are several different compulsory license provisions in United States copyright law. There are compulsory licenses for nondramatic musical compositions, public broadcasting, retransmission by cable systems, subscription digital audio transmission, and nonsubscription digital audio transmission such as Internet radio.
The most commonly known compulsory license is for nondramatic musical compositions. This provision of the Copyright Act allows a person to make a new sound recording of a musical work, if that has been previously distributed to the public, by or under the authority of the copyright owner. There is no requirement that the new recording be identical to the previous work, as the compulsory license includes the privilege of rearranging the work to conform it to the recording artist's interpretation. This does not allow the artist to change the basic melody or fundamental character of the work.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other advocacy groups have suggested forms of compulsory licensing as one possible solution to the legal conflicts surrounding file sharing. In a typical scenario, those who hold the copyrights for the music traded between network users would be legally barred from suing the infringers. In return, the government would extract payments from listeners, perhaps electronic pay-per-song fees or perhaps sales taxes on peer-to-peer file-sharing software, blank storage media, or even Internet access itself. Assisted by some form of P2P "charts," music industry groups would theoretically distribute these royalties to the rights holders. Others have also suggested that a Compulsory Sampling License would alleviate many of the issues of digital music production that often relies on sampling techniques. See Wikipedia on compulsory licensing.
See also Free Software Foundation for example of approaches to allow users to use, share and modify software without all the usual copyright impediments:
http://www.fsf.org/
http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/
And chew on this statement from the Free Software Foundation which attempts to promote the ability of users to use, share and modify third parties' software and certain other original creations for free, without worrying about many of the impediments of copyright:
The FSF holds copyright on a large proportion of the GNU operating system, and other free software. We hold these assets to defend free software from efforts to turn free software proprietary. Every year we collect thousands of copyright assignments from individual software developers and corporations working on free software. We register these copyrights with the US copyright office and enforce the license under which we distribute free software - typically the GNU General Public License. We do this to ensure that free software distributors respect their obligations to pass on the freedom to all users, to share, study and modify the code.
Sample free content sites:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.thenewsroom.com/
http://www.flickr.com/
http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_audio
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.articlesbase.com/
http://www.sxc.hu/
http://www.publicdomain4u.com/
Follow up from this week's class:
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We will be posting reading assignments and information for next week within the next few days.
For fun:
Go Susan Boyle! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxPZh4AnWyk
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