Braving Through Fear of Fair Use Monday, February 24, 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. Hatcher Graduate Library, Gallery Lab Are you digitizing a special collection or unique museum materials? Are you a scholar trying to use images for research, scholarly publishing or teaching? In the last 20 years there has been an explosion in the amount of high-quality online image content from cultural collections. But recent research indicates that scholars are not necessarily taking advantage of…
Posts By: Melissa Levine
Do you have copyright questions? The Copyright Office at the University of Michigan Library is here to help. Join us for one or all of these short workshops by signing up at teachtech.umich.edu. These sessions are geared for faculty and students but all are welcome. We look forward to seeing you! All sessions are in the Hatcher Graduate Library Faculty Exploratory. General Overview of Copyright, Wed. Sept. 18, 10 – 11 am Fair Use and Copyright…
Claire Tatro is an intern this summer with the Copyright Office here at Michigan Publishing. Claire is a student at the University of Michigan School of Information (M.A. 2014). She is working on a series of highlights about books in the public domain in HathiTrust with her mentor, Kristina Eden from the Copyright Office. This is Claire’s first post. Ethel St. Clair Grimwood (a pseudonym for Ethel Brabazon Grimwood) was the wife of a political…
I recently gave a talk on Copyright Essentials on campus to a group of faculty and students. It was a pleasure to find the group for this particular Copyright Essentials to be lively, informed, and inquisitive. One participant offered some interesting observations from his experiences. Michael Hortsch, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology from the University of Michigan, Medical School remarked that copyright is best considered at the outset of a project. Keeping…
Copyright is endlessly interesting, intriguing, and debatable – but only at Copyright Camp is copyright fun! Join us on June 20 from 1 to 5 pm. Registration is free – register here. This event fills quickly, and we want to be sure to have enough bunks – I mean chairs – for everyone. Our theme this year is about copyright and data. We’ll kick off with a keynote from Michael Carroll, Professor of Law and…
Yes, that’s pi as in 3.14. One of the frequent questions that comes up in my work involves confusion over whether facts and data are subject to US Copyright: they are not. Original expressions or arrangements of facts can, however, be subject to copyright protection. A recent case helps make the distinction clear – and also shows how the same facts can result in completely different and wonderful expressions. In Erickson v. Blake a composer created…
The Copyright Office is pleased to announce that Lisa Hardman, one of our ARL Career Enhancement Program Fellows for 2012, has been named as an ARL Diversity Scholar. Lisa worked with us over the course of last year to create a comprehensive research and action agenda to help libraries make full legal uses of state government documents. Lisa made great headway in a largely uncharted area of law and policy; state application of copyright to their…
Today the Association of Research Libraries has issued the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries. It is the culmination of two years of work within the academic library community, looking at the state of actual practices regarding fair use, which explicitly supports teaching, scholarship, and research fundamental to scholarly communication.. The Code is a set of eight high-level principles that are a synthesis of behavioral norms based on reasonable,…
With last week’s flurry of activity over SOPA/PIPA, perhaps you missed the Supreme Court’s decision in Golan v. Holder [PDF]. The opinion makes it unequivocally clear that it is well within the purview of Congress to remove works from the public domain and reinforces the Court’s opinion in Eldred regarding Congress’s authority to extend copyright duration. In one fell swoop, the majority managed to express a legal opinion out of touch with technological and social…
For the moment, SOPA (HR 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act) is on hold in the wake of a remarkable response from the blogosphere, organizations, and private citizens. The bill is dense, opaque, overreaching, and probably unenforceable. It manages to put a crimp on civil liberties and fail to actually help copyright holders who really do face problems with infringement. The timing of all this is worth examination as SOPA (and its counterpart in the Senate,…