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…
Posts Categorized: Copyright Office
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,…
July 29 marked the second MPublishing Copyright Camp – this year with Deborah Wythe of the Brooklyn Museum. Copyright Camp is MPublishing’s way of making copyright fun, and we’ve had the great benefit of working with the great team at Open.Michigan on these events. What is Copyright Camp? On the last Friday of July we invite a speaker to discuss some aspect of copyright then break into informal discussion groups that allow copyright experts to mix and…
Ari Friedlander, who has been Outreach Coordinator for the Text Creation Partnership since July 2010, has accepted the position of Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Davis. For the last year, Ari has served as the face of the TCP, representing our work to current and future partners, writing press releases and blog posts, presenting at conferences, raising money to keep the TCP going, and of course, persistently building up…
Are you interested in how copyright affects your professional life? Do you miss the fun and welcoming atmosphere of summer camp? Then plan to join MPublishing at Copyright Camp, where we’ll provide a forum to discuss copyright and how it affects you on a daily basis. Copyright Camp will be an unconference-style event with an introductory plenary by Deborah Wythe, Director of the Brooklyn Museum’s Digital Collections and open access pioneer. This event is free…
There are potentially thousands of “orphan works” in the U-M Library collection that are in-copyright, digitized, and preserved works in the HathiTrust Digital Library–yet remain unavailable because copyright holders cannot be found or contacted. The Orphan Works Project, which began last month, has just announced that U-M Library will make any identified orphan works available to U-M Library users via the HathiTrust so that they are searchable, viewable, and accessible. From the press release: The…
From the press release: The University of Michigan Library’s Copyright Office is launching the first serious effort to identify orphan works among the in-copyright holdings of the HathiTrust Digital Library, which is funding the project. The vast majority of HathiTrust’s holdings are in-copyright (73%). An unknown percentage of these are so-called “orphans,” that is, in-copyright works whose owners cannot be identified or located. The lack of hard data on the number of orphans in the…
Copyright law is, for good or for ill, now a part of the academic experience. Learning about copyright and alternative models of distribution, such as Creative Commons and Open Access, is an important piece of effectively navigating the waters of the new educational reality. The third annual eCornucopia conference at Oakland University will examine specific examples about how openness is implemented in higher education and the importance of increasing the transparency and accessibility of knowledge….