KATHARINE TRENDACOSTA , Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); It's Copyright Week 2024: Join Us in the Fight for Better Copyright Law and Policy
"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation."
MITCH STOLTZ, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) ; US Copyright Term Extensions Have Stopped, But the Public Domain Still Faces Threats
"We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, and addressing what's at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation...
Copyright terms remain far too long. It will be nearly two decades before a filmmaker making a documentary about the World War II era can use music recordings from the period without facing what the Recording Industry Association of America and other music industry groups have called a “staggeringly complex” licensing process—or else risking massive and unpredictable statutory damages in a copyright suit.
Rather than preserving culture, long and complicated copyright terms keep us from our history. And that cannot be what copyright was meant to do."
"Open access depends on more than removing cost barriers. It also means giving the public freedom to use research. Under the current academic publishing model, even the simple act of sharing can be a crime. When Diego Gomez, a Master’s student in Colombia, shared a colleague’s thesis with other scientists over the Internet, he was doing what any grad student would do: sharing research he found useful so others could benefit from it. But the author of the paper filed a lawsuit, and Diego’s act of sharing became a copyright violation punishable by four to eight years in prison. In the U.S., activist Aaron Swartz also met unjust charges on 13 criminal counts for downloading millions of articles from academic journal database JSTOR. The charges would have put him in jail for years under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. If other users see Diego’s or Aaron’s cases and fear the consequences that can come with copyright infringement allegations, everyday activities like sharing academic resources can become intimidating. These cases remind us that sharing and building on existing research is integral to the open access vision. That could mean anything from translation to remixing to large-scale analysis. In an open access world, these innovative, collaborative actions would not be criminal."
"The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding an end to a lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of a law that prevents people from getting around the access restrictions on copyrighted works such as films, television shows and songs. In July, the Electronic Frontier Foundation led the lawsuit that argues that the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Sec. 1201) inhibits free expression in violation of the First Amendment. The law allows for a triennial review where every three years the Librarian of Congress grants exemptions. For example, in the most recent review, the government made it legal to hack a smart TV to achieve interoperability and also allowed grade school teachers to circumvent access controls on DVDs for educational purposes."
"When universities invent, those inventions should benefit everyone. Unfortunately, they sometimes end up in the hands of patent trolls—companies that serve no purpose but to amass patents and demand money from others. When a university sells patents to trolls, it undermines the university’s purpose as a driver of innovation. Those patents become landmines that make innovation more difficult. A few weeks ago, we wrote about the problem of universities selling or licensing patents to trolls. We said that the only way that universities will change their patenting and technology transfer policies is if students, professors, and other members of the university community start demanding it. It’s time to start making those demands. We’re launching Reclaim Invention, a new initiative to urge universities to rethink how they use patents. If you think that universities should keep their inventions away from the hands of patent trolls, then use our form to tell them. EFF is proud to partner with Creative Commons, Engine, Fight for the Future, Knowledge Ecology International, and Public Knowledge on this initiative. A Simple Promise to Defend Innovation Central to our initiative is the Public Interest Patent Pledge (PIPP), a pledge we hope to see university leadership sign. The pledge says that before a university sells or licenses a patent, it will first check to make sure that the potential buyer or licensee doesn’t match the profile of a patent troll"
""Section 1201 is a draconian and unnecessary restriction on speech and the time has come to set it aside," writes EFF staff attorney Kit Walsh in a blog post announcing the lawsuit. "The future of cultural participation and software-related research depends on it." "[C]opyright law shouldn’t be casting a legal shadow over activities as basic as popping the hood of your own car, offering commentary on a shared piece of culture (and helping others do so), and testing security infrastructure," writes EFF's Parker Higgins, in a separate post explaining the effects that Section 1201 has on scholars, artists, and activists. "It’s time for the courts to revisit Section 1201, and fix Congress’s constitutional mistake.""
"EFF’s written comments were filed as part of a series of studies on the effectiveness of the DMCA, begun by the Copyright Office this year. This round of public comments focuses on Section 512, which provides a notice-and-takedown process for addressing online copyright infringement, as well as “safe harbors” for Internet services that comply. “One of the central questions of the study is whether the safe harbors are working as intended, and the answer is largely yes,” said EFF Legal Director Corynne McSherry. “The safe harbors were supposed to give rightsholders streamlined tools to police infringement, and give service providers clear rules so they could avoid liability for the potentially infringing acts of their users. Without those safe harbors, the Internet as we know it simply wouldn’t exist, and our ability to create, innovate, and share ideas would suffer.” As EFF also notes in its comments, however, the notice-and-takedown process is often abused. A recent report found that the notice-and-takedown system is riddled with errors, misuse, and overreach, leaving much legal and legitimate content offline. EFF’s comments describe numerous examples of bad takedowns, including many that seemed based on automated content filters employed by the major online content sharing services."
"In September, the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued its ruling in the "Dancing Baby" copyright takedown case, initiated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation more than eight years ago. It was a victory for the EFF, but a very mixed one. Today, the court issued an amended opinion that makes the EFF's win stronger."
"A long-running copyright fight between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Universal Music over fair use in the digital age was considered by an appeals court today, a full eight years after the lawsuit began. EFF and its client Stephanie Lenz sued Universal Music Group back in 2007, saying that the music giant should have realized Lenz's home video of her son Holden dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" was clearly fair use. Under EFF's view of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Universal should have to pay damages for a wrongful takedown. If EFF wins the case, it could have repercussions for how copyright takedowns work online. The group is trying to make Universal pay up under 17 USC 512(f), the section of the DMCA that penalizes copyright owners for wrongful takedowns. Currently, victories under that statute are exceedingly rare and happen only in extreme circumstances."
