Showing posts with label Georgia State University. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Georgia State University. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Georgia State Hosts Deep-Dive Event on Intellectual Property and AI; Georgia State News Hub, October 26, 2023

Georgia State News Hub; Georgia State Hosts Deep-Dive Event on Intellectual Property and AI

"Experts from inside and outside Georgia State University gathered for “Protect Your Ideas: IP, AI and Entertainment,” a first-of-its-kind forum that gave students, faculty and staff a chance to share and learn about intellectual property and artificial intelligence with an eye toward entertainment. The Oct. 10 event was jointly sponsored by the university’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development, the College of Law and Popular Culture Collective.

“Atlanta is a national hub for creativity, commerce and research, so it makes sense that we at Georgia State strive to educate people about intellectual property,” said university President M. Brian Blake, who gave opening remarks at the event. “Understanding how to protect your ideas is critical, regardless of your field.”...

After remarks by leadership, Kenny Franklin, senior licensing associate with Georgia State’s Office of Technology Transfer & Commercialization, hosted a fireside chat with College of Law alum Scott Frank, president and CEO of AT&T Intellectual Property LLC and chair of the Georgia Intellectual Property Alliance. The dialogue helped define intellectual property and reflected on its meaning in today’s knowledge economy.

“I tell people that intellectual property is like oxygen. It’s all around us and we don’t see it, but we wouldn’t survive without it,” Frank said."

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Free Webcast by Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on Georgia State University e-Reserves Case: Thursday, May 24, 2012 2 PM EDT

"Register Now for ARL Webcast on GSU Decision:

Washington DC—The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is holding a webcast on Thursday, May 24, from 2:00–3:00 p.m. ET, on the substance and implications of the recent decision in the lawsuit over Georgia State University's (GSU) e-reserves program. Brandon Butler, ARL Director of Public Policy Initiatives, and Jonathan Band (policybandwidth) will recap the basic facts of the case and the key holdings in the decision, discuss the possible next steps in the litigation, and suggest some of the possible consequences for libraries making their own decisions about how best to implement a fair use policy in the context of course reserves.

To register for this free webcast, please visit http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=87299

To read ARL's Issue Brief on the GSU decision, visit http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/gsu_issuebrief_15may12.pdf."

Monday, May 21, 2012

Georgia State Copyright Case: What You Need To Know—and What It Means for E-Reserves; LibraryJournal.com, 5/17/12

Meredith Schwartz, LibraryJournal.com; Georgia State Copyright Case: What You Need To Know—and What It Means for E-Reserves:

"One of the most closely watched e-reserve cases in recent memory came to an end—though an appeal is still possible—on May 11, when Judge Orinda Evans of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in Cambridge University Press (CUP); Oxford University Press (OUP); Sage Publications v. Georgia State University (GSU). The case alleged copyright infringement in GSU’s e-reserves, and in essence the judge came down on the side of libraries in a 350-page decision delivered almost a year after she heard closing arguments.


Of the 75 cases of alleged infringement she considered, Judge Evans held five to be infringement. The rest were either held to be fair use, or the question did not arise, because the copying was held to be de minimis—when virtually no one actually read the posted work—or because the publishers did not demonstrate to the court’s satisfaction that they had standing to make the claim."

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Publishers and Georgia State See Broad Implications in Copyright Ruling; Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/14/12

Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education; Publishers and Georgia State See Broad Implications in Copyright Ruling: "The publisher plaintiffs in the closely watched lawsuit over Georgia State University's use of copyrighted material in electronic reserves say they are "disappointed" with much of the ruling handed down by a federal judge on Friday. But they made the best of it in statements issued Monday, playing up points on which the judge had agreed with them. And one plaintiff, Oxford University Press, said that the decision "marks a significant first step toward addressing the need for clarity around issues of copyright in the context of higher education.""

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

The GSU Lawsuit: You Don't Know How Lucky You Are | Peer to Peer Review; Library Journal, 5/19/11

Barbara Fister, Library Journal; The GSU Lawsuit: You Don't Know How Lucky You Are | Peer to Peer Review:

"Three publishers—Sage, Cambridge, and Oxford University Press—want to return us to those good old days, only without any subtlety about fair use or four factors tests. The lawsuit (partly funded by the copyright fees that we pay to the Copyright Clearance Center) that pits scholarly presses against a university and its library and, by extension, the faculty and students who use their e-reserves system, has gone to trial, and the outcome the publishers have demanded, if they prevail, would seriously turn the clock back."

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Friday, April 15, 2011

Campus copyright: publishers sue over university "e-reserves"; ArsTechnica.com, 4/14/11

Mark Jaycox, ArsTechnica.com; Campus copyright: publishers sue over university "e-reserves" :

"By refining their arguments, the publishers will further elucidate the core issue of the case: where is the border between the grey area of fair use and the illegal realm of copyright infringement when it comes to e-reserves? To date, the publishers' view has been expansive; even including an uploaded chapter is considered infringement.

Whatever the outcome, the case will have far-reaching consequences for universities across the nation. Even though e-reserves are ubiquitous throughout academia, policies differ by institution."

Monday, October 11, 2010

Georgia State Ereserves Case Narrowed Yet Again; Library Journal, 10/7/10

Josh Hadro, Library Journal; Georgia State Ereserves Case Narrowed Yet Again:

"According to a ruling on October 1, the closely watched Georgia State University (GSU) ereserves lawsuit will come down to whether the named defendants participated in the specific act of "contributory infringement," as two other original accusations were removed from the case.

This narrows the scope of the charges lodged by the publisher plaintiffs—Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications—and has Fair Use advocates cautiously optimistic as the case moves closer to trial."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/887124-264/georgia_state_ereserves_case_narrowed.html.csp

Thursday, April 1, 2010

Remix Pedagogy, Libraries, and the Georgia State Case | Peer to Peer Review; Library Journal,

Barbara Fister, Library Journal; Remix Pedagogy, Libraries, and the Georgia State Case Peer to Peer Review:

"I found myself wondering today if students at my college would be happy if the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia agrees to the motion for summary judgment filed by Cambridge, Oxford, and SAGE against Georgia State University. A ruling in favor of the publishers could put an end to most library e-reserves programs and would essentially prohibit the sharing of scholarly publications through course management systems (CMSs) without purchasing a license for each work, each student, each semester.

So why might our students be pleased?

Increasing students’ costs by replacing e-reserves with coursepacks, print or electronic, is, frankly, a non-starter. Legislators have been logging so many complaints about the cost of textbooks, the US Congress has passed a law that requires faculty to identify their required course texts before students register for classes, so that they can calculate how much the course will set them back and plan accordingly.

This is not pleasing to faculty, who now have to turn in their textbook orders much earlier, and it’s a huge headache for campus bookstores (which have to play along but will lose sales to used book vendors) and registrars who have to construct new registration procedures to enforce the law. If the courts rule against George State University, making students pay for virtually every assigned reading would be a politically toxic outcome. But it’s equally unlikely that cash-strapped institutions would be willing or able to subsidize the costs on behalf of students.

The most likely immediate outcome is that faculty would simply scale back on reading assignments. I can hear our students cheering already. But is this really good for higher education?

Going to the source

Many instructors prefer to expose students to scholarly work in its original form, rather than rely exclusively on textbooks that have combined and digested the most commonly-accepted research ideas into an accessible but bland survey.

Of course, faculty have other options. If pay-per-use proved to be too expensive, they could limit their assigned reading to open access scholarship or to materials that are licensed by the library for campus use—oh, but not including publications like the Harvard Business Review, which prohibits using its library-licensed articles in courses. (Personally, I think tenure and promotion committees should disregard any citations to this publication on candidate’s CVs, just to even the score.)

But knowledge isn’t built out of stuff that can be easily substituted, depending on cost and availability. It’s built out of unique ideas that were expressed by scholars in order to contribute something new to our understanding of the world. One of the reasons why market-based economics are so inappropriate for scholarly communication is that in the marketplace of ideas, you can’t win market share by offering a cheaper idea.

Each idea has to stand on its own merits, regardless of which publishing company owns the copyright. If I can’t afford the knowledge in an article published in Nature Neuroscience, I can’t correct the market by choosing an article in a cheaper journal. Even more confounding, being exclusive and rare does not increase the value of an idea; its value is measured by how often it’s shared.

From the publishers’ perspectiveTo try and understand the publishers’ argument, I read the original complaint, their motion for summary judgment, and supporting materials filed by two university presses and one for-profit scholarly press against four individuals: the president, provost, and heads of the library and IT operations at Georgia State University (which, the plaintiffs note, employs over 100 faculty who have written some of the materials these publishers make available; I wonder what they think about this lawsuit?). These seem to be the plaintiffs’ major points:

Revenue generated by course packs has gone down as e-reserve and CMS systems are adopted; students prefer not to purchase course packs because they are costly, so encourage their instructors to make readings available in an alternative form. It’s hard to know exactly what losses we’re talking about, since every sales figure has been redacted from the documents.

Seems it’s none of our business how much we spend on this stuff.

Some instructors’ course content is conveyed through scholarly texts that, though they have likely been acquired by the library on behalf of the campus, don’t generate new revenue for publishers as students are asked to read them. Implicit in this objection is that faculty should be requiring students to purchase most of their course materials and are engaging in spurious remix culture by creating their own spontaneous anthologies. Oh, for shame.

The plaintiffs feel that checklists used to guide fair use decisions are inappropriate because the people using them are not trained in the law, and such checklists (like the one posted at the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), which the plaintiffs otherwise endorse as a convenient resource for paying licenses) are too likely to support fair use claims. (Hat tip to Kevin Smith for the link to CCC’s checklist.)

Because readings are in digital form, students could copy and distribute works even if access is limited to enrolled students. Apparently students should not only pay per use, but that use should be limited in some fashion. This neglects the fact that library subscriptions to digital materials enable distribution of full-text articles; in fact, most databases, even SAGE Journals Online, have functions for saving or e-mailing copies of articles, enabling convenient sharing capability. (Maybe I shouldn’t be giving these people ideas.)

Colleges and universities should adhere to fair use guidelines as restrictive as those followed by publishers; one of the plaintiffs points out that when they publish a work that incorporates copyrighted material, they consider it fair use only if they use less than three percent of the work and the use is transformative—which assigned reading typically would not be. They suggest there is no way that reading scholarly materials without a payment for each student could be fair use.

I particularly like this bit of outrage: Students are able to get materials “without setting foot in a bookstore or expending a single cent on the copyrighted materials that lie at the heart of the educational experience.” Have they heard of libraries? Of course they have! We’re their biggest customers. But apparently we’re not at the heart of the educational experience, or if we are, we shouldn’t be.

I confess I laughed out loud at this statement: “This revenue is also vitally important to the authors of such works, and serves as a spur to, and reward for, creative expression.” There is no direct financial incentive for most academic authors to publish. However, having one of your articles assigned in courses, while not profitable, is sweet.

And then there’s this fit of pique: “Defendant’s acts have been and continue to be willful, intentional and purposeful, in violation of Plaintiff’s rights.” In other words, Georgia State didn’t roll over and settle out of court.

I admit, after reading their arguments, the only one that makes any sense to me is that the revenue stream that came from coursepacks is drying up, and publishers are concerned about how to sustain their operations. But is that reason enough to demand that the use of scholarly materials in courses should be metered on a pay-per-use basis? It seems to me irresponsible for scholarly publishers to attempt to criminalize the use of these materials in courses unless it generates additional income for them.

What are our options?

Raizel Liebler asked an excellent question at the LibraryLaw Blog back in 2008, when the complaint was first filed: is fair use dead? Or are traditional publishing models dying? She lays out five options for libraries if publishers win this lawsuit:

Pay permissions for everything placed on e-reserve. This, of course, will reduce our ability to buy new scholarship and will not enhance publishers’ bottom line.

Adopt a deeply conservative set of guidelines and hope they pass muster.

Tell faculty the only things they can put in e-reserves are links to licensed content that doesn’t prohibit such linking.

Cease offering e-reserves.

Change the system.

This last idea, of course, is the only option that has a positive outcome. We need to find a way that scholars can both systematically and impulsively share scholarly work with students without penalty. We need to find a way to support and sustain the editorial value provided by conscientious and professional publishing. We need to ensure that the materials libraries provide on behalf of their communities can be used to further students’ educations.

Something is badly broken when university presses sue universities for using their materials. We need to stop playing a shell game that merely shifts the costs and benefits around. It’s not sustainable.

I want my students to be happy, and I want our faculty to be more aware of the case for open access, but putting a tollgate on library materials used in courses is not the way to go."

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6724855.html

Thursday, March 18, 2010

In Court, a University and Publishers Spar Over 'Fair Use' of Course Materials; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/14/10

Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education; In Court, a University and Publishers Spar Over 'Fair Use' of Course Materials:

"Maybe you're a professor who wants to use a chunk of copyrighted material in your course this spring. Or perhaps you're a librarian or an academic publisher. If so, the much-followed Google Book Search settlement is not the only legal case you need to be watching. A federal case involving publishers and a state-university system, Cambridge University Press et al. v. Patton et al., should produce a ruling soon, and its stakes are high.

First, a little history. In the spring of 2008, three academic publishers, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and SAGE Publications, brought a lawsuit against several top administrators at Georgia State University. The plaintiffs claimed that the university was encouraging the unauthorized digital copying and distribution of too much copyrighted material, particularly through its ERes and uLearn systems. ERes allows students to access digital copies of course material via a password-protected Web page; uLearn is a program professors can use to distribute syllabi and reading material.

The three publishers alleged that the unauthorized copying was "pervasive, flagrant, and ongoing." In February 2009, Georgia State put in place a revised copyright policy, including a checklist for faculty members to help them decide whether the amount of material they wanted to copy exceeded fair use.

Almost two years and many depositions later, both sides have filed briefs asking for a summary judgment in the case.

Legal briefs are a dry genre, but these tussle over some of the central questions of fair use in an academic context: How much is too much when it comes to copying rights-protected content without permission? To what extent is it the institution's job to shepherd its professors and students through the thorny complexities of copyright?

Unfair Use

The publishers' filing attacks what it calls the university's "blanket presumption of 'fair use'" in a higher-education context. The filing goes after the university's new fair-use checklist and copyright policy, saying that it "delegates the responsibility for ensuring copyright compliance entirely to faculty unschooled in copyright law."

The plaintiffs quote from the depositions of several Georgia State professors who acknowledge that they are not always clear on the copyright issues at stake. ("This is outside of my area of expertise," one is quoted as saying.) The publishers want the university to use the Copyright Clearance Center's licensing system or something like it for course materials.

The defendants take a strict we-didn't-do-it view. Their brief argues that "any alleged unlawful reproduction, distribution, or improper use was actually done by instructors, professors, students, or library employees."

Georgia State's filing also argues that the new copyright policy has drastically reduced the use of the plaintiffs' copyrighted material. It agrees with the plaintiffs that the defendants have no budget for permissions fees and that "faculty members would decline to use works like those at issue if there was an obligation to pay permissions fees."

So on one side you have a set of major academic publishers understandably eager to protect revenue, and on the other side you have a university that says it doesn't promote copyright infringement and doesn't have the money to pay a lot of permissions fees. One implication (threat?) one could draw is that if professors can't use what they need at no charge, they will probably use something else.

Complexities of Copyrights

I asked Kevin L. Smith, the scholarly-communications officer at Duke University, for his reaction. Mr. Smith helps scholars sort out copyright complexities—a function that is becoming ever more essential in university life, as this case makes very clear—and he has written about the GSU case on his blog, Scholarly Communications

For the moment, publishers appear unwilling to go after individual professors. "These faculty members are the same people who provide the content that university presses publish, so it would be really self-defeating," Duke's copyright maven, Mr. Smith, explained. "It would also be an endless game of 'whack-a-mole.' They would prefer a broad judgment against a university."
In any case, the Duke expert said, a fair-use case like this deserves more than a summary judgment. This case cuts to the heart of how many professors choose course material now and how students use it. Summary judgment or not, Duke's Mr. Smith said, "I think faculty and administrators should be very concerned.""

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Court-a-University-and/64616/?key=Tz12clBqMCdEbCY2KCRCfndROXx9chlxPXoWMS4aYlBS

Sunday, July 19, 2009

That pesky checklist; Scholarly Communications @ Duke Blog, 7/19/09

Kevin Smith via Scholarly Communications @ Duke Blog; That pesky checklist:

"The recent flurry of activity in the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by publishers against Georgia State University has focused attention – mine, at least – on the “Fair Use Checklist” that has been adopted for use in quite a number of college and university copyright policies."

http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2009/07/19/that-pesky-checklist/

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Intersting development in Georgia State case; Scholarly Communications @ Duke Blog, 7/1/09

Kevin Smith via Scholarly Communications @ Duke Blog; Intersting [sic] development in Georgia State case:

"The copyright infringement lawsuit brought against Georgia State University by three major publishers has been in a relatively quiet phase recently...Nevertheless, there was a development in Cambridge University Press, et al. v. Georgia State University last week that could significantly change the stakes for the rest of the academic world as it watches this case unfold...

For the rest of us, this means that the decision about fair use, if the case gets that far, will be a lot more relevant to e-reserve and course management systems use around the country. That, of course, could be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how the decision goes. But it seems the decision will be based on policy and practice a lot closer to what many schools use (assuming, of course, that the new policy really does indicate changes in practice). Presumably a ruling in favor of fair use is a little more likely now that it will be decided on the basis of this more pragmatic policy. And such a ruling would more clearly support wide-spread practices in higher education. On the other hand, a ruling against Georgia State, if it happens, would be much harder for the rest of us to explain away and distinguish from our own practices."

http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/2009/07/01/intersting-development-in-georgia-state-case/