EU rejects international solution to library and archive copyright problems; causes collapse of WIPO meeting; IFLA, 5/6/14

IFLA; EU rejects international solution to library and archive copyright problems; causes collapse of WIPO meeting:

"Discussions by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright & Related Rights (SCCR) broke down in the early hours of Saturday morning 3 May, after the European Union (EU) attempted to block future discussion of copyright laws to aid libraries and archives fulfill their missions in the digital environment.

Library and archive delegations from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Australia, the United States, Canada and the UK attended the 27th meeting of the SCCR from 28 April – 2 May 2014, to push for an international treaty to help libraries and archives preserve cultural heritage, facilitate access to essential information by people wherever they are in the world.

The meeting ended in disarray at 1:30am on Saturday morning, after the EU tried to have crucial references to “text-based” work on copyright exceptions removed from the meeting conclusions - a move viewed by other Member States and library and archive NGOs present as an attempt to delay, if not derail, any progress on copyright exceptions at WIPO."

The Conservative Case For Taking On The Copyright Lobby; Business Insider, 4/30/14

Derek Khanna, Business Insider; The Conservative Case For Taking On The Copyright Lobby:

"Current U.S. law provides copyright protection for the life of the author plus 70 years. For corporate authors, the term is 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication. But those changes reflect only part of the reality. In fact, lobbyists have usurped the policymaking process itself to ensure that whenever one term of copyright is set to expire the law is extended.

Several times, these extensions have even been made retroactively, reapplying copyright protections to works that already had moved into the public domain. Thus, the degree to which the current life-plus-70 standard can be relied on to accurately project when a specific work may move into the public domain is limited.

The practical effect of this policy is, effectively, a regime of indefinite copyright. During oral arguments of the 2002 case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said of the policy of continual copyright extension that it "flies directly in the face of what the framers had in mind, absolutely."

If You Repeat A Lie Often Enough

Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture Academy of America, testified during the legislative runup to passage of 1998's Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (colloquially known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act) that "copyright term extension has a simple but compelling enticement: it is very much in America's economic interests."

We have lots of reasons to be skeptical of Valenti’s claim. One, it wasn’t backed by data. Two, there is overwhelming data to the contrary from economists. Three, Valenti was well known for making stuff up that was demonstrably untrue and for having little regard for the rest of the economy."

Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely; New York Times, 4/30/14

Noam Cohen, New York Times; Claiming a Copyright on Marx? How Uncomradely:

"The Marxist Internet Archive, a website devoted to radical writers and thinkers, recently received an email: It must take down hundreds of works by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels or face legal consequences.

The warning didn’t come from a multinational media conglomerate but from a small, leftist publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, which asserted copyright ownership over the 50-volume, English-language edition of Marx’s and Engels’s writings.

To some, it was “uncomradely” that fellow radicals would deploy the capitalist tool of intellectual property law to keep Marx’s and Engels’s writings off the Internet. And it wasn’t lost on the archive’s supporters that the deadline for complying with the order came on the eve of May 1, International Workers’ Day...

Still, Mr. Walters said the archive respected the publisher’s copyright, which covers the translated works, not the German originals from the 19th century. On Wednesday, the archive removed the disputed writings with a note blaming the publisher and a bold headline: “File No Longer Available!”"

Open data: slow down Whitehall's approach has the subtlety of a smash-and-grab-raider and it must take its own advice on best practice; Guardian, 4/18/14

Editorial, Guardian; Open data: slow down Whitehall's approach has the subtlety of a smash-and-grab-raider and it must take its own advice on best practice:

"Open data is potentially of incalculable value. The capacity to merge and manipulate information from a range of public bodies is already delivering wider benefit that ranges from better policing to environmental protection. It will lead to sharper policy making, cheaper drugs and improved health strategies. More contentiously, it could also develop into a valuable revenue stream for government. Whitehall is understandably excited about the potential. But it is approaching the whole open data project with the subtlety of a smash-and-grab raider...

A year ago, the government's own review into open data was published. Its first call was for a National Data Strategy, open to audit, that would set out what data should be released and in what form. Other recommendations included a focus on security, releasing anonymised data only into "safe havens" and introducing tough penalties on end users that fail to safeguard it. This may be part of the best practice HMRC insists it is committed to observing, but external experts are sceptical. Whitehall needs to take its own advice. It needs a strategy, one that explains exactly what the criteria for release of data are, sets out security safeguards that withstand challenge and introduces tough penalties for any breach that demonstrate a genuine respect for privacy."

The Shadow of the Billion-Dollar Copyright Award; National Law Review, 4/28/14

John K. Burke and Vedder Price, National Law Review; The Shadow of the Billion-Dollar Copyright Award:

"On March 18, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision with significant impact for copyright owners in Alaska Stock v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pub. Co., holding that a registration for a compilation covers any copyrightable component works that are also owned by the applicant, even if the registration application did not list the title and author of each component work.

This ruling affirms that a copyright owner can obtain a single copyright registration covering a large number of works. For example, a magazine might contain over 100 separately copyrighted images along with 10 individually copyrighted articles. If the copyrights for the compilation, the photographs and the articles are held by a single owner, all of these works may be covered using a single registration by applying for a copyright in the compilation of the magazine. Using this approach, the owner is saved from needing to submit 111 separate copyright applications, each requiring a separate application and fee.

Going forward, content distributors such as website operators that regularly publish large numbers of copyrighted works must take care to ensure they only use works with the permission of the copyright owner."

With Aereo, Supreme Court digs into copyright nuances; CNet, 4/22/14

Joan E. Solsman, CNet; With Aereo, Supreme Court digs into copyright nuances:

"The Supreme Court, grilling lawyers for TV-streaming service Aereo and the broadcast TV companies seeking to shut it down, focused Tuesday on issues of private versus public performance, universal uncertainty about risks to cloud computing, and the difference between true innovation versus technological cleverness to avoid paying for content.

At stake in the copyright case is how people watch and pay for TV in the digital age, and how the companies that create content are compensated. The case could also call into question the legality of cloud-computing services unrelated to TV, something several justices brought up with both sides."

At Stake in the Aereo Case Is How We Watch TV; David Carr, 4/22/14

David Carr, New York Times; At Stake in the Aereo Case Is How We Watch TV:

"Again and again, Aereo has been tagged as a Rube Goldberg-like invention. Some justices appeared to agree with that view, suggesting that Aereo was exploiting a loophole, a clever end run around federal copyright law...

Aereo is a hybrid of old and new, built on a legion of miniature antennas that grab programming out of the airwaves, as has happened since the dawn of television, but then storing that content in the cloud to be called down in an instant or at a time of the subscriber’s choosing. As arguments proceeded, you could see the justices grappling with the implications attached to the start-up: was it a cable company, was it a cloud storage enterprise, and most important, was it distributing the broadcasters’ programming to the public and if so, should it pay the price for doing so?"