Titanic victory for fair use: appeals court says Google's book-scanning is legal; BoingBoing.net, 10/16/15

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing.net; Titanic victory for fair use: appeals court says Google's book-scanning is legal:

"The Second Circuit ruling is remarkable for many reasons. First, the venue: the Second, which incorporates publishing's home base in New York City, is a court that is generally favorable to rightsholders. This isn't the first time the Second has surprised copyright extremists, though: last year, the court ruled that the Hathi Trust's noncommercial/academic book-scanning project was also fair use, making this the second high-profile loss for the Authors Guild in two years.

The Hathi Trust ruling completely freaked out the Authors Guild and copyright maximalists everywhere. The Copyright Office, which is friendly to those interests, was motivated by Hathi to create a bizarre, incoherent proposal to put the Authors Guild in charge of who can use literature in America, giving them the power to collect license payments on behalf of writers who never joined the organization, including anonymous and long-dead writers -- this, of course, would give the Authors Guild more money with which to launch foolish, doomed, high-profile lawsuits.

The Librarian of Congress is retiring after a generation in office and may well be replaced by someone who believes in fair use and user rights and a balanced approach to copyright, and since the Librarian of Congress controls the Copyright Office, the people outraged by Hathi are totally flipping out and calling for the separation of the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office, so that they can continue to have outsized influence over the future of creativity, culture and scholarship in America.

The Google Books ruling will only make this fight more intense. Appointing a new Librarian will be one of Obama's last acts in office, and the Democratic party is deeply riven by internal disputes between the netroots and the big entertainment companies who are its financial backers. The war-rooms of both camps are definitely buzzing this morning."

Senate Passes 10 Year Term for Librarian of Congress; Library Journal, 10/13/15

Bob Warburton, Library Journal; Senate Passes 10 Year Term for Librarian of Congress:

"As President Obama ponders his choice for the next Librarian of Congress, the first time in nearly three decades that such a nomination will be necessary, the U.S. Senate has passed a bill to put a 10-year term on the position. If passed by the House and signed by the president, the bill will strip the job of the lifetime tenure it has carried since 1802...

Politics aside, another reason supporters feel the limit is now necessary is the accelerating rate of change—in library service, in technology, and in the demands on and challenges to copyright law that tech brings in its wake."

In Choreographed Campaigns, Candidates Stumble Over Choice of Music; New York Times, 10/12/15

Ben Sisario, New York Times; In Choreographed Campaigns, Candidates Stumble Over Choice of Music:

"The disputes also point to what experts say is a legal gray area over licensing rules for music in political campaigns.

After Neil Young complained in June that Mr. Trump had used his song “Rockin’ in the Free World” without permission, Mr. Trump’s campaign responded that it had obtained a so-called public performance license from Ascap, the music rights agency. In addition, the venues where most major campaign events are held — convention halls, hotels, sports arenas — often carry their own licenses from Ascap and BMI, another rights agency, that allow them to play the millions of songs in those agencies’ catalogs.

The issue gets more complicated when the uses of these songs are captured on video and shared on social media — as they almost inevitably are."

Wikileaks release of TPP deal text stokes 'freedom of expression' fears; Guardian, 10/9/15

Sam Thielman, Guardian; Wikileaks release of TPP deal text stokes 'freedom of expression' fears:

"Among the provisions in the chapter (which may or may not be the most recent version) are rules that say that each country in the agreement has the authority to compel anyone accused of violating intellectual property law to provide “relevant information [...] that the infringer or alleged infringer possesses or controls” as provided for in that country’s own laws.

The rules also state that every country has the authority to immediately give the name and address of anyone importing detained goods to whoever owns the intellectual property.

That information can be very broad, too: “Such information may include information regarding any person involved in any aspect of the infringement or alleged infringement,” the document continues, “and regarding the means of production or the channels of distribution of the infringing or allegedly infringing goods or services, including the identification of third persons alleged to be involved in the production and distribution of such goods or services and of their channels of distribution.”"

A ‘Star Trek’ Dream, Spread From Upstate New York; New York Times, 10/11/15

Paul Post, New York Times; A ‘Star Trek’ Dream, Spread From Upstate New York:

Mr. Cawley founded a nonprofit 12 years ago to create the series. It was produced in two smaller spaces before moving last year into a studio inside the old Family Dollar store, where an inaugural episode was shot in early summer. “It’s basically a big Star Trek fan club,” he said. “It gives people a chance to work on the show and be on the show. Episodes are basically crowdfunded, crowdsourced for the fans, by the fans.”

Mr. Cawley’s sets are careful replicas of those used for the original series, including the transporter room (“Scotty, beam us up”), captain’s bridge — where Kirk guided the Enterprise to bold new worlds — and the sick bay, where Dr. Leonard McCoy treated ill crew members...

“Star Trek” was first broadcast on NBC, but the rights to the show are now owned by CBS. The Ticonderoga studio steers away from copyright issues by not charging people to view the episodes, Mr. Cawley said."

Flooding Threatens The Times’s Picture Archive; New York Times, 10/12/15

David W. Dunlap, New York Times; Flooding Threatens The Times’s Picture Archive:

"A broken pipe on Saturday morning sent water cascading into the morgue — the storage area where The Times keeps its immense collection of historical photos, along with newspaper clippings, microfilm records, books and other archival material — causing minor damage and raising significant alarm.

And it raised the question of how in the digital age — and in the prohibitive Midtown Manhattan real estate market — can some of the company’s most precious physical assets and intellectual property be safely and reasonably stored?

Jeff Roth, the morgue manager, said it appeared that about 90 percent of the affected photos would be salvageable, but it is too early to say with any certainty how many were lost.

Though he stood undaunted among rubber drums and wastebaskets catching the residual water dripping from the ceiling, Mr. Roth made it clear that this was the stuff of nightmares."

Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood; New York Times, 9/26/15

David Gelles, Hiroko Tabuchi, and Matthew Dolan, New York Times; Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood:

“We should be allowed to know how the things we buy work,” Mr. Moglen of Columbia University said. “Let’s say everybody who bought a Volkswagen were guaranteed the right to read the source code of everything in the car,” he said.

“Ninety-nine percent of the buyers would never read anything. But out of the 11 million people whose car was cheating, one of them would have found it,” he said. “And Volkswagen would have been caught in 2009, not 2015.”

Automakers aren’t buying the idea...

Volkswagen, through its trade association, has been one of the most vocal and forceful opponents of an exemption to a copyright rule that would allow independent researchers to look at a car’s source code, said Kit Walsh, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for user privacy and free expression.

“If copyright law were not an impediment,” he said, “then we could have independent researchers go in and look at the code and find this kind of intentional wrongdoing, just as we have independent watchdogs that check vehicle safety with crash-test dummies.”"