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Copyright for Librarians is a useful resource for anyone–not just librarians–to learn about the current state of copyright law.

It’s a joint project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL), a consortium of libraries from 50 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe.

The training course is aimed at librarians in developing countries, but most of the information is based on U.S. copyright law for the time being. According to the “objectives” on the site, it seeks to provide training on:

• copyright law in general
• the aspects of copyright law that most affect libraries
• how librarians in the future could most effectively participate in the processes by which copyright law is interpreted and shaped.

Even though the training materials are intended for librarians, the site provides a useful background for anyone interested in copyright law. Recommended.

Now the Obama Administration (specifically, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP) is considering extending the policy to other federal agencies that fund academic research.

via Putting the “Public” In Publicly-Funded Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I am a big supporter of open access to research. I think it provides a large public benefit at a minimal cost to anyone, even private publishers (who, I think, can and do make most of their profit on rapid dissemination of new materials to those who want them now, not six months or more later). Yes, publishers add some value through editorial management and processing, but most authors aren’t compensated, and many publishers are making large profits without adding enough value to justify the cost.

The Legal Information Services to the Public (LISP) Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) just completed its latest version of How to Research a Legal Problem: A Guide for Non-Lawyers. It’s available in PDF and Word formats from the LISP website.

via How to Research A Legal Problem: A Guide for Non-Lawyers « Cocky Law Blawg.

The mission of LIPS is to improve access to legal education and to promote legal information services to the public. In addition to the Guide for Non-Lawyers, they also provide a toolkit for public librarians.

Now that access to case law is even easier for the general public to access (via Google Scholar), this kind of Guide is critical to avoid misunderstandings of the unique complexities and challenges of legal research.

The cloud consists of data and services that live on someone else’s servers. Although the term itself is new(ish), the basic idea is embodied by traditional legal research services like LexisNexis and Westlaw — data lives on someone else’s servers, not your own. Thus, someone else controls the data, not you. And someone else can delete or modify the data, and you’d never know…

It’s one thing to have to contend with Supreme Courts, like California, that have the power to “depublish” an opinion that helps your case and making it worthless as far as precedent is concerned. But to my knowledge, those cases are still on the books, and binding on the parties to the litigation that created the opinion. It’s an entirely different problem when a court can ask a publisher to take down an opinion previously published, and the publisher does it. In fact, the publisher has apparently been doing it for years. Maybe you knew about it, but I didn’t.

via Dear Publisher, Please Stop Deleting Case Law | Jason Wilson | Law Publishers.

This is the sort of thing that has always given librarians heart attacks — to the extent that one librarian I knew years ago attempted to print out every Web site she ever accessed and stored them in file cabinets. A bit extreme? Yes, but the point was that she could control it once it was in print: the data couldn’t disappear, change, etc.

I don’t have the solution to this conundrum — cloud services make too much sense to fight — but the downsides are expensive, too. What to do, what to do?

The central question in the privacy debate that EFF and our partners at the ACLU of Northern California and the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley have been having with Google about Google Book Search is whether this exciting new digital library/bookstore is going to maintain the strong protections for reader privacy that traditional libraries and bookstores have fought for and largely won.

via Warrants Required: EFF and Google’s Big Disagreement about Google Book Search | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I think I can safely say that I am in agreement with the ACLU and EFF on this one. Warrants, requiring judicial approval, are an important safeguard, although not perfect. They are routine for most investigations of physical locations, and, I think, ought to be so for virtual ones as well.

Of course, this prevents large-scale “data mining” activities by governments, who could conceivable flag suspicious activity for future investigation — but that, I think, is how it should be.

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• Lethem and EFF on why Google Book Search needs privacy guarantees (boingboing.net)
• Legal advocates ask for privacy protections in Google Books (news.cnet.com)
• Google responds to publishers (inpropriapersona.com)

Sean, a Zotero co-director, announced yesterday that the lawsuit filed by Thomson Reuters (makers of EndNote) was dismissed yesterday:

I’m delighted to announce that this morning the Fairfax Circuit Court dismissed the lawsuit filed against Zotero by Thomson Reuters. The lawsuit had claimed that the Center for History and New Media “reverse-engineered” Thomson Reuters’s EndNote software to provide data interoperability between Zotero and EndNote.

via Thomson Reuters Lawsuit Dismissed at The Quintessence of Ham.

While some are billing this as a victory for open-source software — which, in some sense at least, it is, since it avoids a further attack on this front against Zotero development — the case was never quite about copyright or open source. In its essense, this case instead focused on a contract claim that George Mason University violated the EndNote contract by developing an “import” feature for Zotero. The GMU site license for EndNote (which I understand GMU did not renew) forbid reverse engineering, and Thomson Reuters believed that this was the method used by Zotero’s developers to create the EndNote import function.

Details are still sketchy, but Sean promises to have court transcripts up next week.

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• Zotero Goes 2.0: Makes Doing Research in Groups Easier (readwriteweb.com)

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Looking for alternatives to expensive legal research through Westlaw and LexisNexis? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of ten alternative sources for legal research (aimed primarily at lawyers and law students) that are useful — and much cheaper:

1. Quimbee — a case brief database.

2. PreCYdent — an “open law source” and legal opinion search.

3. SSRN — an ideal source for cutting-edge legal scholarship (and a repository of older articles too).

4. AltLaw — free access to federal case law, but not as up-to-date as other sources.

5. FindLaw — free access to case law, provided by Westlaw’s owner.

6. LexisONE — Lexis’ answer to West’s FindLaw: the last ten years of state and federal court opinions, and U.S. Supreme Court opinions from 1781 to present, all free.

7. VersusLaw — inexpensive subscription alternative to LexisNexis and Westlaw (federal and state appellate case law).

8. Fastcase — subscription-based online case law research service, providing access to law, court cases, statutes, and regulations, at reason.

9. CALI — The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction provides free online training in most law school subjects.

10. Your local law library — paper and electronic resources, plus librarians who can help:

• Find a law library in California
• Counties often have public law libraries
• Many law schools have law libraries open to the public

For help with conducting legal research, ask a law librarian or consult the Gallagher Law Library’s legal research guide. If you are not a lawyer but still need to do legal research, you might also find it useful to read How to Research a Legal Problem: A Guide for Non-Lawyers.

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• Open Access Law (inpropriapersona.com)
• FastCase.com — Legal Information On The Web (killerstartups.com)
• Social Science Research Network (SSRN) (inpropriapersona.com)
• Law 2.0: JD Supra Frees Legal Content (techcrunch.com)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is much maligned, but, I think, not fully understood by very many people. Today, a visitor to our Software Law class from Microsoft presented a very good explanation of the 1998 law. He explained some aspects that are not spoken about too much in the general tech community, like the ISP “Safe Harbor” provision—which actually applies quite a bit beyond the traditional ISP and could easily include YouTube or even your average blogger. In many respects, the DMCA is quite generous, requiring limited policing of content, provided one is handling 3rd-party uploads, for example.

We finished with a discussion about what changes to the DMCA might be beneficial. One point he made was that ISPs (remember, this includes YouTube, for example) should be required to take more active “filtering” or policing roles, instead of forcing content-owners to do the work of identifying infringing content.

To me, this approach reflected a content-owner perspective on the law, and attempting to balance that somewhat with the needs of corporate ISPs (including the likes of Google). The ideas he had are arguably good changes to close perceived “loopholes” in the DMCA and to better reflect the original Congressional intent behind the DMCA.

However, the end result appeared to me very corporate focused. It attempts to re-balance the needs of these two interest groups while ignoring what our professor termed the “third pillar” of copyright and content: the consumer. Thus, I asked, what exactly do I get out of restricting use of copyrighted content? More content? More stable companies? Perhaps.

But the “black-or-white” alternative of eliminating intellectual property rights rubs me the wrong way, too. Are we not all content producers these days? While I often appreciate finding my content re-purposed, I prefer that I still, at the very least, receive credit for my work. I think an author/creator (but not necessarily an IP “owner”) deserves recompense during a reasonable (i.e., not the current length of time) for use that generates revenue. In other words, if you want to sell my work, I should get a slice of what you receive for that. But if you truly give it away, credit is all I ask. (For this site, I actually use the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.)

The U.S. Constitution does not require IP protection as we have it now. Its focus is on promoting “progress” (whatever that means, of course) in science and the arts (through limited monopolies). The goal is to benefit society, at least in the longer term, not to enrich property owners. So, I ask, do current IP protections truly promote progress? I don’t think they do so at all effectively.

Perhaps we should be pulling more from the French tradition of “moral rights” of authors to find our way out of this quandary. Other than companies and their vested interests, most of the objections I hear from people is the idea that creators are exploited by “pirated” works (but aren’t musical labels in the exploitation business, too?). So why not protect against this by, for example, requiring attribution and revenue-sharing?

This does not address the issue of control, though, another feature of French-style “moral rights.” Should a creator be able to refuse a particular use of his or her work? I think there is a good argument for allowing this in at least some situations. In fact, perhaps this kind of right should last longer than other copyright protections or the right to revenue.

This applies to the creator or creators. But should those rights be transferable? I have no real problem with the revenue-generation portion being transferable (with, perhaps, some reservations to avoid exploitation original authors, and with a more limited duration), but I do not think other “moral rights” should be transferable. (Of course, much creation is collaborative, so one would need to deal with the lack of single authorship too.)

There is much to think about still, but I think the take-away lesson for me is that too often IP law focuses on the large players (and especially on content owners) and ignores the people involved–and especially ignores consumers (perhaps we assume the market will take care of that side… which is another additional discussion…) All in all, a good class and a good presentation about the topic.

For more on consumers and copyright, see, for example:

• A Response to “A Reader’s Guide to Copyright” at the Copyright Advisory Network
• Copyright Doesn’t Just Grant the Content Creator Rights at techdirt
• Creative Consumer Copyright Act by Kevin Donovan
• Copyright Law’s Theory of the Consumer by Joseph Liu (on SSRN)

Will the Internet Replace Universities? | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine:

Via Brad DeLong, an article by Kevin Carey in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts with the obvious — the Internet is killing newspapers as we knew them — and asks whether the same will happen to universities.

Kevin Carey, in the original article cited above, writes:

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.

Cosmic Variance points out the variety of functions available through more traditional university environments, from belonging to a community, to participating in extracurricular activities and becoming independent. He suggests strongly that it would be “too bad” if current instruction were to be replaced by an online model, much as the Internet has supplanted print newspapers.

Reader comments have interesting perspectives on the matter, too. Personally, I am inclined to agree that an online, Web-based education would have provided perhaps twenty percent of what I learned during my undergraduate education, and perhaps fifty percent or more of my law school education. Law school has simple been so much more fact-specific and detailed in its teaching in a way that my undergraduate learning was not. On the other hand, nothing could replace my judicial externship experience or certain interactions with some faculty in law school. But this in-person, experiential aspect was far more critical for me as an undergraduate, where learning facts was far less important than learning to think critical, engage with the world on my own, and seek out my own path distinct from what I thought I should be doing with my life. All achievable independent of a physical university, I would think, but perhaps more difficult and less likely to occur as effectively.

Regardless, I do not think the physical university is going anywhere, but I do think online options are, will be, and ought to be critical supplements, particularly in certain areas of learning.

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Law Librarians, Schools Propose Bold Move to Digital, Open Access Alternative — Library Journal

In a broad call to action, a group of the nations’ law schools and law librarians have signed the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. In essence, the statement urges law schools to adopt digital communication, forgo print, and publish, archive, and widely disseminate its scholarship online.

My first thought is that law schools are often terribly slow to change. Then again, I’ve seen a general acceptance of open access ideas in the legal academy (SSRN, for example), so maybe this is not that out there after all. Part of me things, too, that perhaps open access will be easier to achieve than simply getting rid of paper!

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• Legal Scholarship, Electronic Publishing, and Open Access (inpropriapersona.com)
• Law libraries ask for open access (hyperorg.com)