FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Stanford Center Advocates for Fair Use on Web

npr has an interesting podcast on the Stanford Center's Fair Use Project.  You can listen to it here:

Posted by Jon Lutz

The Threat of Open Access

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is the creation of a group of physicians and scientists who believe that scientific and medical research (much of which is publicly funded) should be freely available to the public.  They publish several free online journals.  According to an article in Nature, the for-profit publishers have begun to see the open-access movement as a serious threat, and they have hired a public relations firm to develop a campaign against PloS and the PubMed service provided by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health.

Posted by Robin Gault

Fair Use Roundtable Discussion

The Library of Congress Section 108 Study Group will hold a roundtable discussion in Chicago on January 31, 2007.  The discussion will focus on the exceptions and limitations applicable to libraries and archives under the Copyright Act.

Posted by Faye Jones

Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material

A report by the Berkman Center for Internet Study and funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on copyright and education had been released.  It's titled: The Digital Learning Challenge: Obstacles to Educational Uses of Copyrighted Material in the Digital Age.  The report discusses obstacles to the educational use of copyrighted material such as:

1. Unclear or inadequate copyright law relating to crucial provisions such as fair use and educational use;
2. Extensive adoption of "digital rights management" technology to lock up content;
3. Practical difficulties obtaining rights to use content when licenses are necessary;
4. Undue caution by gatekeepers such as publishers or educational administrators.

Click on the title above to read the report.

Posted by Jon Lutz

The Economics of Attention

In a recent book by Richard Lanham The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information, Lanham suggests that in the future the most precious resource of the new information economy won't be information but style.  There is so much information that it is style what will get peoples' attention.  With this shift intellectual property will become more important than real property.  The fields of liberal arts and humanities will become more important because they study how human attention is allocated. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Open Access Law Scholarship

Many scholars are concerned that the commercialization of scholarly publishing, particularly in the sciences, serves as a barrier to progress.  One proposed answer is "open access" publishing.

Science Commons encourages more widespread sharing of scholarly information, including legal scholarship.  Their Open Access Law Program has a variety of resources including a Model Publishing Agreement.

For a look at the economics of open access to legal scholarship, see this recent SSRN article.

Robin Gault

Google and Miró Family in a Mire of Copyright Unpleasantness

While aiming for good cheer in honor of surrealist painter Joan Miró's birthday on April 20, Google has stepped on a few toes:

"The family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google’s logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site." (Elise Ackerman from Mercury News, via Drawn!)

"'There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró, and they are putting it up without having the rights,' said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society." (via Drawn! and Wikipedia)

Posted by Toni Urquhart

"Happy Birthday" Gets Cut?

Documentary filmmakers may soon have cause not to say “Cut!” every time they are filming at a party where everyone is singing “Happy Birthday.” For a group of scholars who “hope to breathe new life into a legal doctrine called ‘fair use,’” (WSJ) a comic book—a project of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain—might just do the trick.

Akiko, the filmmaker and star of Bound by Law?, takes to the streets of New York City to film a day of life in Gotham, capturing everything from singing street vendors to Homer Simpson projected from a television in his favorite hangout—a bar. The filming is running along quite smoothly until Akiko runs into a roadblock called: The Doctrine of Fair Use.

The intended purpose of this comic book is to help budget-challenged documentary filmmakers make sense of copyright law and encourage them to “start exercising their rights and even be prepared to take the occasional case to court.”

Posted by Toni Urquhart

The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography

Charles W. Bailey, Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries, has posted this bibliography on his blog, DigitalKoans.  The publications listed are freely available on the web and many of them focus on the legal issues surrounding the Google Print Project.  The Project is working with publishers and several major research libraries in order to scan books and make the content searchable through Google.

Posted by Anne Bardolph

TCNY: Not a Matter of Settled Law

The New Yorker has released its entire archives in an eight-DVD set. Every article and cartoon that the magazine has published in the last 80 years--this is material covering over 4,000 issues--has been condensed into this one volume. (Here's a demo.)

According to Boston Globe columnist, Alex Beam, this significant resource presents an interesting copyright question: What gives them the right to publish this? Have New Yorker contributors such as William Maxwell and John Updike "signed over their electronic rights to the Tilley gang?" He further asks, "...does the ghost of Rachel Carson have a cause of action?"

General counsel for the magazine, Edward Klaris, explains "that The New Yorker can publish the DVDs because of a Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision in March involving National Geographic, which put out a digital version of the 'Complete National Geographic' in 1997."

Beam has discovered that the copyright question is, "as our friend John Roberts might say ... not a matter of settled law."

For now, keep in mind "the lawyer's motto: Every proposition is arguable."

Posted by Toni Urquhart