FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

The Creative Heritage Project

In today's technological  society, digitization and the internet offer immediate access to all types of  media.  Formerly unavailable music, art, performances, designs, symbols, and  stories from around the world are being disseminated and enjoyed.  For educators, artists, and students this opens up new opportunities to learn about varied peoples and cultures.  It can also help provide ways to preserve fast-disappearing traditional ceremonies and language, and even help stimulate the economic development of ethnic populations.  But in the legal community, questions of intellectual property rights can be raised.  Where does the celebration of a culture end, and exploitation of its artists begin?

•            Is it okay for an ethnomusicologist to record a shaman singing in the Amazon jungle, and use the tape as a classroom resource?

•           Can an anthropologist video ceremonial dances of the Hopi Indian Tribe and include the DVD in the next edition of her book?

•             How about if a blues musician mixes some tracks of an Australian Aborigine playing a didgeridoo into his upcoming commercial CD?
  

Who owns the data collected?  Who is authorized to distribute or publish it?  Does it matter if it is for scholarly use rather than commercial?  What constitutes misappropriation of the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples?

In response to researchers and field-workers in native cultures, and tribal communities themselves, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is developing the Creative Heritage Project as a way of exploring answers to these questions.  When fully established, the project will include

•             Information and guidance for researchers and collectors on intellectual property issues during digitization projects

•             Technical support to indigenous communities for the recording and digitization of cultural expressions, and the establishment of digital collections and websites

•             The WIPO Creative Heritage Digital Gateway, a portal through which to access websites of indigenous communities and cultural institutions
  

So whether you're a intellectual property specialist, ethnomusicologist, student of tribal design, collector of folklore, anthropologist, or world citizen sensitive to the commercial exploitation of indigenous peoples, the Creative Heritage Project offers assistance and guidelines to make the best decisions for everyone concerned.

Click here for a pdf brochure on the Creative Heritage Project, and here to browse the database of existing codes, guidelines and practices.

Posted by Patricia Bingham-Harper

Magic and the Law

Can magicians keep others from replicating a trick or illusion that they've developed?  Or keep others from divulging the secrets behind the illusion that make it marketable? 

Magicians have an uneasy relationship with Intellectual Property Law. Copyright Law can protect written scripts, stage directions, and recordings of a performance, but not the process or method of the illusion itself.  To patent a process is possible, but the magician would have to furnish a detailed explanation of how the illusion is done, thus destroying the "magic."  Magicians need to protect their secrets from the public, but not necessarily from each other.  It's a widespread practice to share tricks of the trade with other master magicians and publish methodology in  magicians' journals.  Once information is shared within an industry, Trade Secret Law no longer applies.

These questions and more are addressed in a paper by Yale Law School's Jacob Loshin: "Secrets Revealed: How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property  Without Law."   This interesting and entertaining article will eventually be published in the upcoming Law and Magic: A Collection of Essays (Carolina Academic Press, 2008).  In the meantime, to make a working draft appear, click on this link and whisper  "Abracadabra..."

Posted by Patricia Bingham-Harper

The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds

What are the legal implications of virtual worlds, such as Second Life?  Jack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck examine the changing face of virtual reality and the associated legal issues in The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds. Some of the topics include property and creativity in virtual worlds and privacy and identity in virtual worlds.  One interesting chapter examines democracy in virtual worlds and the future of collective action. 

On page 3, Balkin and Noveck note that "Millions of people around the globe now play in these virtual or synthetic worlds.  In fact, many of the 20 to 30 million regular participants now spend more time in virtual environments than they do at their real world jobs or engaged in their real-world communities; according to one estimate, the average number of hours played is almost twenty-two per week.  People who do not vote or engage in politics in real space eagerly do so in virtual spaces, drawn by the promise of new adventures, new identities, and the possibility of building new social universes."

The State of Play authors had an associated State of Play conference in 2003 sponsored by the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School and the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.  The State of Play conference is now in its 4th year and will be held in Singapore in 2007.  It is sponsored by Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, New York Law School and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.  The organizers describe it as a "pioneering conference on virtual worlds inviting experts across disciplines to discuss the future of cyberspace and the impact of these new immersive, social online environments on education, law, politics and society." Excerpt taken from: http://www.nyls.edu/pages/5057.asp.

The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual Worlds is available in the FSU Law Library (K 3705 .V53 S73)

Posted by Marin Dell

Code: Version 2.0

Lawrence Lessig has updated his "minor classic" Code: Version 2.0. Here's a description from Amazon.com.

The "alarming and impassioned"* book on how the Internet is redefining constitutional law, now reissued as the first popular book revised online by its readers (*New York Times)

There's a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated-that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government's (or anyone else's) control. Code, first published in 2000, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the nature of cyberspace to be unregulable; cyberspace has no "nature." It only has code-the software and hardware that make cyberspace what it is. That code can create a place of freedom-as the original architecture of the Net did-or a place of oppressive control. Under the influence of commerce, cyberpsace is becoming a highly regulable space, where behavior is much more tightly controlled than in real space. But that's not inevitable either. We can-we must-choose what kind of cyberspace we want and what freedoms we will guarantee. These choices are all about architecture: about what kind of code will govern cyberspace, and who will control it. In this realm, code is the most significant form of law, and it is up to lawyers, policymakers, and especially citizens to decide what values that code embodies.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Digging Into the Roots of Research Ethics

There have been examples of researchers violating ethical standards to enhance their own careers.  However Kelly P. Bannister, an ethnobotanist at the University of Victoria went our of her way to protect the indigenous group she researched on their use of plants for food and medicine. 

she withheld extracts of the plants from her graduate supervisor, who wanted to sell them to a pharmaceutical company. Then, when she finished her dissertation, she had it sealed for five years. She didn't want companies to profit from her published work, perhaps at the expense — or at least at the displeasure — of the Indian groups that had collaborated with her.

Ms. Bannister, 41, an adjunct professor of environmental studies, directs a research-and-policy center dedicated to environmental projects at Victoria. She is in demand for publishing on the ethics of research involving aboriginal peoples, and she sits on several university, national, and international committees working to reform research policies.

Her studies focus on making academic research, writ large, more equitable to the indigenous groups it often studies. She concentrates on intellectual property — the stories, songs, and traditions of aboriginal peoples, which have in the past often been exploited or published without the agreement of those who shared them with the researchers.

Read the entire article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Sept. 1, 2006 issue):  Digging into the Roots of Research Ethics: How a Canadian ethnobotanist became a champion of research that advances the lot of indigenous peoples

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

"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

Publishers sue Google

A group of publishers sued Google yesterday, alleging that Google's Print Library Project violates federal copyright law.

Posted by Mary McCormick

Author's Guild v. Google

Findlaw has posted the complaint by the Author's Guild and individual authors against Google alleging copyright infringement for its plans to reproduce and publish massive quantities of books that are not in the public domain on its website: http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/google/aggoog92005cmp.pdf

Posted by Mary McCormick