Peter @brokep Sunde’s insightful and moving account of The Pirate Bay proceeedings http://t.co/T7G9xzMI #corruption #copyfight

— Morten Blaabjerg (@mblaa) July 07, 2012 at 08:02PM

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Et retfærdigt samfund – Om min vej til det politiske part #3 : http://t.co/n81snyeW #landvaluetax #copyfight

— Morten Blaabjerg (@mblaa) July 06, 2012 at 09:17AM

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Skatter! Skaaaatter! Underbara, tjusiga skatter! Om min vej til det politiske part #1 http://t.co/Qpv8iesU #copyfight

— Morten Blaabjerg (@mblaa) June 23, 2012 at 10:44AM

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Items tagged #copyfight on Google+ (and a test of my new http://t.co/ixLyd27t Twitter-to-Wordpress “recipe”) : https://t.co/cpfUTGY2

— Morten Blaabjerg (@mblaa) June 23, 2012 at 08:54AM

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By Reverend, bavatuesdays – December 12, 2011 at 04:41PM

Rene Magritte’s “The Lovers”

UMW Art Historian Marjorie Och recently sent around this Press Release from the Visual Resources Association’s Intellectual Property Rights Committee that seems to take a strong stand in asserting a rather broad and liberal interpretation of the fair use doctrine as it pertains to using images for teaching, research, and study. The statement even encourages sharing!

Points 3 through 6 below are especially important for us here at UMW given that we are in the middle of creating the third iteration of an online exhibit for Marjorie Och’s Venice Seminar. And this Press Release becomes a welcome touchstone for how far can we go when incorporating reproductions of paintings, film stills, more contemporary images of Venice, etc.

Read the entire press release below.

PRESS RELEASE

December 7, 2011

Contact: Visual Resources Association Intellectual Property Rights Committee

VISUAL RESOURCES ASSOCIATION RELEASES STATEMENT ON THE
FAIR USE OF IMAGES FOR TEACHING, RESEARCH, AND STUDY

The Visual Resources Association, the international organization of image media professionals dedicated to furthering research and education in the field of image management, has released a Statement on the Fair Use of Images for Teaching, Research, and Study. The Statement describes six uses of copyrighted still images that the VRA believes fall within the U.S. doctrine of fair use. The six uses are: 1) preservation (storing images for repeated use in a teaching context and transferring images to new formats); 2) use of images for teaching purposes; 3) use of images (both large, high-resolution images and thumbnails) on course websites and in other online study materials; 4) adaptations of images for teaching and classroom work by students; 5) sharing images among educational and cultural institutions to facilitate teaching and study; and 6) reproduction of images in theses and dissertations.

This Statement on the Fair Use of Images draws from the academic community’s longstanding practice of relying on fair use for teaching and learning, and highlights one area – the use of images in theses and dissertations – where the Association believes the community should return to its previous practices of being more assertive. The Statement also relies heavily on recent fair use jurisprudence and aims to provide image users within the educational and cultural heritage communities with greater certainty when relying on fair use.

The Statement was developed by the VRA’s Intellectual Property Rights Committee, with the guidance of a Legal Advisory Committee of preeminent copyright scholars and legal experts, whose members include: Robert W. Clarida (Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman), Jeffrey P. Cunard (Debevoise & Plimpton LLP), Jackie Ewenstein (Ewenstein & Young LLP), Georgia K. Harper (Scholarly Communications Advisor, The University Libraries, University of Texas at Austin), Virginia Rutledge (PIPE Arts Group) and Jule Sigall (Associate General Counsel – Copyright, Microsoft; Formerly Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office).

Maureen Burns, VRA President, noted the Association’s aims in producing the Statement: “An important aspect of VRA’s mission is to inform educational image users about, and to help form consensus around, best practices in the field of visual resources. These guidelines reflect a consensus (albeit largely unwritten to date) within the Association – and by extension the broader educational community – that the practices described within the guidelines are reasonable assertions of fair use. Our hope is that this document will help to ensure that images are robustly and widely used to facilitate uninhibited academic inquiry.”

* * * * *

For more information about the Statement, please visit the Intellectual Property Rights Committee page on the VRA website at http://www.vraweb.org or go directly to the document here: http://www.vraweb.org/organization/pdf/VRAFairUseGuidelinesFinal.pdf

Maureen Burns, Ed.D.

President, Visual Resources Association

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By Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing – December 05, 2011 at 08:59PM

My latest Publishers Weekly column is “Copyrights vs. Human Rights.” In honor of Human Rights Day on Dec 10, I’ve written a piece on publishing’s shameful support of SOPA, a law that will punish the online services that are so key to coordinating and publicizing human rights struggles around the world.

The U.N. characterizes access to the Internet as a human right, and government research in the U.K. and in the U.S. shows the enormous humanitarian benefits of network access for poor and vulnerable families: better nutrition, education, and jobs; more social mobility and opportunity; and civic and political engagement. Yet the services that provide the bulk of these benefits—search engines, Web hosts, and online service providers like Blogger, Tumblr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube—could never satisfy the requirements set out in SOPA. The only way for these platforms to satisfy SOPA would be to all but shut off the public’s ability to contribute and to throttle free expression for all but those entities that can afford to pay a lawyer to certify that their uploaded material will not attract a copyright complaint.

Another group of important entities that could never satisfy SOPA are the civic-minded hackers and security researchers scrambling to improve the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS). In 2011, the DNS was attacked several times, including a breach attributed to the Iranian secret police, which used forged certificates to allow them to impersonate governments, banks, and online e-mail providers like Gmail and Hotmail. If passed, SOPA would ban the production or dissemination of tools that could subvert its blocks, and that would include tools the world’s technologists are creating specifically to help defeat government censorship and surveillance. Many of these efforts and tools are actually funded by the U.S. government, and some, like the Onion Router (TOR), are used by U.S. armed forces intelligence services as well as struggling Arab Spring revolutionaries.

Cory Doctorow: Copyrights vs. Human Rights

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Shared via Posterous on December 04, 2011 at 11:02PM

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By Søren Storm Hansen, dSeneste på nettet – September 03, 2010 at 12:46PM

I går stillede Anders Lassen, adm. direktør for Infomedia følgende spørgsmål: Anerkender du ophavsret som en legitim ret og et effektivt redskab til at skabe værdifuldt indhold?

Han stillede ikke spørgsmålet til mig – hvad der ikke skal forhindre mig i at svare – men til Philipp Schindler, som er Googles boss i Nordeuropa og var i København i går: Google har alt – også lidt gode råd til medierne.

Spørgsmålet indeholder en påstand; at ophavsret fremmer produktion af kvalitet.

Den påstand er temmelig almindelig men så vidt jeg ved aldrig dokumenteret, og jeg tillader mig at tvivle på den.

En bog er beskyttet af ophavsret 70 år efter forfatterens død. Er der i fuld alvor nogen, der tror, at en forfatter ville skrive færre eller dårligere bøger, hvis ophavsretten blev sænket til 10 år efter bogens udgivelse – eller fjernet helt? Og bruger forfatterens arvinger indtægterne fra værket til at skabe nyt indhold af høj kvalitet?

Måske ville det gå omvendt. På nettet kan gamle værker indgå i nye sammenhænge og være grundlag for ny kvalitet. Som det er nu, er gamle værker gemt væk og utilgængelige – blandt andet hos Infomedia. De færreste har en økonomisk værdi i sig selv – det er ikke mange tekster, der sælger et år efter udgivelsen. Hvis de lå på nettet uden ophavsret, kunne de måske bruges til noget.

Jeg tvivler på, at Anders Lassen virkelig mener, at ophavsretten er “et effektivt redskab til at skabe værdifuldt indhold”. Jeg tror, han prøver at beskytte sin forretning, som er en database med artikler.

Det er selvfølgelig legitimt at beskytte sin forretning, men måske er det bedre at udvikle den frem for at bygge mure omkring den.

Er ophavsretten god for Infomedia? Det tvivler jeg faktisk også på.

Vi har altid opfattet en bog eller en artikel som et værk med sin egen kvalitet. Det nye er, at disse værker kan indgå i sammenhænge. De er ikke isolerede. Ved hjælp af en simpel teknologi – et link – kan de knyttes sammen.

Det er en kvalitet, som man ignorerer, når man opfatter en tekst som et isoleret værk. Ophavsretten forhindrer, at værkerne indgår i sammenhænge og dermed hæmmer ophavsretten kreativiteten og kvaliteten. At oprette et link er en kreativ handling, og et link kan have høj kvalitet og være meget værdifuldt.

Ophavsretten understøtter gamle forretningsmodeller, der er under voldsomt pres. Det er sket før, at gamle forretningsmodeller blev presset, men så vidt jeg ved, er det aldrig lykkes at forhindre det nye, og det nye har altid vist sig at skabe nye forretningsmodeller – omend det var svært at se, da de var nye.

Se denne underholdende og lærerige gennemgang af den teknologske udvikling: Falder himlen ned over musikbranchen, medier, film, tv, radio, forlag?

Og ovenstående indlæg er netop et eksempel på min pointe. Det er skrevet af en amerikansk professor og oprindeligt udgivet i amerikansk, juridisk tidsskrift. Jeg har fundet det på nettet via et link, jeg har oversat det og genudgivet det her med forfatterens tilladelse. Det er ikke gemt væk i en lukket database som fx. Infomedia, og det har i kraft af et link og min oversættelse fået en udbredelse, det ikke ville have fået, hvis det var gemt væk.

Jeg tvivler på, at lukkede systemer som Infomedia har en fremtid, og jeg tvivler på, at ophavsretten er god.

De tunge drenge fra den gamle verden vil kæmpe for den, men den er allerede under pres nedefra. Creative Commons er en mere lempelig ordning og et opgør med den meget restriktive ophavsret. Jeg har en fornemmelse af, at stadig flere forfattere vil benytte Creative Commons, fordi de ser klare fordele.

Tilbage står de tunge drenge fra den gamle verden med deres lukkede systemer, som langsomt tømmes for indhold, fordi al kvaliteten siver ud, hvor det kan indgå i sammenhænge – den nye kvalitet.

Foto: kerto.co.uk.

• Dette indlæg er fra dSeneste.dk.
• Abonner også på Dagens links med udvalgte artikler fra danske, svenske og norske medier og blogs.

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By Fred, A VC – November 30, 2011 at 02:28PM

I had a rough night last night. A late flight, not enough sleep, and I’m feeling run down. So I’m not going to do a long post today.

But I saw this bit about Paul Allen advocating “Open Science” and I thought I’d flag it for all of you.

I’ve long felt that the way we go about doing research in our society is wrongheaded. We largely hoard our data and experiments until the breakthroughs are made and then we publish and patent them.

Imagine if all the research and work was being shared in an open platform (kind of like the Internet was designed to do??). Think about how much faster the breakthroughs would come if all the best minds in the world were working together instead of against each other.

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By parker, Deeplinks – November 29, 2011 at 03:43AM

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