Project resources
This page provides quick jumps to important resources for the project -- the major cases; legislation; news items that support an argument. This page is a convenient place for me to begin to pull together copies of everything I need to reference. The links function like a proto-bibliography or like proto-footnotes. In later draft stages, I'll link directly from the text.
Orphan Works
Mass Digitization: Implications for Information Policy, a report from a March 2006 symposium on Scholarship and Libraries in Transition.
Orphan Works report of the Library of Congress
Documents illustrating objections by photographers to orphan works legislation (that eventually killed the bill)
- American Society of Media Photographers urgent call to action
- National Press Photographers' Association objections
Orphan Works safe harbor "rules" offered by consortium of publishers
Lawrence Lessig's 30 minute video about the Google Book Search Project that highlights the number of library books that are orphan works (orphan works statistics appear about - 9:30 minutes before the end of the video)
National Information Infrastructure (NII) Taskforce White Paper (1995) -- proclaiming that all the law needed was a little beefing up to make it work in the digital environment
Free the books [to be launched early December, 2007], the University of Texas at Austin Libraries blog documenting our processes and evidence base for identifying public domain works today (phase 1), and orphan works tomorrow (0hase 2). We are collaborating in this effort with University of Michigan's library.
A good day for open access! -- report on hangingtogether.org of the Oct. 17, 2007 annual meeting of the Open Content Alliance at with Brewster Kahle is reported to have encouraged participants to "take the next step in terms of copyright: a pilot-project will start digitizing out-of-print / in copyright works, a departure from the strictly public domain digitization in the OCA to date."
Examples of mass digitization projects
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) draft digitization plan
Lynch, Clifford (2002). Digital collections, digital libraries, and the digitization of cultural heritage information, First Monday, 7(5).
Google search: digital collections libraries -- nearly 70 million responsive results...
Future reading: Digitization and its discontents -- Anthony Grafton's New Yorker article, Nov. 5, 2007, about the history of books, libraries and the future of mass digitization projects
Adventures in wonderland -- Anthony Grafton's New Yorker article, Nov. 5, 2007, companion to Future reading, above, linking to dozens of digital library projects
Legal resources (links to the Copyright Act)
Recently enacted changes to copyright law
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
Examples of retreats from insistence on DRM, longer terms and contract
Mary Beth Peters, Register of Copyrights, acknowledges that extending term by 20 years was a mistake [video available]
Bruce Lehman, then Commissioner of Patents, acknowledges DMCA anti-circumvention policies have not been successful [video available]
von Lohmann, Fred (2007). Is DRM "enabling new business models"? Electronic Frontier Foundation Deeplinks Blog.
Jobs, Steve (2007). Thoughts on music.
Ian Rogers, Yahoo! Music's General Manager, Convenience wins, hubris loses
EMI, Apple to sell DRM-free music for $1.20/song. Techcrunch.
Apple drops price of DRM-free music to $.99/song (same price as DRM'd music...)
Good Copy Bad Copy (Denmark 2007) -- a 1 hour video documentary about copyright and culture, directed by Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. It features interviews with Danger Mouse, Girl Talk, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Lawrence Lessig, and many others with various perspectives on copyright, and illustrates how film and music industries in other countries derive their revenue streams from other activity besides sales of copies.
Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away -- the title sounds good, and on the surface at least, this is good news, but this is a bigger story, a pretty amazing story of Morris' willful blindness and obstinance. Leaves little room for doubt about why the music industry is in trouble, and will continue to be for some time to come.
The Google Book Search and related lawsuits
McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. v. Google, Inc.
Lawrence Lessig's 30 minute video about Google's fair use claim (market failure/orphan works)
News story about settlement of Agence France-Presse case against Google : illustrates the ambiguity presented by settlements that suggest, but do not confirm, that settlement did not include Google's paying for mere indexing
Lessig's The Future of Ideas
Lessig's Free Culture
News and other stories about publishers' successes resulting from Google Book Search:
- Chronicle of Higher Education, June 5, 2007
- Google's partner success stories page
- Scott Lorenz' story with publisher comments
Fair use cases that help us understand the relationship between harm to markets and social benefit in transformative use cases
- Sony
- Campbell v. Acuff-Rose
- Kelly v. Arriba-Soft
- Grateful Dead case (Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Ltd.)
- Perfect 10 v. Amazon & Google
Business model evolution moves on from reliance on lock-down and copy sales (contract and DRM) -- and what happens to law we don't rely on anymore?
John Perry Barlow's 1994 Wired Magazine article, The economy of ideas
anmoku no ryokai -- the Japanese words for a gentleman's agreement: if:book links to a story in Wired about the tacit agreement not to enforce existing laws that protect Japanese comic books, in order to allow the derivative manga market to thrive, to everyone's benefit
Free is more complicated than you think -- O'Reilly Radar post about making content freely available, including references to Scott Adams' experiments with making Dilbert and non-Dilbert publications free
How to hit paydirt amid an infinite supply -- Glyn Moody of the Guardian, Ltd. interviews Mike Masnick, founder of Techdirt, who describes, without citing him, almost exactly what John Perry Barlow suggested were ways to make a living in a world of ubiquitous copies.
New York Times abandons subscription access to online news stories
Wall Street Journal follows suit
SPARC and ACRL panel discussion about sustainable business models for open access publishing: Course check: A conversation with three open access publishers -- the materials at this site demonstrate how the movement of the journal literature to open access models puts pressure on the remaining scholarly publishers to find ways to provide access to their materials as well. The same lessons we are learning in music, movies and popular periodicals we are also learning in scholarly publishing.
Lessig's talk about remix culture [video]: excellent -- watch this! Lessig emphasizes the importance of competition, that "more free" can compete with "less free," that artists' choice (to distribute differently, for example, to make their own works more freely available) is the key to breaking monopoly, and that laws that criminalize our children's creativity are corrosive -- and we can do better.
Lessig blog comment and link to Miro, an open-source, non-profit alternative video portal that allows for the growth and use of free HD, entertainment and educational video content, downloadable, subscribable (RSS feeds for over 1500 channels), directly competing for time and attention with not free.
Cory Doctorow's explanation of Creative Commons licenses, on Locus Magazine, from the perspective of a creator and a user of others' works (applying licenses to your own work, and searching for materials that are licensed for nonprofit and other uses)
The search engine lawsuits
(other than those related to Google Book Search, covered above)
Gigi Sohn's call for revision to copyright law, including an express exemption for making a digital copy for indexing in a search engine