Despite having a vague sense of the problems that American publishers have had in working with Cuban scholars due to the U.S. trade embargo over the past decades, it never occurred to me that part of the reason was that Fidel Castro was a copyright theorist. So now it’s clearer to me why Che Guevara’s image went viral….
Last semester this excellent site would have belonged in a “thinking about collections” post: this semester, I think I’m headed more towards posts on “shrinking the public domain.” Which leads to me ponder why the ALA has provided a “copyright slider” and not a “map of the public domain”? Pamela Samuelson has the makings of a very useful one in her 2003 article, “Mapping the Digital Public Domain: Threats and Opportunities”, so it’s not as though it couldn’t be done. And artifacts do have politics, as Langdon Winner famously noted back in 1986. Hmm.
It might help to demonstrate that the map is gradually shrinking.
Hearing news reports about the progress of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act, now seems a good time to remind ourselves of this collection in progress: a searchable database of cease-and-desist letters from the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a collaboration between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several leading law schools.
By the way: who owns the law?
Larry Lessig has a new book coming out in the fall: Remix. I’m definitely going to read it (love the idea of decriminalizing youthful copyright offenders like this one), but the more intriguing thing right now is the add-on to the captcha that he has for comments, which apparently helps to proofread digitized text for the Internet Archive. Now, that’s ingenious!
Odd that this review of Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture has taken so long to appear in First Monday. (Almost as lengthy a time as in many non-electronic scholarly journals, I’m sorry to say!) I’ve had the book for quite a while, and found it a fascinating look at fan fiction, among other things. (My own interest as an LIS educator being, of course, the lure of the forbidden posed by all these “plagiarist people” so passionately reading and writing on the edge of our copyright borderline….)
By the way, Dr. Jenkins identifies himself as a “first-generation Star Trek fan” and blogs about things like “Is Obama a Secret Vulcan?”… so who says that tenured faculty at MIT can’t have any fun?!
Fascinating things happening with so-called orphan works right now, especially the variety of issues surrounding the “missing metadata.” Fortunately for some, however, there’s no likelihood that any of this will be resolved in time to be posed as part of a comps question this summer!
Interesting moment in today’s otherwise routine faculty meeting in which the topic of teaching about copyright in 5033 came up. Realized that I am somewhat uneasy about this, as the issues have become so much more complicated than when I worked with Stuart Sutton on his course at Syracuse years ago. (Though I suspect Stu didn’t think of them as especially simple back then, knowing so much more than I!)
Lawrence Solum has just posted an entry about a paper by Edward Lee on his Legal Theory blog that gets to the heart of why I’m particularly concerned about how best to convey a useful framework for thinking about all this, since (because of what I teach besides 5033), I’m possibly a little more attuned to user-generated content issues and their implications (“warming” rather than “chilling” effects, for instance) than some of my colleagues who may take a more traditional approach to “copyright and the library.” Right now, the issues involving fanfiction seem more significant than those that pertain to Feist, for example.
