The DCC Blawg

Final post

2009-10-23T17:06:00.001+01:00

A short and final post to let you know the DCC Blawg has come to an end. As part of the Phase III restructuring of the DCC there will be some changes in the coming months. One of these is that the DCC will no longer have a legal component.

Should you have any queries about the legal aspects of your digital curation activities you may find the JISC Legal service a useful source of guidance.

Best wishes
Mags

Digital Lives - New Paper on Legal and Ethical Issues

2009-10-19T16:20:00.002+01:00

The Digital Lives Project has just released what looks to be a very useful and comprehensive discussion paper on Legal and Ethical Issues authored by Andrew Charlesworth.

The paper examines a range of legal and ethical issues that pertain to personal digital archives and their collection, preservation and access. The legal areas covered include copyright, data protection and privacy law, freedom of information requirements, and content liability both civil and criminal. The paper also examines the issue of ethics in the collection and preservation of, and access to personal digital archives.

One of the conclusions the paper comes to is that technology frequently runs ahead of existing laws and ethical guidelines, and at least some of the solutions to the problems this can cause are likely to lie outside traditional approaches to handling legal and ethical issues.

It goes on to examines a number of potential strategies/solutions that could be employed to
reduce legal and ethical problems/risks. These include:

Wider use of metadata
Greater involvement of repositories in the development of Web 2.0/user created content
Relinquishing some of the ‘gatekeeper’ role, traditionally held by repositories when accessioning content, to depositors
Seeking to change aspects of the legal deposit system.

Digital Lives are welcoming feedback on the paper. You can contact them via digital.lives@bl.uk

New data protection resources

2009-10-15T16:36:00.004+01:00

The DCC has published a new standards watch paper on BS 10012 Data Protection — Specification for a Personal Information Management System.

The standard, which is the first British standard for the management of personal information was introduced in May this year. It was developed by the British Standards Insitute (BSI) to provide a framework that enables effective management of personal information, paving the way for an infrastructure for maintaining and improving compliance with data protection legislation.

Take a read of the new DCC Standards Watch Paper here.

In related news, BSI has launched BSI Data Protection Online, a tool designed to help organisations with the effective management of personal information.

Research carried out by BSI earlier this year found that many organisations are falling behind in their approach to data protection, with almost one in five surveyed admitting to unwittingly breaching the Data Protection Act.

The new online self-assessment tool offers guidance and self-assessment in support of BS 10012. It is applicable to any organisation that holds personal information, regardless of its size, complexity and sector. It allows organisations to undertake a self-assessment process against the requirements of BS 10012 and embed data protection best practice within the organisation.

Specifically, the resource will allow you to:
• Undertake a self-assessment process against the requirements of BS 10012
• Get contextual help throughout the process, written by data protection experts
• Start new, or amend existing, self-assessments whenever needed allowing you to track your progress
• Share self-assessments with colleagues and embed data protection best practice within your organization.

Mike Low, Director, Standards, BSI, said:

"Our recent survey showed that there are many organisations out there struggling with data protection. With the Information Commissioner’s growing compulsory audit powers it is more important than ever to make sure that your data protection practices are up to scratch. If you hold personal information, whether it relates to staff, clients, customers or members, you need to be familiar with current legislation and confident that your own organisation measures up."

Digital Evidence Workshops

2009-10-15T16:15:00.002+01:00

We wanted to let you know about a series of workshops on the subject of digital evidence taking place next week at Liverpool University. These will investigate how digital information should be considered in court; and the consequential need to create new rules of evidence based not on tradition but on how digital information actually comes into creation.

The public workshops take place over three days and are as follows:

Tue 20 October - International compliance requirements (EU perspective) using iRODS data grid as policy engine (Reagan Moore / Stephen Mason)
Wed 21 October - General NARA presentation (Reagan Moore / Jason Baron)
Thur 22 October - eDiscovery and eRetention (Jason Baron)

All days are free of charge. If you are interested in attending please contact Paul Watry - P.B.Watry@liverpool.ac.uk.

Press release - JISC Collections to acquire Content Complete Ltd

2009-10-13T11:39:00.001+01:00

You may be interested in the following press release from the JISC Collections service:

“JISC Collections, the organisation which manages the acquisition and provision of digital resources for universities and colleges in the UK, has reached an agreement to acquire Content Complete Ltd, the Oxfordshire-based licensing and negotiations company.

Content Complete was established in 2003 by Albert Prior and Paul Harwood with the aim of supporting organisations involved in licensing scholarly online content. The Company provides an outsourced service, representing clients in direct negotiations with publishers on pricing
and licensing issues. Content Complete employs seven staff and has a range of clients in the academic, health and corporate sectors.

For the last six years, Content Complete has been JISC Collections' Negotiation Agent for NESLi2, the UK's online journal initiative for the higher education and research communities and has delivered significant savings as a result of this focused and centralised approach. The company has also worked very closely with JISC Collections on a range of projects and activities in this area including archiving, usage data, online journal business models and, more recently, e-textbooks.”

Digital Britain - Implementation Plan

2009-08-25T15:26:00.002+01:00

The UK government has released the details of how it will implement the recommendations in its Digital Britain report. The Digital Britain report was a government commissioned study published in June of this year that made recommendations for how the government could deal with online piracy, extend broadband internet access, and better regulate digital broadcasting.

Responsibility for putting the Digital Britain Report into action will be shared by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS).

The implementation plan confirms that there will be a Digital Economy Bill, published in the autumn.

The plan is available here.

Some of the key paragraphs in the original report from my legal/digital curation perspective were:

Modernising Licensing
33. The UK copyright framework is 300 years old this year. But it has not stood
still. Copyright has had to evolve continually to meet the technological
challenges of photography, the gramophone, film, television, the video recorder,
the photocopier and latterly the Internet and the World Wide Web. And
copyright needs to evolve further in the digital age.

38. The Copyright Strategy’s focus is long term, and global. The Digital Britain
report focuses on what needs to be done in the UK. Much of copyright law is
an EU competence and the UK must work within that European framework.
Nonetheless, the Digital Britain work and the IPO’s copyright strategy work
have shown that, in addition to completing the work of Gowers in this area,
there are changes that could be made at national level which would aid the
process of implementing Digital Britain.

47. As part of the Government’s desire to encourage inexpensive but legal
consumer access to digital content, we will also make some changes to the
legislative framework around copyright licensing, to tackle problems such as
those surrounding the use of so-called orphan works and thus help digital
markets in those works to develop.

Data Security and Assurance
52.The issue of privacy and security of data online is a serious and growing one.
A small number of high-profile cases have demonstrated the strong feelings
that data privacy can provoke, and the complex relationship we have to the
handling of different types of personal data and different types of consent.

53. It is an issue that is likely to become more and more important over the coming
months. Research conducted by the Communications Consumer Panel earlier
this year confirmed that this is an area of particular concern for consumers and
new business models such as targeted advertising and new services such as
Google’s Streetview have taken this issue to front of the public’s mind.

54. If handled properly, new business models such as targeted advertising could be
important revenue earners because, as Meglena Kuneva, EU Consumer Affairs
Commissioner said in March this year: “Personal data is the new oil of the
Internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

55. The ICO and the Information Commissioner have taken the initiative in
addressing the principles which should apply to the use of personal data,
building on the bare legal requirements of the Data Protection Act and focusing
on ways in which businesses and individuals can mitigate risks from the
provision and use of online data. Businesses that collect and use personal data
for commercial purposes are required to respect user rights including access to
personal data. Businesses are legally responsible to the ICO. We support the
ICO’s plans to develop a new code of practice “Personal Information
Online” for consultation later this year.

79. Public Service data and content play an increasingly important role in the
digital economy. The Government has embraced the vision of the Power of
Information Task Force and, in respect of important data sources for innovation,
such as geospatial data, agencies are significantly improving access to data and
clearer licensing pathways from innovation to large scale commercial use.

80 Government commissioning represents a third of the total investment in
professional UK online content. Despite existing guidance many public online
commissions still prohibit the re-use of IP. This leads to wasteful warehousing
of rights. NESTA will pilot a simplified IP framework for digital media bringing
together PACT, the Cabinet Office, Kew Gardens and Arts Council England.

Safe Storage and Transfer of Research Data - Free Seminar

2009-08-24T12:40:00.001+01:00

For those of you in, or near Edinburgh, the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility (WTCRF) is running a free lunchtime seminar on Wednesday 23rd September on the topic of ‘Safe Storage and Transfer of Research Data’.

The seminar will provide an update on the current policies for storing and transferring data (which have been recently revised) and will also provide an opportunity to voice concerns and ask questions. It is particularly relevant to both NHS Lothian and University of Edinburgh staff, and especially those who work across both institutions.

For more details please see the WTCRF site

IPR and Licensing Workshops - London

2009-08-11T17:42:00.002+01:00

The Strategic Content Alliance is running a series of free IPR and Licensing workshops over the Autumn in London. These are aimed at policy makers and practitioners involved in the delivery of online content and services over the internet.

The practical workshops are designed to appeal anyone involved in the digital content lifecycle from creation to curation. They will provide an update about the IPR and licensing issues associated with the use and generation of digital content, recent case law, the types of tools which can be used to manage the issues provided through the toolkit, as well as an opportunity to test the tools against specific scenarios. The events will provide an opportunity to evaluate and critique the SCA IPR and Licensing Toolkit, recently created by Naomi Korn and Professor Charles Oppenheim.

There are three dates to choose from:
Thursday 8th October 2009,
Monday 26th October 2009, or
Thursday 12th November 2009.

The workshops will take place at MLA London, Fourth Floor, 53-56 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DG from 11:00 – 15:30 (including a free lunch).

New journal on the topic of open source software law

2009-08-05T14:34:00.002+01:00

A short post to alert you to a new journal on the topic on open source software law.

The International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (IFOSS L. Rev.) is a collaborative legal publication aiming to increase knowledge and understanding among lawyers about Free and Open Source Software issues. Topics covered include copyright, licence implementation, licence interpretation, software patents, open standards, case law and
statutory changes.

I found the Foreword by Iain G Mitchell QC a rewarding read.

I particularly enjoyed his use of this excellent quote from Stewart Brand:

"Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT

Implementing open data....and fruit skewers

2009-08-03T18:48:00.003+01:00

Had an enjoyable day at the Beyond the Repository Fringe on Friday. Thanks a lot to the organisers.

The highlight for me was the tutorial from Jordan Hatcher & Jo Walsh on Implementing Open Data.

Jordan’s run down of the legal tools offered by Open Data Commons was useful. I was previously aware of these but thought it might be helpful to give a quick summary for those of you who are interested but couldn’t make it. For more details see www.opendatacommons.org

Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) This is a tool for putting your data and databases into the public domain. It demonstrates your desire to relinquish or waive your rights, effectively dedicating the data and database to the public domain. Because there can be some difficulty with waiving rights in certain jurisdictions it also licenses those same rights.

Community Norms Statement (CNS) Open Data Commons encourages the creation and use of a CNS as a complementary tool to the PDDL. A CNS sets out the general principles that those who use the data should adhere to. There is no set text for the CNSs as each community creates their own. However, you can see an example here. These are not legal documents so are not binding.

Open Database Licence (ODbL) This is a tool to allow users to freely share, modify, and use a database, while maintaining the same freedom for others. The licensor allows others to use the database freely while retaining rights them self rather than giving all rights up to the public domain. The ODbL includes a share-alike condition but imposes no constraint on field of endeavour so does not have a non-commercial element. The final version of this was launched just a month ago on 29th June.

Database Contents Licence (DbCL) This works alongside the ODbL. It waives all the rights in the individual contents of the database which is licensed under the ODbL. It does not cover database rights or database copyright.

P.S. loving the fruit skewers! Well done whoever thought of them.

Beyond the Repository Fringe

2009-07-28T17:16:00.002+01:00

There’s a quirky event taking place in Edinburgh later this week that you may want to consider attending. Beyond the Repository Fringe 09 takes place in the Informatics forum at the University of Edinburgh on the 30th and 31st July Details of the programme are available here.

I'm particularly interested in two parts of the event. Firstly, the Digital Curation 101 ‘Lite’ tutorial (naturally!) that is being run for members of the DCC Associates Network. Secondly, what promises to be an interesting tutorial by Jordan Hatcher and Jo Walsh on implementing open data. They will be talking about the work of the Open Knowledge Foundation, including CKAN and Knowledge Forge. This will be followed with an in-depth session on the legal side of open data, including the new legal tools available through Open Data Commons, including a database specific copyleft license.

Registration (which is free) for Beyond the Repository Fringe 09 is available here.

See you there?

FOI and preservation

2009-07-23T18:46:00.002+01:00

Michael Wills, the UK’s Justice Minister has announced the publication of a new Code of Practice on managing digital and other records. He said

"Freedom of Information depends on good record keeping and the preservation of information is important if we are to further increase transparency in public life. The updated Code of Practice is a significant step in ensuring that key records remain accessible to public bodies for day to day business and are preserved for future generations."

The Code makes the excellent point (Introduction, para iv) that “Freedom of information legislation is only as good as the quality of the records and other information to which it provides access.” I couldn’t agree more.

The Code recommends public bodies across the country introduce a strategy for the preservation of digital records to ensure that they can continue to be accessed and used and are resilient to future changes in technology.

Click here to read the announcement on the Ministry of Justice website.

Click here to read the new Code Of Practice.

First British Standard in Data Protection

2009-07-22T17:15:00.002+01:00

You may have read recently about the introduction of the first British Standard dealing specifically with Data Protection.

BS10012 Data protection. Specification for a personal information management system has been developed to establish best practice and aid compliance with data protection legislation. It is the first standard for the management of personal information.

The British Standards Institute website explains that BS10012 “specifies the requirements for a personal information management system (PIMS), which provides an infrastructure for, among other things, maintaining and improving compliance with the Data Protection Act (DPA) 1998.”

The new standard does not prescribe exactly how operations should be run, but instead provides a framework which will enable effective management of personal information. It is intended that it be used by organizations of any size and sector to create a tailored management system which includes procedures in areas such as training and awareness, risk assessment, data sharing, retention and disposal of data and disclosure to third parties.

The DCC will be publishing a Standards Watch Paper written by Sarah Higgins on BS10012 shortly. I will be sure to let you know once this is out.

For more information on the Data Protection Act please see this DCC Briefing Paper on the topic.

Facebook accused of breaching Canadian privacy laws

2009-07-21T16:47:00.001+01:00

The BBC reported on Friday that Canada's Privacy Commissioner has recommended steps to ensure social networking site Facebook protects the privacy of Canadian users of the service, and meets requirements of Canadian privacy legislation. The Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart laid out the findings of a report which said Facebook's information about privacy practices was "often confusing or incomplete", and urged the site to make its policies more transparent to users.

One area of breach is Facebook's policy of holding on to subscribers' personal information, even after their accounts had been deactivated.

It was also criticised for failing to adequately restrict access of users' personal details to some of the 950,000 developers in 180 countries who provide applications, such as games, for the site.

It is reported that Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly has said Facebook is working with the Canadian commission to resolve the issues.

For more information you can read the news release on the website of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or look at the report itself.

Digital Curation Conference deadline extended

2009-07-17T16:51:00.001+01:00

Some of you may be interested in submitting a paper to this conference. The conference organisers are interested in receiving papers on a range of legal and policy issues, including: Creative Commons, special licences, the public domain and other approaches for re-use, questions of privacy, consent, and embargo.

5th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC09)
Moving to Multi-Scale Science: Managing Complexity and Diversity.
2 – 4 December 2009, Millennium Gloucester Hotel, London, UK.
**************************************************************************
We are pleased to announce that the Paper Submission date for IDCC09 has been extended by 2 weeks to Friday 7 August 2009: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2009/call-for-papers/
Remember that submissions should be in the form of a full or short paper, or a one page abstract for a poster, workshop or demonstration.
Presenting at the conference offers you the chance to:-

* Share good practice, skills and knowledge transfer
* Influence and inform future digital curation policy & practice
* Test out curation resources and toolkits
* Explore collaborative possibilities and partnerships
* Engage educators and trainers with regard to developing digital curation skills for the future

Speakers at the conference will include:-

* Timo Hannay – Publishing Director, Nature.com
* Professor Douglas Kell – Chief Executive of the Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
* Dr. Ed Seidel, Director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure

All papers accepted for the conference will be published in the International Journal of Digital Curation

Sent on behalf of the Programme Committee –

co-chaired by Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Digital Curation Centre, Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN and Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information.

FOI for Researchers workshop in Glasgow

2009-07-15T13:01:00.002+01:00

Some of you may be interested in attending this useful upcoming workshop being held by the Research Information Network.

“Freedom of Information: what’s in it for researchers?” is being held on the
14 September from 10:00 to 16:00 at The Lighthouse, 11 Mitchell Lane, Glasgow, G1 3NU

The Research Information Network is holding this free event to raise awareness of the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) as a tool for researchers and to aid understanding of the access regime. The day will cover how to use FOI to access records and information and how to make successful requests. Case studies will be presented to explore how to use FOI in practice, offering strategies for what works well for particular disciplines and types of research and insights will be provided from the Scottish perspective.

Key speakers:
• Professor Duncan Tanner – Director, Welsh Institute for Social and Cultural Affairs, Bangor University
• Sarah Hutchinson - Head of Policy and Information, Scottish Information Commissioner
• Bruno Longmore – Head of Government Records, National Archives of Scotland
• Hugh Hagan – Senior Inspecting Officer Government Records Branch, National Archives of Scotland

The workshop is aimed at academic researchers; other research workers, such as journalists; librarians, archivists and other information professionals who provide research services and research training; compliance officers interested in facilitating access and advising requestors and public policy makers in the access to information arena.

Click here for the full programme, more information or to book a free place.

Training in licensing electronic resources

2009-06-17T14:29:00.001+01:00

Here’s a course coming up in September for those looking for an introduction to the licensing of electronic resources.

Licences and their Negotiation
To be held in : The City Suite, Thistle City Hotel, Barbican, London, EC1V 8DS
24th September 2009, 9.30-16.30

Course Outline
This practical one day training event is designed to provide Information Professionals with an introduction to the licensing of electronic resources such as e books, e journals and abstracting and indexing services. This course has been designed to introduce the major components of such licences and why they are important, what are the issues that are likely to cause the greatest difficulty, and will introduce issues related to the fine art of negotiating.

Click here for more details on the UKeiG website.

Curation and consent. How much is too much?

2009-06-05T17:47:00.002+01:00

I’m researching a DCC Legal Watch Paper at the moment, focussing on consent in research (looking at both the legal and the ethical angles). I have been thinking about all this from a curation perspective. With the potential for reuse of resources or data being an important goal in terms of curation, a key question arises which is:

“What use of their data did the participant consent to?”

The answer to this question has a massive bearing on the useability of that data down the line.

So, for example, did the participant consent to:

only use A (by researcher A); or
use A but by any researcher; or
use A (by researcher A) and use B (by researcher B); or
researcher A transferring the data to researcher B (crucial if option 3 is to be of any practical use and only researcher A has the data); or
use of their data by anyone for any purposes.

Of course, some of the answers could be found in the wording of the consent form (N.B. consent is rarely required by law to be in writing but it is still very wise to secure it that way) but my question is about the picture behind it and the legal and ethical appropriateness of what is written in that form – as well as the effectiveness of that consent for enabling scientific progress.

In an era of open approaches to data, the idea of global consent is quite appealing. It ensures that useful data remains useable (IP and contract considerations aside) and ‘open’. But consenting to any use of your personal data...? It has been said that one of the best things about making data open is the things that will be done with it and created by other researchers that you simply would never have thought of. But when it comes to your personal data (i.e. data about you, that identifies you) are you happy to give consent for it to be used in ways you have never imagined? The answer to this may be yes or no, and I would love to hear your thoughts.

Aside from personal feelings on this matter, would such a wide consent be considered legal? Would it be ethical?

What do you think?

Open Innovation & Intellectual Property

2009-04-27T18:10:00.001+01:00

There will be what looks to be a great event taking place in London in a few weeks time. I’ll be in sunny Italy (tough life) but if I wasn’t I’d definitely be there.

The event is called Open Innovation and Intellectual Property and takes place on Friday15th May at NESTA offices in the City from 1pm.

The description from NESTA is as follows:

“NESTA, The Wellcome Trust and the Creative Commons is jointly hosting a conference to explore how Commons tools can unlock innovation by making it easier for artists, scientists, researchers and businesses to share, collaborate and build on the work of others. Much innovation today is hampered by a lack of access to existing data, content and facilities. In sectors such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, a lack of openness leads to duplication of existing research activities and significant effort down blind allies. In the creative industries, the absence of simple, standardised licensing arrangements which establish usage rights is holding back innovative online business models. Yet it is sectors such as biotechnology and the creative industries which are otherwise best placed to lead the UK out of recession.

One solution is the adoption of the ‘Commons’ model of intellectual property. The commercial and wider social benefits of using the Commons model to address the barriers to sharing are potentially huge. It is estimated, for example, that there are already 130 million Creative Commons licensed works in the world, an over six-fold increase since 2005. And large numbers of service providers are appearing with new business models to "lubricate" the Commons marketplace for knowledge, services and resources.

NESTA’s conference will explore the impact of the Creative Commons to date, and debate its strengths and weaknesses as a model for supporting innovation. In science, the case of the health sector may be particularly compelling: under traditional drug development models, a well-funded research group starting today has a slim chance at getting a drug to market by 2025. Can a Health Commons speeden up drug discovery? In the creative industries, film, games and music businesses point to the way intellectual property rights are managed as a barrier to innovation. Can more widespread adoption of Creative Commons licenses support new business models for the sector?”

Speakers include:

James Boyle (Creative Commons)
John Wilbanks (Science Commons)
David Lammy (IP Minister)
Sir John Sulston (Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation)
Tony Wood (Pfizer)
Iain Wilcocks (Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property)
Richard Mollet (British Phonographic Industry)

If you go, please do let me know anything interesting that comes up! :-)

DCC Legal Watch Paper on Science Commons

2009-04-27T17:51:00.001+01:00

Hello all,

Long time no speak. I’ve not been around for a while and in my absence have neglected to tell you that the DCC Science Commons Legal Watch Paper I mentioned was published back at the beginning of March.

If you’re interested, you can take a read here.

Feedback always welcome!

Making FOI requests easy (plus people power!)

2009-01-21T18:36:00.002Z

Some time ago I mentioned the development by mysociety.org of a new site to help people make Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from different parts of government.

Well its called WhatDoTheyKnow? …and here it is!

mysociety.org is doing the internet rounds today because their site TheyWorkForYou was instrumental in the cancellation of the vote on exempting details of MP’s expenses from the FOI Act.

So if making FOI queries is something you’re interested in, this site will make it very easy for you.

The site also archives the responses on the web for others to use. A good example of data curation!

...and a Happy New Year!

2008-12-31T14:19:00.003Z

I'd like to wish a happy, healthy and peaceful 2009 to everyone out there. Make it a good one!

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nebarnix/854348966/in/set-72157594248654650/ BY-NC-ND

Radical sharing - Science Commons

2008-12-31T14:02:00.002Z

A bit slow off the mark with this one but thanks for conference contributions also go to John Wilbanks for a fascinating talk on ‘radical sharing’.

Chris Rusbridge has already given a good overview of the talk on the Digital Curation Blog, so I will just mention a few highlights for me. A couple of the really helpful bits were the analogies he used when describing the operation of copyright in the digital world.

The first was a container and its contents. You can think of copyright as protecting the container but not the contents of the container. This is how copyright has long operated (it doesn’t protect ideas but the expression of those ideas). However, some of the licences users are forced to agree to lock that container. So although the copyright still operates in the same way access to the contents is reduced (in this case by contract). Open Access solves the legal problem but not the container problem.

The second analogy was helpful in explaining the differences in the way journals/books can be used now when they are (often) electronic as opposed to paper based. He compared this to the difference between buying and renting a house.

When you buy a paper based copy it is a hard copy and it is your hard copy. You are free to do what you like with it. This is like owning a house. Now that many publications are electronic it’s more similar to the renting/lease model. You can still read the publication (live in the house) but as with renting you are regulated by a contract which will add further conditions/limitations.

A further useful point that he highlighted is that using copyleft or sharealike in the data world actually hinders freedom. If two datasets with two different licences both based on copyleft or share alike (i.e requiring resulting works to be distributed under same terms) are used, when someone integrates that data and wants to put a licence on the resulting data they would be stuck because both licences insist the resulting data be made available under a particular licence. Thus, they can’t distribute that data without breaking the terms of one of the licences. Copyleft may work within communities where there is consensus on licensing terms but if the aim is to make it available outside that community it presents difficulties.

An example he gave of this was WikiPathways who just changed their licence terms from containing a share-alike condition to CC-BY. They’ve given up their right to sue but have given info to the world. They reward people who follow their intention with use of a trademark and ignore the people who don’t. The opposite way round from what we have come to expect.

John talked more about the approach of the Science Commons project to data sharing. I’m not going to go into this further here as it will be covered in the DCC Science Commons Legal Watch Paper in the New Year. I will however mention two of his other comments.

Firstly, that people are reluctant to share their data because they are worried someone else might muck it up. But it may not have occurred to them that someone else might do something brilliant with it. Something different from their emphasis, that they would not have done.

Secondly, looking back through history it can be seen that it is not unnatural to be in the position these advocates of openness find themselves in. Dislodging entrenched processes is hard work and stable systems are resistant to change on multiple levels. If this is to be the way ahead it will take some great effort to make it work and require voluntary action on the part of many.

One final thought - it occurred to me how often it is a contractual issue rather than a strict IP issue causing difficulty here. Although it is often the case (and correct me if you feel I’m wrong) that the contracts are made to seem more reasonable (and therefore more readily agreed to) through a misunderstanding/overstatement of the IP rights that actually exist.

Slides now available in relation to previous 'Healthy Consent' post

2008-12-10T16:49:00.004Z

Just a quickie to say the slides for the very interesting keynote at the 4th International Digital Curation Conference given by Professor David Porteous are now available on the DCC website.

Experiences of data sharing in the CARMEN project

2008-12-08T18:31:00.002Z

Thanks also to Alistair Knowles for his presentation about data sharing in the CARMEN project.

He talked about the difficulties of citation of data in cases of protracted ‘ownership’ and also cases of unknown ‘ownership’ (the inverted commas are mine).

His experience is that scientists are much more comfortable with informal agreements and are able to sort matters of ownership and citation amongst themselves. But when asked to formalise arrangements they got nervous and more reluctant to act.

He argued that the solution is not a legal one but a social one (agreement within the community), a conclusion also reached by myself and some others in the Legal and Policy Issues session of the Research Data theme at the JISC Innovation Forum in July of this year. For more details see my earlier post. Do you agree?

Healthy Consent

2008-12-08T13:35:00.003Z

Spent a couple of days last week at the 4^th International Digital Curation conference in Edinburgh. Lots of great speakers and the first day in particular brought up some interesting legal questions.

The keynote on the first day was provided by Prof David J Porteous, the director of the Centre for Molecular Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He discussed a project called Generation Scotland which he is involved in. Generation Scotland is a partnership between the Scottish University Medical Schools, Biomedical Research Institutes, the NHS in Scotland and the people of Scotland which aims to create more effective treatments based on gene knowledge. The project works with genomic data, which is personal and therefore of interest to me from a data protection perspective.

Fascinating talk. Loads of interesting explanation of the background, why they do what they do and the potential benefits. An overview of the impact of environment, wealth, diet and smoking in life expectancy and brief discussion of how much health is dictated by those environmental factors and how much by nature, which is where the genome comes in.

Health is a major priority for the Scottish Government and it only takes a peremptory look at Prof Porteous’ ‘disease prevalence’ maps of the UK to see why. The DCC has its headquarters in Edinburgh and many staff at HATII in Glasgow – so you could say the future of excellent digital curation relies on the work of Generation Scotland ;-)

The subjects of the research conducted by Generation Scotland are volunteers. As will be immediately apparent the kind of data the project collects and uses is not only personal data but sensitive personal data (as defined by the Data Protection Act 1998) which brings up legal as well as ethical issues. The project addresses these through coding and anonymisation of the data to make it ethically sound and secure.

The discussion around consent was particularly interesting. The subjects give ‘open consent’ instead of the usual ‘informed consent’. My understanding is that, on a practical level, this means something like “Trust us. We don’t know what we will do with your data in the future but we will tell you and you have the right to withdraw if you don’t like it”.

This right to withdraw is important and, as Prof Porteous explained, a guiding principle of the project. Generation Scotland needs the ability to remove a subject’s data should they ask to be withdrawn. However, they can’t go back and change anything that’s happened already. This leads to all sorts of questions about what can still be inferred.

There was also some discussion about who owns and controls the data. As I mentioned the other day this is a tricky area. I learnt something new here. The data is owned by the Scottish Government. Some may be surprised by this, indeed that was my immediate reaction and I can see it argued two ways – but that is for another day (do feel free to remind me). But it must be remembered that the owners of the data may not be the same people as those who have rights or corresponding responsibilities in relation to that data. As I said last Monday – eugh!

Prof Porteous finished by touching on a catch 22 situation found in relation to the Generation Scotland work – the requirement for consent to gain consent. On the one hand this is restricting research, and in the vital area of health at that. On the other hand, moves to relax this have been criticised as threatening patient privacy. Do you have any thoughts on this? This is a new area for me and one I know very little of. But it sounds thought-provoking and ripe for a good debate – so let’s start one! (Another link on this...and another one to some people already having a debate)

Lastly, a question that arose for me in response to the answer to a query from a gentleman in the audience. Should consent requirements be different depending on whether the personal data is to be used on behalf of the nation or for commercial benefit? What do you think?

Well that’s me for now. I’ll be back later today. A big thanks to Prof Porteous for such a fascinating start to the conference.

P.S. He mentioned the a book called ‘The Grim Reaper’s Road Map - An Atlas of Mortality in Britain'. Great title - got to be worth a look on Amazon at least!

P.P.S. shocking fact – although life expectancy has been increasing over time the young of today are predicted to live less long than the generation before them. As an advocate of people taking increased responsibility for their own lives, and in particularly their own health, this to me sounds like a rather loud call to action. It’s not curation, or legal but it is very important.

Next Legal Watch Paper - Science Commons

2008-12-01T18:58:00.001Z

Next Legal Watch Paper is on the topic of Science Commons.

What would you like to see covered in there? Any burning questions? Now’s your chance!

By the way, if Science Commons is something that interests you, we have John Wilbanks (VP of Science Commons) speaking at the 4th International Digital Curation Conference tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll see you there. And for those who can’t make it – I’ll blawg about it very soon.

'Ownership of data' – uuuughh!

2008-12-01T18:52:00.002Z

'Ownership of data' – uuuughh! The phrase gives me a shiver just thinking about it. A contentious area rife with complication, confusion and misunderstanding. That said, a super important area, especially for those of us interested in curation and scientific progress in general (perhaps less so for a landscape gardener say).

I was reading the Oaklaw report ‘Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research’ and noticed a couple of interesting pages (‘Chapter 2: Key Concepts’ Paras 2.16 – 2.22 if you’re interested).

The report looked at what is meant by the term “ownership” in relation to data. It identified nine different parties who might claim rights in data. These were:

the creator – the party who creates or generates the data;
the consumer – the party who uses the data;
the compiler – the party who selects and compiles information from different information sources;
the funder – the party who commissions the data to be generated;
the decoder – where informed is protected by encoded formats (e.g. encryption), the party who can unlock the information;
the packager – the party who collects information for a particular use and adds value through formatting it for a particular market or set of consumers;
the reader – the person who reads data added to an information repository;
the subject of the data – the person from whom the data is derived or who the data is about; and
the purchaser or licensee – the party who buys or licences the data.

Your thoughts? What do you think of this list? What does ownership of data mean to you? Do you consider yourself an ‘owner’ of data? And if so, what is your relationship to that data? Am I missing the point and it’s all ridiculously simple?

All input welcomed and appreciated.

More on Google v AAP

2008-11-06T12:40:00.002Z

Following on from my earlier post about the settlement between Google and the AAP I read an interesting analysis of this from Fred von Lohmann at the EFF. Take a read yourself.

Two areas of particular interest to me are the impact on the doctrine of fair use (the U.S. equivalent of fair dealing) and the impact on privacy. Fred’s analysis covers both of these with notable paragraphs being:

“...this outcome is plainly second-best from the point of view of those who believe Google would have won the fair use question at the heart of the case. A legal ruling that scanning books to provide indexing and search is a fair use would have benefited the public by setting a precedent on which everyone could rely, thus limiting publishers' control over the activities of future book scanners. In contrast, only Google gets to rely on this settlement agreement, and the agreement embodies many concessions that a fair user shouldn't have to make."

(For a short analysis of Google’s Fair Use argument see this EFF posting from back in 2005)

and

“Privacy: The agreement apparently envisions a world where Google keeps all of the electronic books that you "purchase" on an "electronic shelf" for you. In other words, in order to read the books you've paid for, you have to log into Google. Google is also likely to keep track of which books you browse (at least if you're logged in). This is a huge change in the privacy we traditionally enjoy in libraries and bookstores, where nobody writes down "Fred von Lohmann entered the store at 19:42:08 and spent 2.2 minutes on page 28 of 0-486-66980-7, 3.1 minutes on page 29, and 2.8 minutes on page 30." If Google becomes the default place to search, browse, and buy books, it will be able to keep unprecedented track of what you read, how you read it, and collate that with all the other information it has about you. Does the agreement contain ironclad protections for user privacy?”

What are your thoughts on the impact of this settlement for future users?

Google and the AAP Settle

2008-10-29T14:05:00.005Z

In the news today…

Google and the Association of American Publishers (the AAP), who were suing Google to stop the Google Library Project, have today announced a settlement agreement. The agreement is on behalf of a wide range of authors and publishers worldwide and will expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and written materials.

It has been reported that:

“The agreement promises to benefit readers and researchers, and enhance the ability of authors and publishers to distribute their content in digital form, by significantly expanding online access to works through Google Book Search, an ambitious effort to make millions of books searchable via the Web. The agreement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright owners, provides an efficient means for them to control how their intellectual property is accessed online and enables them to receive compensation for online access to their works.”

You can find more details of this in Peter Suber’s post on the Open Access News blog or on the AAP's own website.

Image by manfrys on Flickr BY-SA

Medicine/IT/IP conference - Call For Papers

2008-10-21T21:04:00.001+01:00

The call for papers and posters for the SCRIPT-ed 2009 conference 'Governance of New Technologies: The Transformation of Medicine, Information Technology and Intellectual Property’ closes in just over three weeks time on Sat 15th November. The conference organisers are looking for 300 word abstracts at this stage.

The international, inter-disciplinary conference will focus on evolving and emerging technologies and new-technology-driven practices and their impact on the overlapping fields of (1) healthcare, (2) information technology and (3) intellectual property. It will take place in Edinburgh on the 29th to 31st March 2009.

You can find further information on the SCRIPTed website.

Rights & Repositories Resources

2008-10-21T20:38:00.002+01:00

The presentations and reports from the JISC Rights & Repositories meeting held in
London last month can now be found online in the Repositories and Preservation section of the JISC website

The resources include PowerPoint presentations and top tips documents covering topics such as negotiating with rights holders, risk management and choosing the right licence.

New Open Science Mailing List

2008-09-10T12:03:00.002+01:00

Jonathan Gray of the Open Knowledge Foundation has set up a new mailing list for discussions/announcements relating to open science.

The new list aims to bring together people interested in open science across different domains - with a particular focus on open access and open data (cf. Science Commons’ Principles for open science).

You can read Jonathan’s blog post about the new list here

…and you can sign up for the list here.

Planned increase in maximum fine for on-line copyright infringement

2008-08-27T11:50:00.002+01:00

Story from Outlaw that the Government plans to increase the maximum fine that Magistrates' Courts can award for online copyright infringement from £5,000 to £50,000.

The UK Government and the Intellectual Property Office (UK-IPO) are consulting on plans, which would allow Magistrates' Courts in England and Wales to issue summary fines of £50,000 for online copyright infringement. The larger fine is proposed for commercial scale infringements, where the person involved profits from the infringement.

The plan would implement another of the recommendations of the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property, the 2006 report by former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers which has been the foundation of intellectual property policy since its publication.

"This consultation takes forward Gowers Review recommendation 36, which recommended matching penalties for online and physical copyright infringement by increasing sanctions for online infringements," said the UK-IPO in a statement.

The courts in Scotland and Northern Ireland operate differently from those in England and Wales, and there is no equivalent sentencing guideline system there, but the consultation suggests that those courts could still implement maximum fines (para 14 of the Executive Summary).

See the full story at Outlaw.

The consultation is open until 31 October. You can take a look at the consultation paper here. The questions they are consulting on are:

OPTION 1 – MAKE NO CHANGE TO THE LAW

Do you think that POCA already provides an effective means of depriving offenders of the profits from IP crime?

OPTION 2- INTRODUCE EXCEPTIONAL STATUTORY MAXIMA OF £50,000 FOR COPYRIGHT OFFENCES

Should exceptional summary maxima be introduced for all copyright offences in the CDPA?
Do you agree that one level (not to exceed £50,000) of exceptional statutory maxima should be set for all offences in the CDPA?
Do you have any general comments on how the magistrates’ courts deal with copyright offences?
Do you think that different levels of exceptional statutory maxima should be set for the various copyright offences?

OPTION 3- INTRODUCE EXCEPTIONAL STATUTORY MAXIMA OF £50,000 FOR ALL IP OFFENCES

Do you think exceptional statutory maxima should be introduced for all IP offences and should different levels be set for the various IP offences?

New DCC Legal Watch Paper Published

2008-08-18T17:41:00.001+01:00

As promised, I wanted to let you know that the DCC has just published its latest Legal Watch Paper. The topic for this one is Creative Commons Licensing. The paper can be found in the Resource Centre section of the DCC website (as can many other useful things….)

What topics would you like to see covered in future Legal Watch Papers?

Legal Issues from the JISC Innovation Forum (JIF)

2008-08-06T14:20:00.001+01:00

Another thing that the Open Access overview highlighted is that OA is not limited to literature. It can apply to any digital content including raw and semi-raw data.

This reminded me of some of the discussion at the recent JISC Innovation Forum (JIF). The event was split into three themes and I was attending Theme b: Research data - Whose problem is it? The first session in our theme was ‘legal and policy issues’. The session took the form of a debate where Charles Oppenheim and I were debating the motion:

“Curating and sharing research data is best done where the researcher’s institution asserts IPR claims over the data”.

Charles was speaking for the motion and I was against. An open approach to data featured heavily in both the initial debate and the group discussion that followed.

A very brief summary of my argument in the debate is:

1. It is often best that IPR is not asserted because:

a. Often there is no IPR to assert in the data. Facts are not copyrightable therefore data that is merely fact is not copyrightable. We must also consider the database right but it should be noted that this is not as wide reaching as initially thought and covers databases not data.

b. Where IPRs do exist in the data, collaborations involving different jurisdictions, large numbers of institutions etc can make unravelling the ownership of those rights complicated. Large amounts of resources are spent/wasted agreeing these.

c. Open data has distinct advantages for downstream innovation. Look at the example of US public data. Science Commons now advocating waiving all rights and placing data in the public domain.

2. Answering counter argument of - don't we need IPRs as incentive to create? Well, in academic circles it is often more about attribution than economic advantage. As data merged and new data created this becomes more difficult. Answer for attribution lies in technology not IPR.

Mahendra Mahey kindly produced notes from the session (including coverage of Charles’ argument for the motion) which you can find by clicking on the link on the Legal and Policy Issues home page or by linking directly here.

What do you think? Do you agree with my argument (some of which is overstated for the purposes of the debate)? Or do you notice some flaws? I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on the legal aspects of sharing data.

Open Access continued....

2008-08-06T12:16:00.002+01:00

What I omitted to say the other day when I posted about Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview was that I found it really useful. I learnt a lot, confirmed a lot and am very grateful to Peter for producing it.

I had only two queries about what was written. The first was from the third paragraph which started “The legal basis of OA is either the consent of the copyright holder or the public domain, usually the former.” This went on to say that:

“Because OA uses copyright-holder consent, or the expiration of copyright, it does not require the abolition, reform, or infringement of copyright law.”

Or does it? I agree with Peter to a great extent but I also think we must remember the difficulties that can arise in establishing ownership of copyright whether that is in case of multiple contributors, academic/university produced works, funder requirements or orphan works. In my view reform in this area would be helpful to the OA cause.

What do you think?

The other area was in the paragraph about OA serving the interests of many groups. I was particularly interested in the funding agencies part of this and pleased to see that Peter had identified two benefits for them. The description went as follows:

“Funding agencies: OA increases the return on their investment in research, making the results of the funded research more widely available, more discoverable, more retrievable, and more useful. OA serves public funding agencies in a second way as well, by providing public access to the results of publicly-funded research.”

I’m very possibly missing something but aren’t these two the same thing? I’d be ever so grateful if someone could point out anything I’m missing.

IP Conference – free registration

2008-08-04T15:14:00.002+01:00

Here’s an interesting looking conference taking place in Helsinki, Finland this October.

ONE RIGHT SYSTEM FOR IP – VISION IMPOSSIBLE?

International Conference

1 – 3 October 2008
Hotel Rantapuisto, Vuosaari, Helsinki

Hosted by IPR University Center and the INNOCENT Graduate School

Globally, the intellectual property (IP) system has become fragmented and complicated. It is contested by the internet generation and many academics for outdated protection schemes. It is contested by developing countries for its imbalance. It is contested by rightholders for providing mainly national protection and weak enforcement mechanisms in a global economy.

The future structure of IP system has been widely debated for years. IPR University Center (University of Helsinki) wants to give a contribution to this important debate by organising a high level academic conference in October 2008.

One Right System For IP – Vision Impossible? is a multidisciplinary conference focusing mainly on legal aspects. It is aimed at European researchers in law, economics and technology, as well as practitioners interested in intellectual property rights.

You can take a look at the programme here. A number of the papers look like they could be very good. In particular, the two taking place late morning on Thursday 2nd could have some relevance for digital curation:

The Changing Purposes of IP Protection: A Basis For Convergence?
Professor Graeme Dinwoodie, Chicago-Kent College of Law

and

Evolving New Markets for IP and its Implications
Dr Ilkka Rahnasto, Vice President, IPR, Nokia Corporation

What’s more - the conference is free of charge!

Quote of the Day

2008-07-22T17:18:00.001+01:00

With all the debate and discussion that flows about various legal and illegal forms of copying in the digital age, I like this quote which takes us back to a simpler time.....

"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind, so I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind. "

(Rudyard Kipling)

Open Access 101

2008-07-22T17:10:00.002+01:00

Looking for an overview of Open Access? I’ve just finished reading this one provided by Peter Suber. Peter Suber is, amongst other things, editor of the very useful Open Access News blog.

Want something even shorter? Check this one out.

Want it in Spanish? Or Slovenian perhaps? He covers that too!

Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation

2008-07-22T16:56:00.001+01:00

WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organisation) has just released an International Study on the Impact of Copyright Law on Digital Preservation. The study focuses on the copyright and related laws of Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States and the impact of those laws on digital preservation of copyrighted works. It also addresses proposals for legislative reform and efforts to develop non-legislative solutions to the challenges that copyright law presents for digital preservation.

Peter Suber gives a useful summary of the study and comments on it from an open access perspective on his blog. You can take a look at his thoughts here.

Freedom of Information: what relevance to researchers?

2008-07-09T13:27:00.001+01:00

An announcement from the Research Information Network (RIN) about a workshop for researchers on the topic of FoI.

"Freedom of Information: what relevance to researchers?

9 September 2008, 10:00 - 16:00

Royal Institute of Public Health, 28 Portland Place, London W1

The Freedom of Information (FoI) Act came fully into force in 2005.
The Act imposes significant duties and responsibilities on public
authorities to give access to information. Together with the Data
Protection Act and the Environmental Information Regulations, FoI is
a significant part of the wider government agenda to increase
openness, transparency, trust and accountability in the public sector.

In this context, the Research Information Network is organizing a
workshop to raise awareness of FoI as a resource discovery tool for
the research community; to help researchers become 'informed
consumers' under the new access regime; and to look at instances
where use of the FoI Act has been beneficial to researchers. Speakers
at the event, to be chaired by Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for
Freedom of Information, will include Professor Duncan Tanner (Bangor
University), Steve Wood (Information Commissioner's Office) and
Teresa Bastow (The National Archives)."

Click here for further information, programme and registration.

Making use of the FoI legislation a resource discovery tool is a topic I have covered in a number of my presentations so I do feel this could be a useful workshop for many.

Opening up about licences

2008-06-17T10:58:00.002+01:00

I was at the DCC / Edinburgh e-Science Collaborative Workshop at National eScience Centre last week. Although I was the only speaker from a legal background, legal topics were mentioned by a number of the other speakers. It was evident that increased use of open and more permissive licensing by scientific journals in particular would have a massive positive impact on certain eScience projects.

If you’d like to take a further look, the slides from the day will be available here.

Coincidentally (and with fortuitous timing) the DCC will be publishing a Legal Watch Paper on Creative Commons licences in July so do keep an eye out for this. I will give you a head’s up!

Clearing a Path Through the Copyright Jungle

2008-05-01T15:16:00.002+01:00

The British Academy, together with the Publishers Association, have released yesterday a set of Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research. The announcement was as follows:

"A unique collaboration between two contrasting organisations wanting to cast light on the tangled world of copyright permissions and payments bears fruit today (30 April 2008) with the publication of a set of Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research.

The collaborators are the Publishers Association, the leading trade organisation serving book, journal, and electronic publishers in the UK, and the British Academy, which speaks nationally for the humanities and social sciences – the discipline areas where copyright issues have caused most confusion.
Designed to clear a path through the complex jungle of copyright legislation, the Joint Guidelines set out to provide practical, objective guidance for the layman and woman, endorsed both from the perspective of the academic researcher and that of the publisher and copyright ‘guardian’.

Authors, publishers and researchers frequently face daily uncertainty as to their respective rights and obligations regarding copyright. The Guidelines address the most frequent problems encountered, including fair dealing exemptions, the terms of protection for different types of materials, widespread confusion over copyright for material held in digital form, and difficult ownership issues, including the troublesome subject of “orphan works”."

You may download or view a copy of the guidelines here.

I have not yet read them yet but I do know that I will be skipping to the section on databases first as IPR in these wonderful creatures is a hot topic for me at the moment. However, with the guidelines being aimed at the humanities and social sciences I fear there will not be enough detail on this important issue to satisfy those involved in eScience.

Extending access to online resources - Survey deadline this Wednesday

2008-04-28T18:06:00.002+01:00

Last few days to fill in a survey released by JISC Collections concerning the extension of access to online resources for non-traditional user groups that are not currently provided for within the JISC Model Licence.
This project is called the Additional Authorised User Initiative (AAUI). The AAUI is designed to meet the wider access requirements generated by new user groups by providing a new framework for negotiating and licensing online resources. It is intended that the framework will enable institutions and the publishers who supply them to manage this extended access in an orderly and legally robust manner.

The survey is being conducted in order to:

i. gain feedback on whether or not you are aware of the AAUI
ii. determine whether the Additional Authorised User Licences currently
meet your needs
iii. obtain help in widening access to new user groups

If you would like to take part in the survey, please complete the online
response form by Wednesday 30th April.

Another Copyright Project - I Kant Believe It

2008-04-07T15:48:00.002+01:00

Saw an interesting post on the popular science website PopSci.Com. In "Dead Guys Sound Off On Copyright" Matt Ransford talks about copyright as "arguably the most heated and oft-discussed topic in regard to the Internet and all that it has become. " In these days of DRM, music downloading and Creative Commons, Ransford highlights a project that is looking back through the years to find out how far we've come on this topic.

Sponsored by the AHRC, the project is called Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900). It's website offers to the public original papers that have long been archived in libraries across the world.

"Fifty core documents were chosen each from Germany, France, and Britain, along with twenty from Italy and the United States. Each has been scanned, transcribed, translated, and annotated with related documents. Many of the great minds of the past 500 years are represented: Machiavelli, Luther, Kant, Locke, Balzac, and Hugo, for example."

You can find more information and gain access the resources on the project's website.

Pop Culture meets Law

2008-04-07T15:23:00.006+01:00

I just finished writing a DCC Legal Watch Paper on medical data sharing and privacy yesterday. Interesting then today to come across a reference to this story. Much too low brow for the Legal Watch Paper :-) but an interesting example of medical data privacy issues in practice nonetheless!

Image by We're Britney's Fans on Flickr BY-NC-SA

FOI Podcast!

2008-04-07T15:15:00.003+01:00

For those if you that are fans of this format, you might be interested to know of the monthly podcast produced by Ibrahim Hasan. Ibrahim discusses all the latest FOI decisions and gives his personal views as to how they affect FOI practice. There are also interviews with experts and FOI stakeholders.

You can access the podcast here. You may also listen to previous podcasts or read the full transcripts.

Two new FOI publications

2008-03-18T13:15:00.004Z

JISC Legal has recently released two update papers on Freedom of Information (FOI).

The first is a short ‘essentials’ paper giving a summary of the main provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and highlighting what colleges and universities need to consider in order to comply with the Act.

The second is much a longer paper which they term ‘overview’ but is really quite detailed. This gives a fuller explanation of the responsibilities of public authorities, publication schemes, requests for information, and the exemptions to these. It also touches on related legislation such as the Environmental Information Regulations and Data Protection.

( FYI - the DCC will publish a Legal Watch paper on the Environmental Information Regulations towards the end of this year. There is already a briefing paper on Data Protection in the Resources section of the DCC website as well as an older one on FOI).

For those of you who don’t know about it, a bit more info on JISC Legal.
***
The JISC Legal Information service is funded by the JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) and hosted by Strathclyde University
The principle aims of the service are:
1. To disseminate information and to raise awareness of the legal issues relating to the use of information technology particularly with reference to the following:
• Data Protection
• Intellectual Property Rights
• Human Rights
• Freedom of Information
• Disability and The Law
• E-Security (Monitoring and Encryption)
• Cyber-crime and Criminal Liability
• ISP (Internet Service Provider) Liability

2. To follow relevant court cases and legislative developments within the United Kingdom (and where relevant internationally) and examine the effect such developments may have on the sector.

3. To co-ordinate and liaise with FE and HE organisations, relevant regulatory bodies, projects and studies in areas related to the remit of the service.

Check out their website for lots of useful IT-related legal information.

Special Issue on Open Data

2008-03-11T13:03:00.004Z

The February issue of Open Source Business Resource is devoted to Open Data. Here are the articles:

• Dru Lavigne, Editorial
• Tracey P. Lauriault and Hugh McGuire, Data Access in Canada: CivicAccess.ca
• Joseph Potvin, How is Copyright Relevant to Source Data and Source Code?
• Jordan Hatcher, Implementing Open Data: The Open Data Commons Project
• Ismael Peña-López, The Personal Research Portal

Image by diylibrarian on Flickr CC-NC-SA

Egypt to Copyright Pyramids

2008-01-30T14:14:00.000Z

I missed this interesting copyright story over Christmas. The Egyptian government announced a proposed law that will require royalties to be paid when copies are made of artifacts or monuments such as the sphinx or the pyramids. Only exact, to-scale replicas would be subject to royalties. Copyright experts have questioned whether the law would be enforceable internationally.

What do you think of this?

You can check out coverage of the story below:

BBC

National Geographic

Slashdot

Overlawyered.com (what a great name for a site!)

Open Data: An interview with Peter Murray-Rust

2008-01-30T14:08:00.000Z

You may have already seen this but if not do take a look at Richard Poynder’s interview with Peter Murray-Rust. It’s so informative. The links to relevant documents, sites and blog posts are invaluable.

Great new FOI resource!....coming soon to a computer near you

2008-01-22T15:01:00.000Z

You may have heard of a group called mysociety.org. They’re a charitable organisation that builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. They’ve built loads of really useful websites such as PledgeBank, TheyWorkforYou and FixMyStreet. I’ve been an admirer and user of their sites for some time.

Well they have another one in the offing and this time it’s based on Freedom of Information legislation

The new site will help people make Freedom of Information requests from different parts of government. It will then archive the responses on the web.

Keep your eyes peeled!

… oh go on then – I’ll make sure I tell you so there’s no hard work involved for you!

New Journal!

2008-01-22T13:49:00.000Z

A new journal has been brought to my attention called Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology.

You can find the launch issue online at http://www.bepress.com/selt.

The following announcement was released:

"The Berkeley Electronic Press is pleased to announce the launch of a new
peer-reviewed journal in law, policy, and technology. Studies in Ethics,
Law, and Technology examines the ethical and
legal issues that arise from emerging technologies. Topics include biotech,
nanotech, neurotech, IT, weapons, energy and fuel, space-based technology,
and new media and communications. Articles explore the synergy between law
and ethics, and provide a robust policy response to technology's
opportunities and challenges."

The launch issue focuses on questions of human enhancement, a topic I know little about. It will be interesting to keep an eye out for the themes of future issues in what promises to be an interesting journal.

Digital Copyright: opportunities and practicalities

2008-01-16T11:59:00.000Z

Are you coming across copyright issues in the delivery of digital content? There is an event coming up in London on 22 February that may be of use to you.

Digital Copyright: opportunities and practicalities
Presented in association with Naomi Korn, copyright consultant.

Copyright is a current and important topic for many organisations, particularly those that are considering digitising and delivering digital content in order to make sure that their rights are not infringed upon and their assets are fully exploited. This all-day course will focus upon participant's experiences and case studies. It
will encourage group work and discussion around key areas, whilst focusing on current topics and real world digital issues. This course will appeal to everyone currently digitising content or thinking of embarking on a digital project who wishes to learn more about rights issues. Participants are invited to bring case studies and outlines of current projects to the session.

By the end of the day, participants will:

* Encounter the key issues relating to digital copyright
* Know the importance of managing and protecting their rights
* Share experiences and good practice tips with other participants
* Gain knowledge about how best practice can
be embedded within their daily work

Naomi Korn is an experienced trainer and consultant, specialising in copyright, IPR, licencing and digital rights management. She has
worked for many years with museums, galleries, archives, libraries and the higher/further education sector. She was the former copyright officer at the Tate and has contributed to many international projects. She is currently MDA's IP Officer and chair of MDA's IP Advisory Committee for Collections.

Sessions include:

* Copyright in a global environment: overview of
the legal landscape and key issues
* Digitisation and copyright: what can you digitise and when should you?
* Digital Rights Exploitation: generating income from copyright
* Delivering content on the web: practical tips for protecting your rights
* Institutional Intellectual Property Audit
* Digital Rights management: solutions and shortcuts
* Case studies

For further details and booking click here.

Courses are £140 (no VAT) per person and are
based in London at King's College London.

We’re All Copyright Managers!

2008-01-15T17:11:00.000Z

Here is a short article by Lesley Ellen Harris which she has recently posted on a number of mailing lists. In the piece she highlights the increasing need for non-lawyers to understand copyright laws. Take heed!

Librarians Without Lawyers
Librarians Acting as Copyright Managers

Copyright Law Affects Us All

Copyright law is complicated - even for lawyers - and even for copyright lawyers who deal with copyright issues on a daily basis. Yet because of the application of the law in a broad variety of sectors, individuals with no legal backgrounds must learn about copyright law to protect their own works, negotiate permissions for others to use their content, interpret licenses for the use of online content, work within a regime governed by copyright law, and generally manage a variety of copyright issues. Visual artists, writers, photographers and filmmakers are all in professions where their income is based on copyright law. Educators, librarians, archivists and other information professionals are involved in daily activities which must be undertaken within the confines of copyright law. With the Internet, often all of these non-lawyers must understand international copyright treaties and foreign copyright laws as well as the copyright laws in their own countries – at least on a practical level.

Interpreting Fair Use/Dealing

In fact, certain provisions in copyright statutes like the U.S. fair use, or fair dealing, are intended for individuals to interpret. Therefore, if an artist wants to create an artistic work incorporating works of others, that artist must determine whether her use is fair use/dealing as if a judge in a court were deciding that same issue based on those particular circumstances. The same is true for a librarian or educator photocopying print material for use for her patrons or colleagues, or trying to explain to someone why free content obtained on the Internet is not necessarily free to forward (as opposed to forwarding a link to access that same content).

Non-Lawyers Interpreting the Law

Of course, some individuals may be able to benefit from in-house legal advice. Authors of books may sometimes rely upon the advice of their publishers' attorneys. However, many author agreements put the burden on the individual author to ensure that an author's work does not infringe upon the rights of others and that all proper copyright permissions have been obtained. Those who work in universities or larger organizations may have access to their in-house attorneys for advice on copyright issues. But even with such access, many individuals complain that the advice or answers take too long to obtain and that they must analyze the copyright issues themselves in order to get on with their work.

There are many librarians and content owners who continually are negotiating permissions and licenses to copyright-protected works and who have much more practical experience than any attorney. These are often our colleagues with whom we can gain much insight.

Copyright Manager

The reality in copyright-based industries is that individuals must understand copyright law, contract law, litigation issues, risk management and be effective negotiators. Many enterprises now have positions occupied by non-lawyers that relate to copyright. Often, these positions are filled by information professionals. For instance, a Copyright Officer may be responsible for copyright management issues. A Licensing Officer may be responsible for negotiating digital licenses, and explaining the legal uses of digital content within their enterprise. Non-lawyers who are put in a "copyright management" position should take some comfort from the recognition that they are not alone.

The article is published in SLA Information Outlook, January 2008.

Conflict between copyright and data protection - talk tomorrow

2008-01-15T12:57:00.000Z

For those in the Edinburgh, UK area you may be interested in a free talk talking place at the law school tomorrow by visiting professor, Margaret Ann Wilkinson.

Professor Wilkinson is speaking about conflict between copyright and data protection - an unusual coupling. I have seen discussions of the conflict between copyright and freedom of information, or data protection and freedom of information but I have not seen someone discuss a conflict between copyright and data protection before so this will hopefully be interesting.

"Wednesday 16th January 2008 at 13:00

Lecture Theatre G.270, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh

"Battleground between new and old orders: control conflicts between copyright and personal data protection."

Professor Margaret Ann Wilkinson

School of Law, University of Western Ontario

Professor Wilkinson is Director of the Area of Concentration in Intellectual Property, Information and Technology Law. Prior to her graduate studies, Professor Wilkinson practiced law in Toronto for several years. She first joined the Faculty of Law in 1991. In 1992, she became jointly appointed to the Faculty of Law and the then Graduate School of Library and Information Science, now the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. She retains her supervisory status for doctoral students in Library and Information Science and her supervisory status in the Graduate Program in Law, but is, since 2007, fully appointed to the Faculty of Law.

She is also an Adjunct Professor at The Richard Ivey School of Business. Her thesis on "The Impact of the Ontario Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, 1987 upon Affected Organizations", won the American Society for Information Science Doctoral Dissertation Award. Professor Wilkinson has spoken and published in the areas of intellectual property, information policy and information and media law, as well as in the areas of management, professionalism and professional ethics.

All Welcome"

I will post some notes on this in the coming weeks.

New Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data

2008-01-07T16:57:00.000Z

First day back today - I have some exciting law/digital curation news for you.

You may remember my posts back in October about the development of an open data commons database licence. Well, work on this has progressed and just before Christmas Science Commons announced a protocol for implementing open access data. The announcement was as follows:

"Today, in conjunction with the Creative Commons 5th Birthday celebration, Science Commons announces the Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data (”the Protocol”).
The Protocol is a method for ensuring that scientific databases can be legally integrated with one another. The Protocol is built on the public domain status of data in many countries (including the United States) and provides legal certainty to both data deposit and data use. The protocol is not a license or legal tool in itself, but instead a methodology for a) creating such legal tools and b) marking data already in the public domain for machine-assisted discovery.

You can read the Protocol here.

We built the Protocol after a year- long process of meetings and consultations with a broad set of stakeholders, including representatives of the geospatial and biodiversity science communities. We solicited input from international representatives from China, Uganda, Brazil, Japan, France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Colombia, Peru, Belgium, Catalonia and Spain.

We expect to convert this work into a working group with founding members from our existing communities of practice. However, the world is moving very quickly in terms of data production, and as such we created the Protocol as a guide and as a tool to bring together the existing data licensing regimes into a single space.

As part of that decision, Science Commons has worked with data licensing thought leaders and is pleased to announce partnerships with Jordan Hatcher, the lawyer behind the Open Database License; Talis, the company behind the Open Database License process; and the Open Knowledge Foundation, creators of the Open Knowledge Definition.

Jordan has drafted the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License - the first legal tool to fully implement the Protocol. It is available at his Web site. This draft is remarkable not just for the Public Domain Dedication but for the encoding of scholarly and scientific norms into a standalone, non-legal document. This is a key element of the Protocol and a major milestone in the fight for Open Access data. Talis, a company with a strong history in the open science data movement, played a key role in birthing Jordan’s work, and we’re pleased to work with them as well.

We are also pleased to announce that the Open Knowledge Foundation has certified the Protocol as conforming to the Open Knowledge Definition. We think it’s important to avoid legal fragmentation at the early stages, and that one way to avoid that fragmentation is to work with the existing thought leaders like the OKF.

We will be launching a wiki for comments on the Protocol soon, and will announce a strategy for versioning the Protocol in 2008."

I'll keep you updated!

Copyright and preservation news from Israel

2007-12-13T12:50:00.000Z

Thanks to Chris Rusbridge for forwarding on the following information from Rivka Shveiky, who is the head of the legal deposit department at the Jewish National and University Library in Israel:

“Some weeks ago, The Knesset (the Israeli parliament) passed two laws that have important implications for preservation in libraries and archives in Israel: the first - a new copyright law, the second - The National Library Law.

The new copyright law addresses the preservation needs in the clause "permitted usages in libraries and archives". For the sake of preservation, this clause includes permission to copy copyrighted works, from which the library or the archive possesses a copy, as long as the library or archive does not use the preservation copies as extra copies for everyday use. In practical terms this allows libraries and archives to copy works from obsolete formats to newer ones in order to preserve it for the future. The law also indirectly refers to the preservation of online content, by authorizing the Minister of Education to permit copying of certain kinds of works. The Minister of Education is also authorized to determine the terms for public access to the copied works.

The National Library Law contains a clause that gives The National Library even more extensive rights to copy copyrighted works for the purpose of preservation. The National Library received the right to copy any publication which is subject to Legal Deposit but failed to be deposited for any reason. While Internet sites are not subject to legal deposit in Israel, the new law allows The National Library to copy Internet sites, and thus enables the archiving of the Israeli domain. Public access to the archived Internet sites will be under the terms and conditions that the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Education will determine.”

Guide to Managing IPR in Digital Repositories

2007-12-13T12:36:00.000Z

I have been informed that the final outputs of the JISC TrustDR (Trust in Digital Repositories) project are now available.

Here’s the information that’s being provided by TrustDR:

Managing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Digital Learning Materials: A Development Pack for Institutional Repositories

Authors: John Casey, Jackie Proven & David Dripps

Distributed under a Creative Commons License - Attribution 2.5 UK: Scotland

You can download it here.

The pack is aimed at those who are setting up or running digital collections of learning materials that are managed at an institutional level. It is written in a clear and straightforward style that sets out to persuade the reader of the benefits of engaging with the issues associated with IPR in e-learning. The approach taken is based on the idea that the organisation of an IPR policy in e-learning should reflect and support the educational activity instead of hinder it – and that means understanding ‘the business of e-learning’. To do this it paints a compelling picture of an educational sector in the process of changing from traditional ad-hoc models of teaching to a more sustainable, team-based model – driven by increased student numbers, a greater focus on learners needs, and increased requirements for flexible delivery with the increasing use of digital media and technologies.

The pack is useful and unusual in that it situates its analysis and advice specifically in the highly relevant context of the professional and institutional process change that is required to introduce and extend flexible learning opportunities in our education systems – a common scenario that raises many IPR challenges. It surveys the current confused and contradictory practises in UK education and suggests that these practices reflect a situation where e-learning is not yet effectively integrated into our institutions. It also highlights a lack of involvement and leadership by senior management.

The authors argue strongly that sorting out the IPR policy for e-learning can be a way of getting senior management to engage more effectively with the educational and organisational changes that are needed to make e-learning work. Clarifying IPR policy therefore becomes an enabler for best practice. Looked at in this light - to be able to account for the provenance of content in e-learning materials is really a matter of individual academic integrity and for institutional quality control. Another central argument deals with the relative values of teaching activity by humans and the role of learning materials content, and again the pack promotes the development of policies that properly reflect these values.

The format of the development pack is a central document of about 70 pages linked to other resources; it is designed to allow the reader to dip in and out or to explore themes in greater depth. The pack functions both as a personal training manual and as an organisational development tool, it includes:

A Beginners guide to IPR in e-learning

Discussion of the pros and cons of using Creative Commons licences

Useful of tools to help analyse your situation and development needs

A collection of common IPR mistakes made by institutions

Overview of the relevant technical factors

An introduction and guide to Risk Management

Discussion of the kinds business models associated with the use of creative commons licences

Understanding and assessing the value of learning materials

A practical guide to implementing flexible learning (published by the QAA)

Tools for understanding and modelling organisational and professional change

Policy discussion and development documents for use at institutional and national levels

Scenarios/ case studies

The TrustDR (Trust in Digital Repositories) project was charged with developing practical solutions to the problem of managing IPR in collections of digital learning materials. The work was carried out between 2005 and 2007 and was led by Ulster University, Northern Ireland, in collaboration with the UHI Millennium Institute, Scotland.

Managing Intellectual Property for Museums

2007-11-26T14:28:00.000Z

I’ve just become aware of a useful new publication from WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organisation) called ‘the WIPO Guide on Managing Intellectual Property for Museums’

The executive summary explains that:

“In the digital age, the cultural heritage community is increasingly faced with the responsibility of managing its own IP internally, as well as managing uses by third parties and users throughout the world, often on diminishing budgets. Effective use of the IP system allows museums to meet international standards of best practice, and can offer significant opportunities to leverage their goodwill, authenticity, uniqueness and scholarly expertise to generate a return on investment.

The first part of the Guide describes IP issues of relevance to museums such as rights in scholarly content, technologies developed in-house, and branding tools that provide recognition and awareness of the museum in a commercial context. It also sets out recommended best practices in managing IP to enable a museum to identify its IP, understand its rights in using its collections, and strengthen its ability to deal with critical IP issues as they arise. The second part of the Guide reviews existing business models that could provide museums with appropriate opportunities to create sustainable funding, and deliver on their stated objectives.
The WIPO-commissioned author of the guide – Mrs Rina Elster Pantalony – is a recognized Canadian expert in the field of museums and cultural heritage institutions.”

You can learn more about the publication by listening to an interview with the author Rina Pantalony on the website of the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). A transcript of the interview is also available.

Massive Loss of Confidential Details by Revenue and Customs

2007-11-21T11:50:00.000Z

Bit of an obvious one to report on but seeing as it is data protection related how could I resist?!

The loss has been reported widely as the top news story in many papers. You can check out the BBC, Guardian and Times coverage form these links.

In addition the Information Commissioner’s Office has released an official statement on the matter.

If you are interested in the data protection principles you can find them in the Data Protection Act 1998 on the OPSI website.

I think this situation highlights the importance of good practice and genuine compliance. As the information commissioner, Richard Thomas, is reported to have said:

“it just does not matter what laws, rules, procedures and regulations are in place, if there is no proper enforcement of those rules.”

Legal Implications of Web 2.0

2007-11-20T17:04:00.000Z

An interesting article in the Times discussing the copyright and privacy issues inherent in Web 2.0.

Image by gualtierocatrame on Flickr CC-BY-NC

Free the Postcode!

2007-11-06T14:27:00.000Z

While writing my last post I came across this initiative (Free the Postcode!) from a link on Chris Fleming’s website. The website says:

“The postcode database - which turns a postcode to a latitude/longitude and back - is not free in the UK. In fact, it's very expensive. The Post Office owns it and sells it to various companies that make use of it for things like insurance or parcel tracking. There are however many people who'd like to use it for non-profit purposes. Say you want to lay out events like free concerts / gigs on a map and you only have the postcode... you have to buy the database.
Instead, wouldn't it be nice if it was free like zipcodes are in the US? To do this, you have to have a number of people collaborating with GPS units who note positions and postcodes. Hence this site to collect that data.”

It then provides a way for people to enter data that they have collected themselves with a GPS. My little knowledge of GPS was gained on some work I did on the GRADE project (Scoping a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction). If you’re interested in the issues involved in the reuse of geospatial data you can take a look at the project here.

Around the World in 80 Clicks (Legal and IT aspects of geospatial data)

2007-11-06T14:11:00.000Z

For those of you in Edinburgh and around - this talk by Chris Fleming of the OpenStreetMap project looks interesting:

Around the World in 80 Clicks (Legal and IT aspects of geospatial data)
Wednesday 14 November 2007
6.00 for 6.30 p.m.
at
The Faculty of Advocates, McKenzie Building (behind Fringe Office) High Street, Edinburgh

The announcement says:

"The OpenStreetMap project is a way of creating a free crowd sourced map allowing users use of the data for any purpose they might wish, avoiding some of the restrictions of both traditional mapping and seemingly free maps such as Google maps. Since it started over 5000 people in every continent have start mapping from places as diverse as Iraq, Australia, Brazil, Spain and Germany. Mapping of the whole of the Netherlands has been donated by a commercial mapping company and at the current rate of progress it is hoped that the mapping of the UK will be completed by the end of 2008.

In this talk, Chris Fleming will talk about and demonstrate the mapping process, how to create a map without violating copyright from the use of GPS devices to sources of copyright free data such as out of copyright maps and aerial photography. At its inception OpenStreetMap chose a Creative Commons ShareAlike-Attribution licence, and Chris will talk about the appropriateness of this licence for this kind of project, what this style of licence has encouraged and both the benefits and the limitations of the licence conditions. He will also consider alternative licences and the difficulties involved in changing licences.
Chris graduated from Edinburgh University with a degree in Computer Science and Electronics in 2000. By day he works for Agilent Technologies (formally part of HP) based in South Queensferry monitoring systems for telecoms networks. While working on web development he became frustrated with the state of commercially available sources of mapping data and so became involved in the OpenStreetMap project in early 2006. Since then he has been participating in discussions around the usage and licensing of the data as well as talking about the project in Scotland and organising a mapping party in Edinburgh."

To book a place they ask that you e-mail Rosie Saunders at:
rosie.saunders@advocates.org.uk

You might also want to check out OpenGeoData. This is a blog about open maps, geographical data and OpenStreetMap.

Joint DCC and SCRIPTed Workshop - Legal Environment of Digital Curation

2007-10-30T15:33:00.000Z

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and SCRIPTed online journal are
delighted to announce that they will be delivering a joint one-day workshop.
This event will take place at the University of Glasgow on November 23, 2007
and will provide a useful overview of legal considerations for non-legal
professionals who work with data. The day will consist of talks by experts
in the areas of:

-Intellectual property rights and licensing
-Data protection, freedom of information and privacy
-Data as evidence

This will be followed in the afternoon by group discussion in each of these
areas.

Intended Audience
The intended audience for this event are people who:

-Share data
-Manage data for others
-Need to preserve data
-Are setting up institutional repositories for data
-Manage collaborations depending on data

Programme
To view the programme for this event, please click here.

Venue
This event will take place in Charles Wilson Building, University of
Glasgow. This is building E15 on the following map.

Registration
You may register here.
Registration fees are £30 for DCC Associates Network members and £60 for
non-members.

Handy hint - membership of the DCC Associates Network is FREE! For more information on
becoming a member, see the Associates Network page.

Nature Precedings – pre-publication research and preliminary findings

2007-10-22T11:15:00.000+01:00

You may have heard about Nature Precedings. It’s relevant to us in many ways - from copyright implications, to sharing of findings and ease of access to archiving and preservation.

Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It is a free service which describes itself as providing a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It makes such material easy to archive, share and cite.

The site states that you should only submit material to Nature Precedings if you own the copyright (which will usually mean that you wrote it) and have the permission of any other copyright holders (e.g., in the case of a co-authored piece of work, the other authors). They specifically ask that if you are uploading a presentation you take particular care that none of your slides contain material for which you do not own the copyright.

Copyright for all documents remains with the author(s). Others may make use of the material under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Licence. Simply put, this means that the content may be quoted, copied and disseminated for any purpose, but only if the original source is correctly cited.

As well as making scientific documents citable, Nature Precedings also aims to make them globally available and stably archived. To this end, they are in discussions with governmental, academic and not-for-profit organisations about providing mirror sites of Nature Precedings content. The plan is that if, for any reason, this content becomes unavailable from Nature Publishing Group, it will continue to be available through those sites.

Last Call for The Survey of Database Licensing Practices

2007-10-03T11:56:00.000+01:00

Primary Research Group is planning to publish a survey of library database licensing practices and is seeking survey participants. The survey will close on October 9th
2007. Academic, public, corporate, legal and special libraries
are eligible. This is an international survey open to libraries
of all countries. Participants receive a free PDF copy of the
estimated 100-page report. Data are broken out by type and size
of institution for easier benchmarking. Click here to take the 40 question
survey.

Thoughts on drafting an open data licence

2007-10-02T11:21:00.000+01:00

Further to my previous post on the open data commons database licence I’d like to draw your attention to this post by one of the creators, Jordan Hatcher, where he discusses the thinking behind the development of the licence.

Open data commons database licence

2007-10-02T11:12:00.000+01:00

A draft Open Data Commons Database licence has been produced by Jordan Hatcher and Dr. Charlotte Waelde of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh School of Law. It is sponsored by Talis

In Jordan's words it is:

"an attempt at a worldwide licence for databases following in the footsteps of other open /free/libre licences in both software and content. In Creative Commons terms it is an SA licence."

You can read Jordan's blog post announcing its release here.

The draft text of the licence itself is located here.

It is very important to note that this licence covers copyright and database rights over databases. It doesn’t cover the rights over the contents of databases. Because the data has been separated from the database in the licensing,
a supplemental BSD/MIT style licence for the data, intended for
factual information rather than other "contents of a database" has been provided.

There's also a discussion list set up specifically for the licence. Any comments or thoughts would be most welcome.

Law as a "positive agent"!

2007-09-04T11:55:00.000+01:00

I just read an interesting article by Brian Fitzgerald and Kylie Pappalardo in the CT Watch Quarterly called ‘The Law as Cyberinfrastructure’. The article discusses both open content licensing and open patent licensing and highlights a number of the relevant issues and initiatives in these areas. What I specifically like about it was that it saw the potential for law to be an enabling tool as opposed to a barrier to progress. This is an approach we try to promote here at the DCC.

Here are some of the passages I particularly like on this point:

“In the realm of collaborative endeavour through networked cyberinfrastructure we know the law is not too far away. But we also know that a paranoid obsession with it will cause inefficiency and stifle the true spirit of research. The key for the lawyers is to understand and implement a legal framework that can work with the power of the technology to disseminate knowledge in such a way that it does not seem a barrier. This is difficult in any universal sense but not totally impossible. In this article, we will show how the law is responding as a positive agent to facilitate the sharing of knowledge in the cyberinfrastructure world.”

“Legal instruments that can match the dynamic of the technology and appear seamless and non-invasive are the goal.”

“As lawyers, we hope that the law can adapt to facilitate the very great potential cyberinfrastructure promises us. To this end, we need to think of legal tools as being part of the infrastructure and work towards providing innovative models for the future.”

What are your thoughts on this?

What is personal data?

2007-09-03T15:27:00.000+01:00

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) published new guidance last week that explains its view of what counts as personal data under the Data Protection Act. The guidance included the view that information that is not personal data today may become personal data as technology advances.

Read about this story on outlaw.com

Read the guidance from the ICO

JISC Collections Licensing Workshop: Copyright in the digital age - 7th September 2007, Birmingham

2007-08-13T14:49:00.000+01:00

Announcement from JISC collections about a licensing workshop focusing on copyright in the digital age.

"Early Bird registration discount still available for members until 15th August

Copyright is a complex issue that confuses many and infuriates others. What you can do and cannot do in relation to the educational use of copyrighted digital resources is not clear and is complicated by myth, rumour and the Internet. It is now as easy to infringe upon the copyright of digital materials as it is for the infringement to be detected.

Following on from the popular workshop that was hosted in London earlier this year, JISC Collections is repeating this event, which will take place at the Millennium Point Thinktank events suite in central Birmingham on Friday, 7th September 2007. The workshop will focus on digital copying and issues relating to sharing between collaborative institutions. This will be of interest to librarians and all practitioners and teaching staff who use online content in their teaching.

Attendees will be introduced to the online interactive tool which demonstrates how online resources from JISC Collections can enable practitioners and institutions to resolve the common misconceptions and issues relating to the use of copyrighted digital and online resources in research, teaching and learning."

You can find more details and register online here

New survey on open content licences

2007-08-06T16:11:00.000+01:00

The Eduserv Foundation is funding a study into the use of Creative Archive, Creative Commons and similar open content licences by cultural heritage organisations in the United Kingdom. The study is being led by legal consultant Jordan Hatcher of opencontentlawyer.com. As part of the study a survey has been released. Click here to take the survey.

The survey is open to UK-based cultural heritage organisations such as museums, libraries, galleries, archives, film and video organisations, broadcasters, and other organisations that conduct cultural heritage activities.

The goal of the study is to provide information on the actual use of Creative Archive, Creative Commons, and similar licences. This information will be useful to decision makers and interested professionals in the cultural heritage sector, and for local and national government and the HE and FE sector. The study will be conducted from now through to the middle of September and a report will be made available in October.

If you are a member of a cultural heritage organisation, whether or not you currently use Creative Commons or Creative Archive licences, your participation in the survey would be really helpful to make this study a success.

As a bonus for completing the survey, respondents will get the chance to enter a drawer to win one of three iPod Shuffles that come pre-loaded with music! See the survey for full details.

It would also be very helpful if you would publicise the survey by blogging about it or forwarding this post to people who you think might be interested.

You can learn more about the project and read the original research proposal at the project’s homepage.

If you would prefer to take part via post or telephone, or are interested in finding out more about the study, please contact Ed Barker and Jordan Hatcher at

cc-study@eduserv.org.uk
--or--
phone +44 (0) 125 474328

2007-07-31T14:52:00.000+01:00

Creative Commons has launched a new division focussed on education. It's called ccLearn.

ccLearn is dedicated to realizing the full potential of the Internet to support open learning and open educational resources (OER). Its mission is to minimize barriers to sharing and reuse of educational materials — legal barriers, technical barriers, and social barriers.

* With legal barriers, they advocate for licensing of educational materials under interoperable terms, such as those provided by Creative Commons licenses, that allow unhampered modification, remixing, and redistribution. They will also educate teachers, learners, and policy makers about copyright and fair-use issues pertaining to education.
* With technical barriers, they promote interoperability standards and tools to facilitate remixing and reuse.
* With social barriers, they encourage teachers and learners to re-use educational materials available on the Web, and to build on each other’s contributions.

ccLearn will be in transition over the remainder of the summer, reaching full operation this in autumn. It is an international project, and will be working with open educational sites and resources from around the world.

Open Data Licensing: is your data safe?

2007-07-25T15:03:00.000+01:00

Just a quickie. Those of you interested in the issues raised by data licensing might want to take a look at Chris Rusbridge’s interesting discussion of the area on the Digital Curation Blog.

Electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic landscape

2007-07-17T16:33:00.000+01:00

This sounds relevant...

Electronic copyright, IPR and access issues in the emerging electronic
landscape

ALISS One Day Summer Conference British Library Conference Centre
13th August 9.30-4.30

From the announcement:

“On 13th August ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information
Professionals in the Social Sciences) will be holding a one day conference
on the topical issue of electronic copyright IPR and access issues. It will
include presentations from ongoing projects and practical tips from
practitioners. The speakers will include:

Copyright and data licensing;, does electronic differ from print?' Richard Ebdon, Copyright Officer, The British Library.
The practicalities of copyright in the online age. Helen Bartlett, Copyright Manager, HERON.
Rights and responsibilities: managing electronic images Grant Young Technical Research Officer, TASI - Technical Advisory Service for Images.
IPR and multimedia in institutional repositories: lessons from the MIDESS Lesley Pitman, Librarian and Director of Information Services, UCL SSEES Library.
Librarians against plagiarism: how Imperial College London is using PRS and active learning to combat the cut and paste generation. Ruth Harrison and Julia Garthwaite.
Irish Studies Online - JSTOR and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, QUB. Norma Menabney, Queen University, Belfast.

Cost: £75 ALISS Members, Non-Members £95. This will include a buffet lunch
and tea/coffee.

Registration: Places are limited. To register contact: Heather Dawson,
ALISS Secretary, LSE Library, 10 Portugal Street, London, WC2A 2HD.
h.dawson@lse.ac.uk"

All Online Data Lost in Internet Crash!!

2007-07-12T17:44:00.000+01:00

Checkout this breaking news.......

Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research: A Legal Analysis

2007-07-11T18:17:00.001+01:00

Another one from the domain of open knowledge but this time from the other side of the globe….

Researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have released a report entitled 'Building the Infrastructure for Data Access and Reuse in Collaborative Research: A Legal Analysis'. This has been produced as a result of two different QUT projects: Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law and Legal Framework for e-Research.

The announcement explains that the report:

"examines the legal framework within which research data is generated, managed, disseminated and used. It provides an overview of the operation of copyright law, contract and confidentiality laws, as well as a range of legislation - privacy, public records and freedom of information legislation – that is of relevance to research data. The Report considers how these legal rules apply to define rights in research data and regulate the generation, management and sharing of data. The Report also describes and explains current practices and attitudes towards data sharing. A wide array of databases is analysed to ascertain the arrangements currently in place to manage and provide access to research data. Finally, the Report encourages researchers and research organisations to adopt proper management and legal frameworks for research data outputs. It provides practical guidance on the development and implementation of legal frameworks for data management with the objective of ensuring that research data can be accessed and used by other researchers."

I must admit that I have only scanned this so cannot give an accurate review but at 274 pages we can probably safely assume that it is pretty comprehensive!

Guide To Open Data Licensing

2007-07-11T18:05:00.000+01:00

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) has released a Guide To Open Data Licensing.

This is currently on their wiki at http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing

The OKF announcement said:

"While attending XTech back in May it became clear that there were a lot of questions both about the legal status of data and what approaches to use when licensing it.
...

We started work on the guide in order to have something which could help answer these kinds of questions. At present it is roughly divided into two sections. The first section deals with the practical question of how to license your data. The second section discusses what kinds of intellectual property-like rights exist in data in various jurisdictions.
This guide is very much in an ‘alpha’ state, with much that can be done to improve and extend it. We’ve been working on it in the wiki precisely so that anyone may edit it and we’d welcome contributions — whether it be adding new sections and use cases or just fixing typos. So please, check it out and feel free to make changes."

So do check the guide out and comment or contribute (if you’re into that kind of thing!)

SERU 0.9 Draft Available for Pilot Use

2007-06-28T18:29:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Joy Davidson who passed this announcement on to me.

NISO's Shared E-Resource Understanding (SERU) Working Group has
made available a new 0.9 draft of SERU on the NISO Web site.

This latest version of the Shared Electronic Resource
Understanding provides a set of statements publishers and
libraries can choose to use for sales of electronic content. SERU
offers publishers and libraries an alternative to the
often-burdensome process of bilateral negotiation of a formal
license agreement by allowing the sale of e-resources without
licenses if both parties feel their perception of risk has been
adequately addressed by current law and developing norms of
behavior within the publisher and library communities. Libraries
and publishers can notify serials vendors of their willingness to
work with SERU allowing vendors to more easily mediate such
subscription sales.

The working group encourages pilot use of the 0.9 draft by
interested libraries and publishers. SERU 0.9 includes
guidelines for implementation and is accompanied by a revised FAQ
to assist users of the statements. NISO is maintaining a list of
libraries and publishers who plan to use SERU for pilot
transactions. To join the registry or to see the list of current
trial participants visit
http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU/registry.html.

The NISO SERU Working Group is grateful for the active commentary
earlier SERU drafts have generated. The current SERU document
reflects a range of suggestions from many constituencies in the
library and publishing communities. The working group continues
to welcome comments on the draft statements. Comments can be sent
to Karla Hahn (karla@arl.org) or Judy Luther
(judy.luther@informedstrategies.com), the working group
co-chairs, or any other member of the working group.

An informational listserv providing announcements of future
developments with the project is available as well. SERU 0.9 and
further information on the SERU Working Group, can be found at
http://www.niso.org/committees/SERU/.

The NISO SERU Working Group was formed in late 2006 following a
development meeting supported by the Association of Research
Libraries (ARL), the Association of Learned and Professional
Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Society for Scholarly
Publishing (SSP).

Ruling in Perfect 10 v.Google

2007-06-27T16:33:00.001+01:00

Photo totally unrelated to the story today. I've been away on a variety of trips recently. In order to explain the gaps in the blawg postings at the same time as making good use of my snaps I will be adding travel shots to the next few postings!

Bit late on this one but back in May the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the US has upheld Google's appeal against claims of infringement of copyright for creating and displaying thumbnail images. The court also ruled that when Google frames and links to other sites, it does not violate their copyright. If you’ve got time for 48 pages take a look at the full decision. You can also read Jason Schultz’s views about the decision on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks blog. Remember that this is a U.S. case which talks about ‘fair use’. ‘Fair dealing’ (its UK counterpart) is much narrower.

This is one of the cases mentioned in a DCC legal research paper currently in progress that discusses, amongst other things, the practice and legality of framing and in-lining. I’ll say a bit more about that once it’s published.

Librarians' top concerns

2007-06-12T15:58:00.000+01:00

SCONUL (the Society of College, National and University Libraries) recently released the Top Concerns Survey 2007. It showed that 42% of SCONUL members considered "Compliance (e.g. licensing, copyright, FOI, DDA, digital rights, health and safety)" to have been a high concern in the last 3 months. Compliance wasn't the highest ranked concern though. The areas scoring most highly were:

e-environment;
space and buildings;
staffing and HR management; and
policy and strategy

First postgraduate qualification in information rights

2007-05-15T18:30:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Sarah Higgins who brought the Information and Rights Practice LLM course at Northumbria University to my attention.

The course covers the Data Protection Act 1998, the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 together with the common law duty of confidence and the right to privacy protected by the ECHR.

You can find more details at the university’s website.

The Blawg may be quiet for a while as I’m off on my holidays. Au revoir!

Got 20 minutes? (Taking open data to another level)

2007-05-11T15:30:00.000+01:00

I know. Who has? But if you can find it I really recommend watching this video (brought to my attention by Peter Suber on the SPARC Open Data list – thank you!). It’s a very interesting presentation by Hans Rosling where he de-bunks a few myths about the "developing" world. Rosling is professor of international health at

Sweden

's world-renowned Karolinska Institute. He is also the founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life.

In the first 15 minutes he provides a fascinating overview of the changes that have occurred in the world over the last 40 years in terms of child survival rates, average number of children per woman, life expectancy at birth, distribution of income, GDP per capita. The graphics he employs to make this understandable and engaging are wonderful. In the last 5 minutes he turns to the issue of the availability and usability of data (digital curation bells!!)

Rosling poses the question “why are we not using the data we have?” and answers:

“The data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the Internet is there but we have still not used it effectively. All that information we saw changing in the world [in the demonstration] does not include publicly funded statistics. There are some web pages like this …but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. And this won’t work!”

He then asks, "what is needed?" His answer - "linking data to design."

That’s where Gapminder comes in. The website describes its purpose as:

“… filling a gap. There has been a market failure in distributing global data. A lot of people are interested in the data, but don’t get access to it (and if they manage to access the data, they need to be advanced skilled statisticians to analyze it). Gapminder wants to make data more accessible and easier to use for instant visual analysis. We believe decision makers, politicians as well as education at almost all levels lack adequate tools.”

The software is proving popular with many. Ben Hyde has blogged:

"These gapminder charts are just marvelous. They are a exemplar of what we should expect from data presentation going forward. Printed data’s days are numbered."

My main thought here is that better access to the data and greater understanding of what it demonstrates can only be a good thing in terms of international health and development.

But also, the software is not limited to use with international health data. The usefulness of its application to all types of data is ripe for exploration!

See Peter Suber's blog post on this topic

Image by Ilya Eric Lee on Flickr CC-NC-ND

Internet users more powerful than the law?

2007-05-11T14:02:00.000+01:00

An interesting news item on out-law.com about a company at the forefront of the user-generated content movement that has chosen to risk legal action that may spell termination for the company, in place of disappointing its users. Digg, a website that ranks news stories according to its readers votes, has received cease and desist letters from entertainment companies after a number of its leading stories this week contained details of a secret code which unlocks the anti-piracy systems of DVDs.

Digg.com originally deleted the stories but after a massive user backlash allowed the stories to be posted In a U-turn that could open them to legal action.

Encryption codes like the one revealed on Digg are covered by the U.S.'s 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a controversial piece of legislation (read the U.S. Copyright office summary here).

Fred von Lohman, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said in his blog that sites which carry the code or links to it are unlikely to be able to use a traditional defence of 'safe harbor'.

"While no court has ruled on the issue, AACS (the trade group for Advanced Access Content System Licensing) will almost certainly argue that the DMCA safe harbors do not protect online service providers who host or link to the key."

Read the out-law.com news item here

See more about this story in:

Image by Darwin Bell on Flickr CC-BY-NC

World Intellectual Property Day 2007!

2007-04-26T14:59:00.000+01:00

Today is World Intellectual Property Day 2007!

This year WIPO celebrates the link between intellectual property and creativity under the theme - Encouraging Creativity.

You can check out what activities are going on around the world to celebrate World Intellectual Property Day 2007 on WIPO’s website. Prize for the person who identifies the funniest one!

Image by Eszter on Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA

Latest issue of FOI Journal out

2007-04-25T18:01:00.000+01:00

Just a quickie!

The latest issue of Open Government has just been published. The journal's aim is to publish research and communications related to Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation from the perspective of academics, practitioners and FOI users. At only two years old it is a relatively new jounrnal (for obvious reasons!)

Magazine's archive online

2007-04-19T17:30:00.000+01:00

I read an article in Mediabistro.com about Harper’s magazine putting articles from its 157 year archive online. This brings up licensing issues (what use(s) did the authors licence to Harper’s?) and also highlights the time and effort required for rights clearance activities. Harper's VP, public relations Giulia Melucci is reported to have said "In an ideal world we would have contacted all 40,000 writers living and dead." Presumably we can take from this that they didn’t.

Image by Geff Rossi on Flickr CC-BY-NC-ND

User Generated Content - The Copyright Conundrum

2007-04-06T18:18:00.000+01:00

This event looks interesting. Thanks to Sean Flynn for flagging it up. I'm afraid I can't make it but hopefully somone else can. Although it's taking place in the States there is a live webcast.

Sean's message was as follows:

Please join us for

User Generated Content: The Copyright Conundrum
April 10th | 4:00 pm — 6:00 pm
Reception to Follow
Washington College of Law | Room 603

4801 Massachusetts Ave NW, Washington D.C.

Registration: www.wcl.american.edu/secle/cle_form.cfm

The Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at the American University Washington College of Law and the Center for Social Media at the American University School of Communications, in collaboration with the DC Chapter of the Copyright Society of the USA, present a lively discussion on the implications of copyright law for makers of participatory media and the platforms on which it is displayed. The discussion will emphasize strategies to avoid or minimize risk of copyright liability. Panelists will include:

Sarah B. Deutsch
Vice President & Assoc. General Counsel
Verizon

Alec French
Senior Counsel, Gov’t Relations
NBC Universal, Inc.

Fred von Lohmann
Sr. Staff Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation

Steve Tapia
Sr. Attorney, Law & Corp. Affairs
Microsoft

Mike Remington
Partner
Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP

This event is open to the public. Your registration is appreciated to help our planning of the public reception following the panel. Registration, however, is not required to attend.

Registration

www.wcl.american.edu/secle/cle_form.cfm

Webcast

www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/webcast.cfm

Hot off the press - Next DCC Conference!

2007-04-02T19:01:00.000+01:00

3rd International Digital Curation Conference 2007

The UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC), the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) are pleased to jointly announce the 3rd International Digital Curation Conference to be held on Wednesday 12th – Thursday 13th December 2007 at the Renaissance Washington Hotel in Washington DC, USA.

Entitled “Curating our Digital Scientific Heritage: a Global Collaborative Challenge” the conference will focus on emerging strategy, policy implementation, leading-edge research and practitioner experience, and will comprise a mix of peer-reviewed papers, invited presentations and keynote international speakers.

Further details and a Call for Papers will be published shortly at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/dcc-2007/

The event will follow on from the Fall 2007 CNI Task Force meeting which will be held on Monday 10th – Tuesday 11th December, also at the Renaissance Washington Hotel, Washington DC.

More information about the DCC can be found at http://www.dcc.ac.uk/

Blogs as new sources of research data - what about privacy?

2007-03-27T15:49:00.000+01:00

Last week I went to an interesting workshop at the e-Science institute in Edinburgh called ‘New Kinds of Social Data: from Blogs to Administrative data'.

The meeting was targeted at researchers in academia and government and those concerned with long time archiving and access of social data. My primary interest was in the privacy and data protection implications of using these new data resources. A talk I found particularly interesting was given by Karen McCullagh, entitled ‘Blogs archives and privacy’.

Karen is currently working on her PhD. You can find out more about her research project here. The survey on 'Bloggers Privacy Expectations and Attitudes ' is no longer live but Karen hopes to make the results of this survey available at this link shortly.

All of the presentations from the workshop are available online.

Google, YouTube and IP infringement

2007-03-26T19:28:00.000+01:00

Interesting article by James Boyle in the Financial Times last week. He was talking about Google, YouTube and intellectual property infringements by major corporations.

Read the article

I particularly liked the following paragraph:

"When we are dealing with intellectual property, how do we know who is a trespasser and who is a greedy landowner trying to enclose the public right of way? First lesson, analogies to physical property are dangerous. Most of these disputes are about whether a new market, enabled by technology, should lie inside or outside the scope of the artificial monopoly conferred by the intellectual property right. Because these rights are created for a purpose - to foster and disseminate science, innovation and culture - there are inevitable "should" questions involved. Should copyright make it illegal for a search engine to index my book (which requires making a copy of it) if only a small fragment is available to a searcher and publishers can request removal? Google has a very good argument that copyright should not and does not make that illegal."

This relates to conversations I've been having with Peter Buneman recently about the appropriateness of the current copyright regime in a digital environment. More to follow on that one...

US to create a universal database of all its research results.

2007-03-22T19:43:00.000Z

News that the US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories.

Read about it in Nature.com

Handy FOI Resource

2007-03-21T15:35:00.000Z

I came across this useful Freedom of Information resource today:

http://www.informationhandyman.com/BlFOIResources.htm

If you have any questions about Freedom of Information, you could make a useful start here. Alternatively you could send your query to the DCC on info@dcc.ac.uk as we'd be happy to help you.

UNESCO publishes survey on ethical implications of emerging technologies

2007-03-16T18:56:00.000Z

UNESCO has published a survey of the ethical implications of emerging technologies. The technologies covered include the semantic web and metadata, radio-frequency identification, the geospatial web and location based services, mesh networking and grid computing. For the ‘technologically-challenged’ amongst us (I count myself in this group) the report starts with a very useful overview of the technologies covered. It then sets out two “Infoethics Goals for Neutral Technologies”. These are:

(1) Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms; and

(2) Access to Information and Communication (which is split into Public Domain, Diversity of Content on Information Networks and Unfettered Access to Information)

Amongst the recommendations made at the end of the report is the establishment of a community of technologists to protect personal data. The authors, Mary Rundle and Chris Conley state that:

“the control of personal data flow will prove pivotal for the exercise of human rights and access to information in the Information Society. This factor is one of the most important identified in this survey of “Ethical Implications of Emerging Technologies” as technology will increasingly have potential to be used to wield control over people’s existence.”

Google assisting in massive data swaps

2007-03-14T17:29:00.000Z

I'm a bit tardy in reporting this one but there was an interesting article on the BBC website recently about how Google is helping academics around the world to exchange huge amounts of data.

The firm's open source team is working on ways to physically transfer huge data sets up to 120 terabytes in size. Google sends scientists a hard drive system and then copies it before passing it on to other researchers. It hopes that one day the data it helps to swap will be available to the public.

On the legal perspective the article says,

Google keeps a copy and the data is always in an open format, or in the public domain or perhaps covered by a creative commons license

A bit vague...?

Move towards cross-border licensing for e-resources

2007-02-26T18:25:00.000Z

A couple of interesting items came my way today via the JISC Collections Weekly Update. Firstly, the announcement that Knowledge Exchange – an umbrella organisation of four national ICT bodies – has begun a multinational tender process to explore with publishers the possibility of cross-border licensing arrangements. JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) reports that:

"with national licensing agreements for online resources well established in the four countries – the UK, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands – the aim of the initiative is to explore whether further economies of scale can be secured and new and innovative business models developed through an international approach."

You can find further information here.

Secondly, JISC are running a licensing workshop on Copyright in the Digital Age on 30 March in London. The workshop will focus on digital copying and issues relating to sharing between collaborative institutions. Understanding copyright is a key issue in digital curation, as when people are unsure of their legal rights and responsibilities they are sometimes reluctant to act and afraid to use resources.

You can find more details and register on the JISC Collections website.

Communication from the Commission - Scientific Publishing in the Digital Age

2007-02-19T19:22:00.000Z

The Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European Economic Committee on Scientific Information in the Digital Age: Access, Dissemination and Preservation (a bit of a mouthful) was brought to my attention today. Thanks to Neil Beagrie at the British Library for that.

It's a reasonably short document that is well worth a look because, as well as its coverage of digital preservation, it gives attention to some of the relevant legal issues in this area. It discusses the practice of assigning copyright in journal articles and, more interestingly, the differences when you are dealing with research data, where the Database Directive becomes relevant and (arguably) a cause for concern. The Communication also highlights legal deposit as a central issue for the preservation of digital scientific information.

SCRIPT-ed online journal

2007-02-16T16:55:00.000Z

Wondering what I should write about in my first post to this Blog (or should I say Blawg?) Well, I’m just back from a meeting of the editorial board of the SCRIPT-ed journal so I think I’ll write about that.

SCRIPT-ed describes it self as “an online, international, interdisciplinary and multi-lingual forum for articles, reports, commentaries, analysis, case and legislation critiques, and book reviews pertaining to law and technologies in the broadest sense.”

SCRIPT-ed is the online journal of the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property and Technology Law based in the School of Law at the University Edinburgh. The AHRC Research Centre…(it’s a very long name) is a friend of the DCC and provides legal input on digital curation issues.

The journal covers a lot of interesting topics. The current issue is December 2006 and there will be new one out on the 15th of March. Check it out!