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

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"

Internet users more powerful than the law?

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:

The New York Times

The LA Times

The Guardian

Forbes

Financial Times

Image by Darwin Bell on Flickr CC-BY-NC

Google, YouTube and IP infringement

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...

UNESCO publishes survey on ethical implications of emerging technologies

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.”