The Library Society of the World is here to help you help us conduct a non-harassing protest against these vendors. We recognize that the vendor representatives that will be staffing the boothes in the MidWinter exhibit hall are not the bad guys. They didn’t make these decisions and they don’t deserve to have bad days because of this protest. Their executives, however, need to know that SOPA is not ok with us. The Library Bill of Rights is clear:

III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

So here’s the plan:

1. Print off as many copies of the LSW SOPA Protest Coupons (PDF) as you can manage, making sure to print it double sided. (The file is in color, but it prints in black and white just fine.) Ideally, print off as many sheets as you think you can use and as many as you think you can carry to hand out to people at Midwinter.
2. Cut or tear sheets into 6 protest coupons, each of which should have the letter on one side and the “+1 Protest Point” pattern on the other.
3. Use Andy’s Exhibit Hall map to help you know which vendors support this legislation, and take them a coupon or three.
4. Please try to be nice to the vendor reps, but make it clear that their higher-ups need to know that we’re not ok with this.

Ideally, by the end of Midwinter, each vendor booth should have a hefty collection of protest coupons quantifying our displeasure.

P.S. This post and the protest coupons have a CC0 license — that means that I claim no copyright on this work and that you can use it and share it at will.

So, the Associated Press reported on Amazon’s acquisition of Woot.com. Looks like pretty standard reporting to me. A couple quotes here and there to give some substance — normal stuff.

How much do I owe you?

Woot noticed the article and realized that those quotes came from Woot’s blog. Woot remembered when the AP had cracked down on bloggers quoting AP material and created a handy web form for easy calculation and payment based on the number of words bloggers wanted to use when quoting the AP. And so, Woot decided that it was only fair to charge the AP for the quoted material. Here’s what Woot said (quoted for the purpose of comment and criticism, as allowed under section 107 of Title 17):

… We couldn’t help but notice something important. And that something is this: you printed our web content in your article! The web content that came from our blog! Why, isn’t that the very thing you’ve previously told nu-media bloggers they’re not supposed to do? So, The AP, here we are. Just to be fair about this, we’ve used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we’ve figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post….

If you read the whole post, you’ll find that Woot proposes a compromise. I won’t spoil it for you.

So, since I quoted for the purposes of comment and criticism, here’s my comment followed shortly by my criticism.

Comment: I love Woot’s response because THIS IS SO DUMB! Oh, wait, that might have been my criticism. I guess I find it both hard to believe and stunningly easy to believe that the AP would have a web form that does everything it can to make you believe you have to pay $17.50 for up to 50 words of quotation. (It does mention Fair Use, in the little pop-up you can open if you want to know more about this license, but it makes Fair Use seem like a pretty rare thing, and a risky thing for both you and your employer.)

Criticism: This post is pretty much all criticism, I suppose, but I’m particularly critical of the “It’s only Fair Use if we quote you, not the other way around” and the “my lawyer is bigger than your lawyer” approachs to copyright. And then there’s the AP’s list of copyright dos and don’ts where all the dos are “do know about the risks of copyright infringement to you and your employer” and all the don’ts are “so don’t infringe our copyright.”

This isn’t copyright — this is playground bullying. If you take my milk, that’s stealing. If I take your milk, that’s my right.

(Via David)

The FriendFeed user, Kol, had bookmarked an image that he found on a site that allows artists to share their work with each other. In typical FriendFeed fashion, this bookmark appeared in FriendFeed with a thumbnail of the image he had bookmarked and with places for other FriendFeed users to comment on, “like,” or re-share the bookmark and its related thumbnail image with their own sets of FriendFeed friends. The artist objected strenuously (and not at all politely) to the fact that this thumbnail appeared on FriendFeed. Kol and other FriendFeed users tried explaining that Kol had not, in fact, infringed on the artist’s rights by bookmarking her image since thumbnails do not violate copyright and since the image was licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (though the artist has since removed that license). In short, the artist was well within her rights to ask (politely) to have her image removed from FriendFeed as a matter of courtesy, but she was probably not within her rights to accuse the original poster of wrong-doing. That’s the sanitized version, at least, which I reproduced here at some length because of difficulties with the original material.*

So, except for the attendant drama, the issues seem to be garden-variety intellectual property confusion. But all the drama involved in this particular exchange was actually kind of illuminating.

First, it reminded me that as an information consumer, I’m used to the feelings of frustration involved in finding out that I can’t freely use other people’s stuff however I want to even if I cite my sources. I run up against the flip-side of these frustrations only very rarely, however, and they’re good to bear in mind. I happily slap Creative Commons licenses on lots of the stuff I produce, but I remember all too well the first time I found my work being reproduced and shared in a way that I didn’t particularly appreciate but that fell squarely within the parameters of the license I’d chosen. There’s nothing like working up a good head of righteous indignation only to remember that they’re doing exactly what I said they could do and no more.

This particular discussion might also be less straight-forward than it at first appeared. Licenses always trump copyright, and the original image** has license-like language attached to it that prohibits “use” of the work outside of a specific community. The artist clearly thought that this applied to bookmarking and sharing via FriendFeed, though that’s not at all clear from the term “use.” Kol either didn’t read those instructions, or read them but didn’t think they applied to bookmarking, or read them but didn’t think they constituted a license. (To be fair, I’m not completely sure they are a license, either, but I think good etiquette would be to assume that they do.) And where does all of this leave the artist’s fans? If they want to share bookmarks with other fans or potential fans, they can’t turn off the “suck in a thumbnail” feature of these social networks. The only way that gets turned off is if the originating site has lock-down features like Flickr does for the images its users make private.

Little did Kol know when he bookmarked this image that he’d bring down the wrath of the artist, spark a huge debate on FriendFeed (and a ton of re-shares of Kol’s post), and set this librarian to musing about the incredibly intertangled worlds of intellectual property, etiquette, and the Internet.

* I don’t like talking about things without linking to them, but this one has me on the fence for two reason: 1) the link may die suddenly since there was a promise to delete the thread as soon as someone from FriendFeed had seen and responded to the original poster, and 2) the language in this thread is decidedly not safe for work, or for kids, or for me. Still want to see it? Here you go. [Edit: yep, the original post is gone now.] I may or may not screen-grab the post for posterity. I haven’t decided yet if that’s fair to all involved, or if I want to have that kind of language saved anywhere associated with me. Call me a prude, if you want, but them’s my boundaries and it’s up to me if I want to cross them.

** I’m aware that by linking to that image, the artist may find my post, so I’ll just say right up front that while I welcome constructive comments and discussion, I reserve the right to delete any crude or abusive comments. And I get to decide what constitutes “crude” or “abusive.”

This is even more the case when making sense of the law as it applies to electronic reserves. Reserve services are governed by Section 107 (the “Fair Use” section).* Unfortunately, one of the best ways to know if any particular interpretation of Fair Use is correct is to see how court cases have handled that issue, and no court cases have yet dealt with electronic reserves.** This means that libraries everywhere have to make one fundamental decision without guidance from the courts: are electronic reserves more like coursepacks or more like print reserves? The former assumes an element of commerce in the creating and selling of the coursepack that isn’t present in electronic reserves, but offers the slim comfort that the creation of coursepacks has been tested in the courts.*** The latter builds on the idea of extending easy access to a subset of the library’s collections to a particular population of students, but it leaves libraries with no legal precedent to lean on.

And having decided between these two options, libraries then have to make a whole host of related decisions about how far Fair Use extends, what mechanisms should be in place to guard against copyright infringement, and how to make sure that all of this stays out of the way of the students’ learning experience as much as possible. All of this with only legal analogy, not legal precedent, as a guide.

Is it any wonder, then, that documents explaining the rationale behind our policies are more statements of belief than they are statements of fact?

This I believe: electronic reserves are not coursepacks. Yet they are copies of original articles and must therefore undergo the Four Factor test for each and every article, each and every time they are used. I also know that Fair Use was invented with education in mind, and therefore I believe we should weigh those Four Factors with confidence in the knowledge that they were laid out for us, that they are speaking to us, and that they are not grasses laid over legal snares that are lurking, waiting to torture us and demand our first-born children in payment for unforeseen infringement.

* Unfortunately, neither Section 108 (provisions for library copying) nor Section 109 (the “Doctrine of First Sale”) apply to electronic reserves. If they did, things would probably be a lot clearer cut.

** A case against Georgia State University is still in the works.

*** See the first two cases listed here.

I have never received any such comments and I hope I never do, but just in case, here are my terms of service.

I reserve the right to delete any comment left on this blog if I think that the comment is inappropriate or harmful in any way.

I hope that I never have to exercise these rights.

As much as I hate to say it, I think they’ll gain a lot of customers on those last two points alone. Nothing makes people squirm as much as copyright permissions. Everyone always doubts their fair use analysis and forgets that “multiple copies for classroom use” is written right into the fair use clause of the law.

But why might you not want to sign up for that license? James Boyle of the Financial Times has a great piece on that, as does Peter Hirtle of the LibraryLaw blog (his analysis is here). In short, here are the key issues as I see them (both of which figure large in Hirtle’s post):

• Paying for permission when you don’t have to erodes fair use arguments in the future by increasing the market value of the work.
• Permissions come in many shapes and sizes. What is the use of licensing permissions from the CCC when we already pay licensing fees from databases, for example?

I would hate to see my library go this route, especially since I imaging that the CCC fee structures are based on a fairly -er- “optimistic” interpretation of fair use. And yet I feel sympathy for libraries that either don’t have the staff to go through the permissions process, or don’t have the training to determine fair use on their own.

At the same time, just writing that last sentence makes me feel like I’ve just said, “It’s just too bad some kids don’t have the wherewithal to learn to read…” I recognize that licensing will be an attractive option, but I think it’ll cripple us.

A few months ago I was asked to write a chapter for an upcoming ACRL publication. Right away I asked, “Can I have a co-author, and can we put our finished product into our institutional repository?” The answers came back in the affirmative, which was very encouraging all around.

Then we got our copyright agreements in the mail and the cover letter said, “This form grants you the copyright to your work, allows you to use your work elsewhere after the original publication, and allows deposit in your institutional repository.” Woohoo! But….

The agreement itself said, “…. the Author hereby grants and assigns to the Publisher … all copyrights therein or relating thereto…” Hmmmm…

Further down, the agreement says that “Publisher hereby grants to Author a royalty-free license to publish the Work in any book of which the Author is the author or editor, provided the Work is identified as having first been published in the original publication cited above. The Publisher also grants to the Author the right to file the work in their institutional repository.” So that’s very, very nice, but it’s not the same as keeping our copyrights.

So, after talking it over with some people in the LSW chat room, I asked the publisher if I’d gotten the right agreement. It’s been known to happen that there is more than one possible agreement and that the author receives the wrong one.

But it turns out I got the right one. ACRL’s response was very encouraging, though. They said they’ve never been asked about this before and wondered what would be better. So I suggested removing that bit about “you get to keep your copyrights” from the cover letter, and then adding a clause saying that copyrights revert to authors X number of months or years after the book officially goes out of print. Sound reasonable? I hope they think so.

Meanwhile, I’ve suggested to our copyright group on campus that we should add a “what to think about before you sign away your rights” facet to our copyright training.

[Update: It looks like ACRL thinks this is reasonable! They are even thinking of asking their lawyers to draw up something even more permissive.]

[Update 2: They're thinking of making the agreement explicit that they own the copyright, but we get to use the work in any old way we want as long as we cite it as having been published first in this ACRL volume. Sounds wonderful to me!]

Copyright status of works published in the US between 1923 and 1963 is of particular concern, as it is dependent on whether the original copyright was renewed. Changes in copyright law have removed this question for works published after 1963. The Copyright Office has never made available in machine-readable form the renewals it received between 1950 and 1977, which would generally cover renewals for books published between 1923 and 1950. This has made it difficult for libraries and archives to determine which books are in the public domain.

Several organizations have taken steps to make the Copyright Office’s records more accessible. Most noteworthy is Project Gutenberg, which scanned and transcribed the printed renewal records. You can view their work here. This database builds on their work, making the text searchable by field in a single file. We are also grateful for the early efforts of Michael Lesk in the creation of this database.

Just to emphasize the point: this is finally one single place to search for these records. No more juggling two or three clunky tools. Yay!