Tag Archives: copyright

November 6, 2012, 8:00 am

Comment on the New DMCA Exemptions

Just over two years ago, Kathleen wrote about the DMCA exemptions issued by the Library of Congress.

Last week, the U.S. Copyright Office published an updated rule with DMCA exemptions (it went into effect on October 28), and the changes aren’t all good. To get a quick overview of the new exemptions, I’d recommend reading this piece at ArsTechnica and this one at readwrite hack.

Some of what’s in the new rule is perfectly sensible. As Timothy B. Lee points out, ebook access for the disabled should now be easier, since the exemption no longer requires that “’all existing e-book editions of the work contain access controls’ that inhibit disabled access” before it’s legal to circumvent DRM. Thus, users need no longer incur the expense of owning multiple ebook readers in order to circumvent DRM legally. This is a good thing!

But other parts of the rule cry out for a …

March 1, 2012, 11:00 am

Note-taking and Copyright Infringment

By Amy Cavender

Marginalia I don’t often post to Twitter before I’ve even had my morning coffee, but I did this morning (February 23; see the image below for the post).

What occasioned the comment was an article in the Chronicle that I’d received an email about, noting that Kno is suing Cengage Learning for breach of contract. Nate Hoffelder has some commentary here.

As I understand the case, it boils down to this. Kno is suing because Cengage has pulled their books from Kno’s store. Cengage did this because Kno made it possible for students to annotate their textbooks and easily use those annotations, through a feature called Journal. Cengage claims that this makes derivative works possible, and is thus an infringement of their copyright.

Really

Of course, highlighting, annotating, and even quoting from books of many sorts is nothing new. We’ve written quite a lot about annotating digital texts here at…

July 5, 2011, 8:00 am

Pinterest: A Social Catalog

By Erin E. Templeton

A few weeks ago, a friend posted something to Facebook from a site I wasn’t familiar with: Pinterest. The post in question was a wonderful photograph of a wall of bookshelves filled to the rafters with various texts. Like many academics, I love books; I love libraries, and I love photographs of both books and libraries, so I had to see where this photograph came from.

Enter Pinterest. Pinterest is an electronic bulletin board that allows users to pin images from around the web onto one communal space. Users can manage several different categories on their boards, and you can use either the default categories (eg. “For the Home,” “Recipes,” “Quotes,” etc.) or create your own.

Users can limit their views to only pins that they themselves have contributed, they can “follow” other users and see those pins in addition to their own, or they can also browse everything that has been …

June 24, 2011, 8:05 am

Four Reasons to Join the EFF This Week

By Jason B. Jones

This morning I want to point to four disconnected stories–all from this week!–that, taken together, point up the importance of a strong civil liberties advocate in online legal discussions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been just such an advocate for more than 2 decades now, and supporting their work, whether by joining or making a one-time donation, has only become more crucial.

Here are the four stories:

One of the most-linked stories on the internet yesterday was Andy Baio’s “Kind of Screwed,” in which he discusses being sued for copyright infringement for transforming a famous photograph of Miles Davis into a wholly different kind of art (on this point, see Neven Mrgan). As he concludes, the fact that this is almost self-evidently fair use has nothing to do with the outcome of the case: But this is important: the fact that I settled is not an admission of…

September 16, 2010, 3:00 pm

Solutions for Dealing with Copyrighted Materials in an Open Access Course

By Ethan Watrall

Most regular ProfHacker readers know that I’m an Open CourseWare evangelist. However, I will be the first to admit that fully embracing an Open CourseWare philosophy isn’t always an easy thing to do. Challenges can include institutional opposition (from fellow faculty or administration), technical issues (where to host, choosing a platform, etc.), and student confusion (most students have been trained to use the university’s chosen LMS, and expecting them to use another platform or follow a different model can sometimes be problematic).

For me, however, one of the most significant challenges that has cropped up in recent years is how one goes about dealing with the inevitable copywritten materials used in class. What do we do with the articles, videos, book chapters, books, and audio that are someone else’s intellectual property? The problem (at least for me) is that, in many cases,…

August 12, 2010, 3:00 pm

How to Rip DVD Clips

By Prof. Hacker

DVDs [This is a guest post by Jason Mittell, Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. Jason blogs at Just TV.]

In my previous post, I detailed how the new DMCA exemption allows all faculty to legally rip excerpts from DVDs for educational purposes, whether in-class lectures, online posting in a digital publication, or at conference presentations. (Anyone interested in the legal issues raised by the ruling should definitely read law professor and fair use advocate Peter Jaszi’s commentary.) I have found that even among film & media studies professors, who have had a similar but more narrow exemption in place since 2006, one of the chief obstacles to exercising this right to rip is not legal, but technological. Even faculty who are fluent in video editing software can find the ripping process technically cumbersome and confusing.

It’s important …

July 27, 2010, 3:00 pm

Letting Us Rip: Our New Right to Fair Use of DVDs

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Jason Mittell, Associate Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies at Middlebury College. Jason blogs at Just TV.]

This week saw the release of a seemingly minor bit of legal policy that has a major impact on academic uses of technology, expanding the scope of legal ways to extract video clips from DVDs for purposes of criticism and commentary. (An earlier post by Kathleen Fitzpatrick provided additional information on this ruling with regards to jailbreaking phones and accessing eBooks.) This ruling on DVD circumvention has a potentially transformative impact on faculty and students across a range of disciplines, and can hopefully help spur innovative scholarship and pedagogy. In this post, I’ll detail the policy shift and consider some of the ways it can be applied in teaching and research; in a follow-up post in a few weeks, I’ll offer a more…

July 27, 2010, 11:00 am

Information on the New DMCA Exemptions

By Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Yesterday, the Library of Congress issued its triennial statement of exemptions to the portions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that forbid the circumvention of digital rights management (DRM) and other technological measures intended to prevent access to or copying of digital materials. Three years ago, the announced exemptions allowed film and media studies professors to crack the content scrambling system (a.k.a. CSS) on DVDs in order to rip short clips to make compilations for classroom use. This seemed at the time like an awfully restricted exemption — literally only film and media studies profs (no profs in other fields, and no students), literally only in order to create compilations of clips for use in the classroom (not for use in critical writing) — but it appeared then that the statement might be the thin end of the wedge.

And so it turns out to have been. The…

February 11, 2010, 2:00 pm

5 Resources on Copyright Activism (The DMCA STILL Needs to Die)

By Jason B. Jones

I’m cranky today about copyright and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. As folks probably know, I post regularly at Wired.com’s excellent GeekDad blog. Over the past year, I’ve posted a lot about Star Wars: The Clone Wars, mostly because it’s my 6-yr-old’s favorite show. Helping me in that task is LucasFilm, which a few months back added me to their PR list, and so I get clips and stills from each episode, which I’m allowed (like many other folks) to post to Flickr and YouTube.

Over the weekend, apparently an overzealous lawyer from The Cartoon Network noticed that one of the clips had gotten over 4,000 views, and sent YouTube a takedown notice. (Even though I had gotten the clip from LucasFilm, and even though I included their copyright statement. A classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing.) YouTube’s default policy on…

December 14, 2009, 10:48 am

Talking About Fair Use in the Classroom

By Julie Meloni

Recently at ProfHacker, in his post about intellectual property, George Williams noted “it would be in our best interest as teachers and scholars to start being more assertive about the doctrine of our Fair Use rights.” I couldn’t agree more, but as anyone who isn’t a lawyer knows, Fair Use is a complex issue. Furthermore, it’s an issue relevant not only to teachers but also to scholars at any level—and that includes first-year students who might be using copyrighted material in essays or presentations. So how do we go about talking about Fair Use in the classroom, and when should we?

The answer to “when should we” obviously depends on the type of course you’re teaching, and the extent to which students might have occasion to use copyrighted materials as part of their work. I’ve taught courses in composition, professional & technical writing, literature…