COPYCENSE

“This groundbreaking study of the copyright laws of 11 developing countries reveals that public access to knowledge is being curtailed more than is necessary. This is because the laws are more protective of copyright holders than they need be.

“The report discloses that Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Thailand have all expanded the scope of copyright protection beyond what is required by the international copyright treaties they have acceded to. In addition, they have not incorporated all the available limitations and exceptions that would have opened up access to knowledge.

“More insidious however, is the legislative advice being provided by multi-lateral agencies such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). WIPO’s advice to developing countries contained in its Draft Laws on Copyright and Related Rights does not take full advantage of all the flexibilities available under the various international copyright treaties.

Consumers International. Copyright and Access to Knowledge. Feb. 20, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

A. INTRODUCTION

This edition of CommuniK.™ features the fourth part of a series about copyright law exceptions that are available to libraries, schools, and archives. This is the first of a two-part article that discusses Section 107 of the 1976 Copyright Act, otherwise known as the “fair use” doctrine.

Fair use serves as the broadest copyright exception available in copyright law, one which is generally applicable to all circumstances. Fair use, however, is a paradox. First, fair use is very difficult to apply properly without experience. Second, while federal courts have decided a number of fair use cases in a way that seems to strengthen fair use, other factors (including a hyperactively litigious content industry) have served to diminish the doctrine’s practical viability.

This article discusses a conversation I had last year with Siva Vaidhyanathan, a copyright scholar that teaches at New York University. The second part of this two-part article, which will analyze Section 107, will be published next week.

Portions of this article originally appeared in the September/OctoberJune 2005 edition of Online magazine.

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“A shift in our system of values is now taking shape. When a new generation that now downloads illegal music from the Internet and uses open source software will age, it will more likely change the law than its way of thinking, namely its attitude towards digital content in particular and intellectual property in general.

“It means that content in itself is not recognized as a good. And of interest to the market, from a commercial point of view it can only be as a contextual part of a more complicated service. Such thinking, and its corresponding business model, is clearly visible in such companies as Google: on one hand their services are impossible to copy, on the other for end users they are free.”

Sergey Dmitriev. Have We Seen the Back of the Hard Copy Reader? St. Petersburg Times. Feb. 14, 2006.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Daniel Clancy, the Engineering Director for the Google Book Search Project, mentioned that Google [Book Search] was NOT going for archival quality in their scans and were ok with skipped pages, missing content and less than perfect OCR — he mentioned that the OCR process AVERAGED one word error per page of every book scanned!

“The key point that I took away from this is that Google book project IS NOT an alternative to library/archive/archival/preservation scans. Libraries will still have an important role to play (as we already know!) because a certain percentage of the digitized content owned by StanMichOxYork will be basically unusable as archival, preservation-level digital content. Google’s ok with that, but libraries shouldn’t be!”

Diglet. Thoughts on Google Book Search. Feb. 16, 2006.

Editor’s Note: Digitization project expert Jill Hurst-Wahl discussed the poor quality of the Google Book Search scans last November.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.