The Will to Get Past DRM
“When it was announced over a year ago that The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation’s Greatest Magazine would be released on eight DVDs, I immediately put in my pre-order. After it arrived, I took out the first DVD and stuck it in my Linux box, expecting that I could start looking at the collected issues.
“No dice. The issues were available as DjVu files. No problem; there are DjVu readers for Linux, and it’s an open format. Even worse, if you do install the software, and then perform a search using the somewhat klunky search tool built in to the proprietary DjVu reader, you’ll soon find yourself in DVD-swapping hell as you jump from issue to issue.
“I finally got so frustrated that I decided to break through The New Yorker’s limitations and DRM, both to access the content I wanted to use and to prove to myself that it could be done. It took a while, but it worked.”
Scott Granneman. The Big DRM Mistake. Security Focus. March 1, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Senator Introduces Net Neutrality Bill
“Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.
“The bill is meant to ease growing fears that open Internet access may be blocked or compromised by the Bell phone carriers and cable operators, which may create tiers of service for delivering content to consumers, much the way the post office charges more for overnight mail delivery than for regular delivery.”
Ken Belson. Senate Bill to Address Fears of Blocked Access to Net. The New York Times. March 2, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Demystifying Fair Use
A. INTRODUCTION
This edition of CommuniK.™ features the fifth and final part of a series about copyright law exceptions that are available to libraries, schools, and archives. This is the second 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 goes beyond a strict interpretive analysis of Section 107. Instead, the article discusses fair use within the context of risk management, including how to analyze a potential fair use situation with a cunning eye that gives equal parts consideration to unlicensed use and the copyright owner’s exclusive rights.
Portions of this article originally appeared in the November/December 2005 edition of Online magazine.
Professors Debate Google Book Search
“Google’s quest to “organize the world’s information” is supposed to make life easier. But the issues surrounding the company’s book search program have complicated many academics’ views of copyright, because they involve many nuances surrounding security, infrastructure and compensation.
“At a debate Feb. 24 hosted by the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, Hal R. Varian, founding dean of the School of Information Management Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the Google project is fulfilling an important service by helping people find texts, oftentimes those that have been out of print for decades.
“Doug G. Lichtman, a law professor at the University of Chicago said that Google unfairly puts a burden on copyright holders by forcing them to have to contact the company to ‘opt out’ if they do not want their books included in the search database. He also asked why the onus should fall on authors or publishers to “opt out” to make sure that Google’s search system isn’t allowing third parties to unlawfully use their works.”
Rob Capriccioso. Google’s Not-So-Simple Side. Inside Higher Ed. Feb. 27, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
Microsoft’s Music Offering Is Lacking
“Technical glitches by Microsoft and the digital music device makers have hampered Napster Inc.’s ability to close the gap with Apple’s iTunes, the dominant online music service, Napster’s chief executive said on Tuesday.
“There is no question that their execution has been less than brilliant over the last 12 months,” Napster Chairman and Chief Executive Chris Gorog said at the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York.
“Microsoft Corp., he noted, had to grapple with the complexities of dealing with a number of different services and device makers.”
Adam Pasick. Napster Rues Microsoft, Player Glitches. Yahoo! News. March 1, 2006.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.
K. Matthew Dames Editorial On Libraries & Google Book Search
“Late last year, I criticized Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association, for comments he made to The Wall Street Journal about Google Book Search. Gorman comments, printed in a November 1 article, characterized Google’s digitization initiative as “a potential disaster” because the project “reduce[s] scholarly texts to paragraphs” and “flaunt[s] [his] intellectual property rights” as an author.
“My criticism of Gorman had less to do with what he said than his apparent naïveté about how his comments would influence the raging debate about libraries’ role in a digital (and digitized) global information landscape. What Gorman affirms his reputation as a Luddite who is out of touch with today’s information environment, and as such, Gorman speaking as Gorman is irrelevant to the larger debate. On the other hand, Gorman speaking as the president of North America’s largest library representative organization – the de facto voice of “the library community” – potentially has huge legal, political, and economic consequences for the entire information science profession.
“I remain shocked and amazed at Gorman’s penchant for speaking without apparent knowledge or context. But at least Gorman has said something. In contrast, I find it disappointing that our nations’ largest library representative organizations (LROs) have remained eerily silent on digitization copyright issues at a time when they desperately need to be vocal.”
K. Matthew Dames. “Associations’ Silence on Book Search Is Not Golden.” Online. March/April 2006.
See also:
K. Matthew Dames. ALA’s Gorman Strikes Out Again. CopyCense. Nov. 4, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC. CopyCense™ and CommuniK.™ are trademarks of Seso Digital LLC.
K. Matthew Dames Editorial On Libraries & Google Book Search
“Late last year, I criticized Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association, for comments he made to The Wall Street Journal about Google Book Search. Gorman comments, printed in a November 1 article, characterized Google’s digitization initiative as “a potential disaster” because the project “reduce[s] scholarly texts to paragraphs” and “flaunt[s] [his] intellectual property rights” as an author.
“My criticism of Gorman had less to do with what he said than his apparent naïveté about how his comments would influence the raging debate about libraries’ role in a digital (and digitized) global information landscape. What Gorman affirms his reputation as a Luddite who is out of touch with today’s information environment, and as such, Gorman speaking as Gorman is irrelevant to the larger debate. On the other hand, Gorman speaking as the president of North America’s largest library representative organization – the de facto voice of “the library community” – potentially has huge legal, political, and economic consequences for the entire information science profession.
“I remain shocked and amazed at Gorman’s penchant for speaking without apparent knowledge or context. But at least Gorman has said something. In contrast, I find it disappointing that our nations’ largest library representative organizations (LROs) have remained eerily silent on digitization copyright issues at a time when they desperately need to be vocal.”
K. Matthew Dames. “Associations’ Silence on Book Search Is Not Golden.” Online. March/April 2006.
See also:
K. Matthew Dames. ALA’s Gorman Strikes Out Again. CopyCense. Nov. 4, 2005.
CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC. CopyCense™ and CommuniK.™ are trademarks of Seso Digital LLC.
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