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Todd Suomela's Library tagged copyright   View Popular

"Should Copyright Of Academic Works Be Abolished?" | Berkman Center

The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem.

cyber.law.harvard.edu/5505 - Preview

copyright intellectual-property academic publishing

23 Jul 09

OnTheCommons.org » Art, God and Copyright

Two examples of copyright and religion in conflict: Indonesian batik designers, and sermon sharing sites.

www.onthecommons.org/content.php - Preview

copyright intellectual-property religion culture commons

21 Jul 09

Were we smarter 100 years ago..? | The Public Domain |

I have been rereading the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act. I have come to the conclusion that 100 years ago we were smarter about copyright, about disruptive technologies, about intellectual property, monopolies and network effects than we are today.

www.thepublicdomain.org/...were-we-smarter-100-years-ago - Preview

copyright intellectual-property history 1910s law legislation

apriceformusic.com - home

The Price for Music Model strives to provide artists and music rights holders with a monetary return for music content consumed via the internet, addressing the revenue gap arising from digital content being downloaded via non-legitimate channels.

www.apriceformusic.com - Preview

intellectual-property copyright arts music money creative-class creativity

03 Jul 09

Sumutia: Remix culture and copyright law

Popular culture - as opposed to the pop culture created by artists without academic training which is flooding our media - has always been a remix culture.

sumutia.blogspot.com/...culture-and-copyright-law.html - Preview

popular culture remix fair-use copyright intellectual-property

  • There's the problem. People have grown up in a fair use zone where you could do anything with culture and they expect this to extend to their Internet living rooms, in which they typically converse with a few dozen friends. Funny Photoshop transformations of Brad Pitt's face? Lawyers at your door. Insert 'poops' into that Britney Spears song? Lawyers again. Lose your house paying your defence lawyer.
    You see, lawyers have this fictional creature known as The Consumer. That's all of us, but stripped of any urge or ability to get creative. And then there is that other mythical monster called The Artist, who creates works from scratch - or gets hauled into courts for theft. Neither of these phantasms has anything to do with how human culture actually works.
  • You have been muzzled.

    This is why people are angry. Their normal modes of expression have been turned into a crime. They know they are only safe from prosecution because they are small fry - unless someone decides to make an example of you. Thus, any time you post some photoshoppery or a musical mash-up you risk having it summarily deleted and your account cancelled for criminal cultural activities.
    Perhaps I do accept that there should be a way for creative artists to make a living with their craft, but if it comes at the cost of turning the rest of humanity into passive consumers, I say it is not worth it. We need a completely different way of showing our appreciation to artists.

Ruling Imagination: Law and Creativity » Blog Archive » Robert Johnson made no deal with the devil; he listened to and learned from his colleagues.

Conceptions of Robert Johnson’s work highlight the context dependent nature of notions of originality. Originality is yet another characteristic of copyrightability that is not always easy to delineate in actual contexts of creation.

blogs.geniocity.com/...nd-learned-from-his-colleagues - Preview

originality creativity innovation imagination music culture remix blues copyright intellectual-property romanticism authorship

  • explains that the prevailing view of an author as the originator of new works is a relatively recent phenomenon arising out of the Romantic Movement and its view of an artist as someone uniquely inspired. This view of authorship stands in stark contrast to an older view becoming new again in today’s remix cutlure — a view that creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing:

The Myth Of Original Creators | Techdirt

  • Law professor Peter Friedman recently had a few interesting blog posts that helped highlight this. First, he noted that the very notion of an author as the originator of a new work is a relatively recent phenomenon, and part of the Romantic Movement. However, prior to that, the view was much more akin to what we're actually seeing today with online tools of creation: "creative endeavors are derivative and collaborative, that originality is not the product of isolated genius but of, well, remixing."
01 Jul 09

» “Don’t ask, don’t tell” rights retention for scholarly articles The Occasional Pamphlet

  • This brings us to the strange social contract.  What has arisen, perhaps surprisingly, is a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to online distribution by authors.  Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don’t ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations.


    The standard system for scholarly communication is thus based on widespread contractual violation and fraud.


  • Nonetheless, individual authors still breach contracts regularly as they act to maximize their career advancement possibilities.  To many, including myself, this state of affairs is untenable.  I am not willing to routinely violate contracts in this way.  Consequently, I and others have for some time reconciled the two distribution mechanisms explicitly, by amending the contractual conditions of copyright assignments.  For many years, I have as a matter of course refused to sign copyright assignment forms that do not give me the right of noncommercial online distribution of my work. Originally, I would use alternative copyright assignments that I wrote myself.  More recently, I have been attaching the SPARC addendum to publishers’ assignment forms, and then the Science Commons addenda that superseded it.

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18 Dec 08

Short Term Profits Over Long Term Principles; Google's Caving On Book Scanning Is Bad News | Techdirt

So, it's quite upsetting to see Google cave on this. The settlement does not establish any sort of precedent on the legality of creating such an index of books, and, if anything pushes things in the other direction, saying that authors and publishers now have the right to determine what innovations there can be when it comes to archiving and indexing works of content.

www.techdirt.com/...1218012674.shtml - Preview

google google-books copyright intellectual-property publishing archive search

24 Jun 08

On the Erosion of the Public Domain - john wilbanks' blog - john wilbanks' blog on Nature Network

The public domain is not contractually constructed. It just is. It cannot be made more free, only less free. And if we start a culture of licensing and enclosing the public domain (stuff that is actually already free, like the human genome) in the name of “freedom” we’re playing a dangerous game.

network.nature.com/...e-erosion-of-the-public-domain - Preview

commons intellectual-property copyright licensing

04 Jun 08

Open Content Alliance (OCA) - Home

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.

www.opencontentalliance.org/ - Preview

copyright education library open-content

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