FC Discuss listAs we head into the last few days before Christmas and Hannukah (a.k.a. “the busiest shopping days of the year”), just a reminder: If you’re looking for any last many gifts, be sure to consult our RIAA-Free Gift Guides before you make any music purchases. Vote with your dollar, and give a gift you can feel good about.
Best fishes,
Gavin
Earlier this week, I was infuriated by this article by Makan Delrahim. It’s filled with false dichotomies and ad hominem attacks on Mark Cuban and Senator Orrin Hatch’s political foes. It’s also factually inaccurate on several counts.
I was pleasantly surprised to see Senate Candidate Pete Ashdown defend himself in an LTE today. The letter was prepublished on Ashdown’s blog.
Ashdown has signed the IPac Statement of Principles and is specifically running to stop Hatch’s unhinged pursuit of ever-stronger copyright protection.
How refreshing.
(Cross-posted from ShoutingLoudly.)
Exactly one month from now, you could be attending a party at FreeCulture.org’s first Northeast regional summit!
* Who - If you are a member of a Free Culture chapter, or you are interested in helping to start one at your school, you are invited.
* What - A weekend of networking, brainstorming, planning, and direct action!
* When - January 13-14, Friday afternoon through Saturday evening
* Where - Columbia University’s Lerner Hall in New York City.
* Why - To encourage cooperation among chapter leaders, to promote chapter growth, and to create new initiatives on the local and national level.
For more information, check out the website, and then hurry over to the registration form and reserve yourself a place at our gathering.
UPDATE: Siva Vaidhyanathan has been confirmed as our keynote speaker! Yet another reason to come to our rocking conference.
This is old news now, but I want to talk about it anyway.
Last month, American University released a document called Best Practices in Fair Use. Authored by filmmaker groups and endorsed by more, the guide lays out principles for “best practices” when dealing with the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law.
The plight of fair use, particularly in the realm of documentary filmmaking, is well documented — see for example Chapter 7 of Lessig’s Free Culture. When I first heard about this project in May, I immediately recognized it as work of great value. I’m glad to hear it’s come to fruition.
Since the statement is approved by filmmakers themselves, they can read the statement and adopt its principles without doubt: they know the authors are looking out for their best interest. This is a powerful tool: not just for filmmakers who want to use the work of another, but on the supply side as well. Not only does this document inform filmmakers of their rights, it informs them of their obligations as well. Not only will this embolden filmmakers when they receive a cease & desist letter or are told they have to get permission to quote in their film — hopefully this will reduce the number of cease & desist letters sent in the first place.
The excellent work of the Center for Social Media and the Program on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest will go a long way in encouraging education and discussion of copyright, particularly among the creators themselves.
The free culture student movement can help spread this document within their campus communities and ensure its wide reach. And we should.
The model of “best practices” for fair use did not originate in this report, and the model does not have to end here. Fair use is intentionally an open-ended doctrine, the grease that keeps the wheels of copyright turning: Congress hates to codify it and tends to do a poor job of it besides. Case law can be complex, unclear, contradictory — and the only way to be totally sure of something is a slow, expensive, and risky process. So the model of developing sector-wide statements of best practices makes particular sense for fair use. And the process of developing, adopting, and implementing these best practices is an enlightening one itself, and turns the question of “How should the law work?” into a very tangible one.
If I may, I’d like to suggest one field where this is desperately needed: academia.
As students, this hits particularly close to home for us. But in the academy, where information is the key commodity, there is far too little understanding and too little discussion of fair use. The prime example here would be the Association of American University Presses’ response to the Google Print program (now called “Google Book Search”). The AAUP is the group that represents the publishing houses of U.S. universities and university systems (including mine); as such, AAUP is ostensibly bound to universities’ commitment to work for the public good and increase access to information. But AAUP’s stand with the Authors Guild and their lawsuit to kill Google Print evinces AAUP’s true loyalties: to copyright maximalism, control, and profit over the public good.
I suspect this is a case of one hand not knowing what the other is doing, rather than all the universities represented by AAUP actually being in the maximalist camp. But universities must protect themselves: they should be sure that all their activities are furthering (or at least not attacking) their central goals. Therefore it seems appropriate to develop a model for university-wide best practices, inviting all the parties to take part in the process: researchers, administrators, publishers, and students.
The time has come to announce our Northeast U.S. regional summit, which will take place in New York City at Columbia University’s Lerner Hall on January 13-14, 2006 (that’s Friday afternoon through Saturday afternoon). If you are a member of a Free Culture chapter, or you are interested in starting one at your school, you are invited. NYU professor and commentator Siva Vaidhyanathan has agreed to be our keynote speaker, and this will be an excellent chance to get involved with FreeCulture.org if you haven’t been before.
This is the first summit since the launch of FreeCulture.org in April 2004 (when no real chapters yet existed). We would like to organize a national/international summit, but that will take significant financial resources due to travel costs, which would prevent many students from attending without travel grants. Therefore, we are organizing regional summits, starting with the Northeast, with plans for California and Southeast, in the hope that since attendees are in geographical proximity, travel costs will be reduced. Perhaps we will find the funds to do a national conference by the end of next semester…
At any rate, I will post again with the website and registration form for this NYC conference very soon. Until then, mark your calendars and save the date!
Two big stories this week in the quest toward open access in scientific research and publishing:
Of course, Peter Suber’s Open Access News is the (in-depth) blog of record for news about open access. To learn more about open access, see Peter’s excellent overview.
The EFF has publicly dissed the Copyright Office’s triennial DMCA rulemaking, refusing even to participate.
This is a reasonable reaction to the three-branch monte, “where’s the fair use” shell game that is the triennial rulemaking.
Read the brief report (pdf). Additionally, read a more thorough critique: Catch 1201 (shameless plug).
Update Gavin says: It’s worth noting that FreeCulture.org didn’t file anything for the same reasons. Now that the comment period has closed, the comments filed should be publically available soon. Of course, we’ll provide a link when that happens. Watch and see: there won’t be many comments, because everyone who cares knows there’s little use commenting. We couldn’t agree more that the exemption process has failed its fundamental purpose of providing balance in copyright law. Let’s face it: the DMCA simply grants too much control to copyright owners in a very blunt fashion. The DRM + DMCA combo effectively kills digital fair use, the grease that keeps the copyright wheels turning. Remedying this situation — and ensuring it doesn’t spread to other countries, like Canada’s Bill C-60 that just died with their last parliament — should be high on the list of priorities of the free culture movement and anyone who believes in fair use.