Consilience

Copyfraud: False claims of copyright such as a claim of copyright ownership of public domain material. (source: wiktionary)

Let’s start out this discussion with a quick true story:
I was working on a presentation for one of my graduate classes. My group partner and I were making a dang good presentation and wanted to spice it up with some nice photos of works of art (our topic was art related). So, we went to one of the more prominent art image databases: ARTstor. We found some paintings by Marc Chagall from 1911 and I was all ready to download them and insert them into our presentation. I then did the obvious next step: right-click the image to Save as… Not so fast! The flash interface doesn’t allow that. Why not? That is a complicated question to answer.

My aim is not to fully answer that question. The purpose of this post is to raise awareness, pure and simple. There is a problem out there and it has a name: copyfraud. The perpetrators are either ignorant at best or deceitful at worst. The ones being harmed are you and I, the public. People who want to create but are being unjustly[1] restricted. And being unjustly restricted means they are being unjustly censored.

(Nina Paley, CC:BY-SA)

Back to that Chagall painting. The cool part was this painting was done in the early 1900’s, 1911 to be exact. What that means is that the copyright term on that painting has expired (in US law, which is what governs ARTstor as it is a US non-profit). And, here is the part that is the issue, according to US copyright law any faithful reproduction of a creative work that does not add any new creative element does not produce a new copyright. In simpler terms: if I take a picture of a public domain painting then I do NOT hold a copyright on that photo; that photo is also in the public domain. I did not add any new creative anything to it so there is nothing to copyright. This is all explained in the court case Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp[2]. LARGE CAVEAT: this only applies in the US. The US rightfully, in my opinion, does not give copyright rights for “sweat of the brow” aka: hard work only (see: Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service). Countries like the UK do give copyright restrictions (“protections”) for sweat of the brow work.

Back, again, to that painting by Chagall. I decided to click on the “View Full Record” link to learn more about it and I came across this line: “Rights: © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris” BZZZZZZT! WRONG!

This, my friends, is a classic case of copyfraud

(tvol)

What kind of effect does this have on you and me? First and foremost it “[results] in users seeking licenses and paying fees to reproduce works that are free for everyone to use, or altering their creative projects to excise the uncopyrighted material” (Mazzone, “Copyfraud”). People are paying fees to organizations that purport to have our best interests at heart to use images that are in the public domain. Or, almost worse, people are not creating new and cool works because they are told they aren’t allowed to. This is where copyfraud hurts you: our culture will be locked down by those who have no right to do so (cue Free Culture and Free Speech discussions).

Now, let me be clear: I am not saying that people should never be allowed to sell public domain works. That is, of course, one of the things you are allowed to do with public domain works: sell them to people. In fact, paying the people a small fee for the professional work they did to create a high quality scan of a work is important; it means they’ll keep doing it[3].

However, falsely claiming that you hold a copyright on an image is illegal. It is even spelled out explicitly in the US Copyright law: “Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500″ (emphasis mine). So either unlawfully claiming copyright or being someone who distributes that unlawfully copyrighted work results in a fine of up to $2,500. ARTstor, if prosecuted, could be fined a large amount of money ($2.5 million if there are only 1000 works that fall into that category, which according to my test searches is probably a low ball number).

This, of course, assumes that ARTstor is willfully, “with fraudulent intent,” making available these images with false copyright notices. Unfortunately, I think that isn’t too much of a stretch. I don’t think it is a stretch because I don’t believe that the people running ARTstore, or their lawyers, are ignorant. If I were a lawyer asked to sign off on a database of scans/photographs of works of art, this is one of the things I would double, nay, triple check. First, make sure that copyright information is being preserved in the database. Second, make sure that the copyright information in the database is accurate. Third, make sure that you are attributing copyright to the copyright holder on each image, if applicable. Fourth, make sure you aren’t falsely attributing copyright on any image. And in doing any of that I would, as a lawyer worth his salt, research court cases that have an effect on scans of works of art like the Bridgeman v Corel case.

In addition to assuming ARTstor has consulted people with JDs, there are reports out there of people who work for other institutions who, when asked about the fact that they are falsely claiming copyright, say “everyone else does it.” I wish I could say I was joking; that is truly what they say, and think. Put that related example and everything else said together and one could easily assume that ARTstor is doing this “with fraudulent intent.” Again, strong words, but this is an important issue.

What you can do:
Leave a comment with an example of copyfraud that YOU have found. Lets get a big list of organizations who are intentionally or unintentionally falsely claiming copyright on public domain works. The next step is to get them to stop. Emails, phone calls, blog posts, identi.ca/twitter notices, whatever. Stand up for your rights.

Beginning list:

• ARTstor (but JSTOR gets it right)
• American Antiquarian Society. “This site and all contents © 2009 American Antiquarian Society” WRONG!
• Place-holder for your submission!

Footnotes:
[1] “unjustly” instead of “unlawfully” because we are being contractually limited, which is legal. It just isn’t right.
[2] This post doesn’t even get into the discussion of overly zealous publishers making wild claims that over-reach and stifle creativity. Examples are the Major League Baseball and National Football League organizations saying that no part, no matter how small or short, can be reproduced without their permission. That is a blatent lie: those uses fall under Fair Use. The lawyers who wrote those notices, assuming they did any research or know anything about intellectual property law, actively lied when they wrote them. That is a strong statement on my part, but I can only either assume that or assume that the people who wrote those notices were not either A) educated lawyers or B) they didn’t consult an educated lawyer. For a good discussion of this issue see (for example): Mazzone, Jason “Administering Fair Use.”
[3] However, a discussion of the restriction of our heritage via contractual terms should also be had. Contracts are weird things: you can sign away rights that you have, like the right to reproduce public domain images. And remember, EULA and Terms of Service are binding contracts in the US. I think that may be my next post on this topic: “Taking Away Your Rights by Clicking ‘I Accept’”.

Copyfraud links (short list):

• Copyfraud (wikipedia)
• Copyfraud by Jason Mazzone. Great article with a legal perspective.
• More attacks on institutional copyfraud (Library Law Blog)
• Copyfraud in Google Book Search (Open Access News)
• Special collections and the public domain (Steve Lawson)
• ‘Copyfraud’ and public domain works.(THE SIDEBAR) (Access My Library)
• Copyfraud (EFF)
• Copyfraud (Libology Blog)
• Libraries and Copyfraud (RAGESOSS 2.02)
• Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. (wikipedia)
• The Bridgeman Art Library v.Corel Corporation (Copyright Advisory Network)
• Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (wikipedia)

EDIT: Clarified paragraph beginning with “In addition to the fact..” I was overloading the pronoun “they.”
EDIT2: misspelling, thanks Douglas.

Release Party Time!

Thats right, the Michigan LoCo Team will be hosting our biannual Ubuntu Release Party on April 25th in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The venue of choice is The Corner Brewery as it provides ample seating and ability to move tables around to have bigger groups. Plus, if you know where to sit there are power outlets!

And you know the Michigan LoCo can throw a party, we even had people come up from OHIO last time because they knew our party was better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year we even had people from CHICAGO make the drive over. I don’t even see Ohio or Chicago on the list of Release Parties yet.

Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.

Be sure to check out what other teams are having parties on the nice JauntyReleaseParties wiki page.

Hope to see you there!

As many of you know, I am currently working for Creative Commons and as such I am also always in the Creative Commons IRC channel, #CC. One of the unintended consequences of this abbreviation of Creative Commons is that it is also the abbreviation of Credit Cards (and “Change Congress,” come on Larry, branch out a little!). This didn’t really seem like a problem to me at first: who would have thought the #CC channel was a place about credit cards? Would people be applying for credit cards via IRC? No.

But, I forgot to account for the nefarious side of humanity. The people that are looking for an easy way to scam the world. On a somewhat regular basis people come into the channel and ask for credit card numbers. Scratch that, they DEMAND credit card numbers. A typical scenario is:


user1 enters #CC
< user1> !CC
< user1> ?CC
< user1> !give
< user1> give me credit card #!
... 5 minutes goes by
user1 leaves #CC


This has happened enough times that the /topic for #CC now includes this at the end: “Need credit card numbers? email tips@fbi.gov”

Today, however, I got my first personal request for credit card numbers. Since I idle in #CC, so goes the users logic, I must have access to credit card numbers to sell to people. Here is the full unedited transcript from our interaction:


12:03 Irssi: Starting query in Freenode with oera
12:03 < oera> hello, i'm here for buy credit card number, can you help me?
12:03 < greg-g> email tips@fbi.gov they can help you
12:05 < oera> ok thank but are you try this email?
12:06 < greg-g> they can help you
12:13 < oera> they can help me for going to jails ?
12:13 < oera!i=oera@eta91-1-82-234-203-250.fbx.proxad.net ["Leaving"]


Now, my response wasn't as good as it could be; it could be a ton more funny. What do you think I should say next time someone asks me for credit card numbers? I'm looking for snarky and/or punny responses.

There is a great event coming up at the University of Michigan, sponsored and coordinated by a great team of librarians: Open Access Week 2009.

Molly Kleinman, one of those great librarians, puts it into context for us:

I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. … The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

You really should read the rest of Molly’s post for a wonderful explanation of why the current scholarly publishing system is failing for everyone except the Elseviers of the world.

Along with presentations focused on faculty and scholarly publishing models, there is also going to be a talk by my current boss, Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan will be talking about the impact of Creative Commons (CC) licenses on Open Access, what challenges still exist for Open Access, and what the Creative Commons is doing to build and support an ecosystem of openness. Everyone is welcome to join this event, and all the events during Open Access Week. For the details about Nathan’s talk, check out the announcement on the OPEN:Michigan blog.

If you are in the South East Michigan area and are interested in what Michigan is doing to promote Open Access and make it really work, come by for any of the events; there should be a wide enough range to accommodate most interests.

I’ve been triaging bugs for Ubuntu for a while and I have always wanted an easy way for bug reporters to give me all the relevant information that is needed to help with finding out the problem. The way I usually did this was to add copy/paste-able requests to the Debugging Procedures Ubuntu wiki page. This was a pain for a few reasons: sometimes those copy/paste segments weren’t there and I had to add them and it also necessitated I have those wiki pages open (and wasting valuable tab-space in Firefox).

But now, thanks to the work of Matin Pitt, you no longer need to do anything as complicated! If the package already has some Apport Hooks then all you need the bug reporter to do is to run the command: “apport-collect 12345″ (substituting 12345 with the bug number in question, obviously).

apport-collect will then go find all the open tasks for that bug (just in case it is assigned to more than one package), run all of the apport-hooks for those packages, and attach that information to the bug report. It does all of this with out any other interaction with the reporter. To see which packages already have apport hooks available for them, see the Apport wiki page. Now, we all need to start adding more apport hooks so this is even more useful.

Be sure to check out Martin’s original announcement on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list.

This past week was Spring Break at the University of Michigan. So I decided to skip the trip to the beach and instead go to Washington DC to work 9-5 for a week. Really.

My school, the School of Information, has this neat program called Alternative Spring Break where students can go work with some really cool organizations in Washington DC, New York, or Chicago. It is an opportunity to go discover if you actually enjoy doing what you are in Graduate School full-time to learn (my words, not theirs). Also, it is a wonderful networking opportunity; I met some really great people last week and whether or not they can help me find a job is secondary.

I specifically worked for the American Library Association’s Office for Information Technology Policy. This is basically the “think tank” for the ALA Washington office. The Washington office also has the people in the Office of Government Relations; the people that go out there and make sure that the libraries’ perspective is heard on Capitol Hill. It is a really important perspective: who else are as big of proponents of open access to knowledge for all people? who else guards your privacy to such a great degree? Librarians are wonderful people to have on your side, but watch out if you do something wrong.

My time at the OITP involved writing a report about the HathiTrust, an endeavor originating at the University of Michigan and the University of Indiana. It is, in the most simple of terms, a long-term digital works preservation project. It is preserving and providing access to all of the digital scans that are being given to the various member Universities from the Google Book Search scannning program and also the libraries’ internal scanning operations. But there are some important implications of the HathiTrust, and that is what I set out to find. I want to give special thanks to John Wilkin, Executive Director of the HathiTrust, for answering my many questions.