Happy Open Access Day!

Today’s Daily Nebraskan printed a guest editorial written by Kevin and me.  We wanted to use a blog post to back up our editorial and give people access to more information on OA.

The best place to start to learn about OA is Peter Suber.  He has produced some amazing resources on the web for learning about open access.  His OA Overview is fairly comprehenesive, but those faint of heart might try starting with his Very Brief Introduction to OA.  Professor Suber also has a great explanation of what you can do to promote open access from the perspective of faculty, librarians, administrators and students.  And for everything you need to keep up-to-date with current events in OA, check Suber’s blog or newsletter.

There are a couple of videos that help explain some of the major OA issues.  The first is Professor Suber’s talk to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.  It’s about an hour and a half long, but totally worth it if you want to understand the growing OA movement on campuses around the country.  Here is another interesting video of Sydney Verba, Director of Harvard University Libraries and professor of political science, and Charles Nesson, Professor of Law about why OA makes sense at Harvard.

I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight a couple of OA journal articles that were very helpful in researching this issue. Jessica Litman at Michigan Law has a great article about the “The Economics of Open Access Law Publishing.”  In addition, Lawrence B. Solum of Illinois College of Law has a very interesting piece about the shift of academic scholarship to shorter articles with greater access for the public.

There is a great OA wiki run by Simmons College.  Some particularly interesting entries include “OA by the numbers,” “OA journal business models,” “Video about OA,” and “University actions” — wouldn’t it be cool for UNL to join the schools on this list.

If you would like to see what a major OA journal looks like, check out the Public Library of Science.  PLoS runs a number of science and medical journals but they have one very interesting journal called PLoS ONE.  This is an interdiscplinary journal that applies principles from the web 2.0 to academic publishing, allowing for comments and ratings to journal articles.  The articles are still peer-reviewed but mainly for accuracy, so that every writing that is technically accurate will be available for users to read, rate, and comment on.  This is an interesting approach to apply the long tail to academic publishing.

For anything else you want to know about OA, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a great resource.  Check out their OA page for articles, newsletters, forums, brochures, and directories of OA journals.

Thanks to Elaine Westbrooks and Joan Barnes for the UNL-specific numbers in the editorial.

Please join us on October 14th in Love Library on campus to celebrate Open Access Day.  The event is around 2 hours long, starting at 5:30 p.m. and will include presentations by the Dean of Libraries, Other UNL students and faculty, and a webcast that includes world renown scholars.  We will be posting a much longer article about the benefits of open access in the days following the presentation, but if you would like to learn more about this exciting movement then come hang out with us on Tuesday night!

Thanks to everybody who came to watch “Good Copy Bad Copy” this week.  We had a great crowd.  (Thanks especially to Professor Cummins for bringing her class.)

For those of you who weren’t able to make it, that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on all the fun.  “Good Copy Bad Copy” is available online in via flash or bit torrent.

We plan to meet next week sometime to see if people want to talk about issues from the film, current events in IP law, and more…or we might talk about nothing and just hang out at a coffee shop.  We’ll send out details on time and place sometime soon.

Cory Doctorow has reported on Boing Boing that the State of Oregon has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to Web sites such as Justia and Public.Resource.Org which provide mirrors of Oregon state law. Oregon claims copyright over its state laws and says that their own Web site is sufficient for public access; however, as Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org points out, their Web site is filled with HTML errors, does not meet Section 508 accessibility requirements, and has no metadata.

Thanks to everyone who attended last Thursday’s meeting.  We discussed a number of current events that have a bearing on the free culture movement, and broke off into committees to discuss how to take action as a group on campus.  Committees include the advocacy, education, involvement, and events committees.  We plan on having these smaller groups get together every meeting, so if you weren’t last week, think about where you’d like to be involved for future meetings.

Also, thanks to those who came to our Be Kind Rewind viewing.  There was some great remixing going on, which Jack Black and Mos Def referred to as Sweding (video explanation of Sweding).  There are a bunch of Sweded videos up on YouTube, including a Sweded version of the original trailer.  We encourage people to do their own Swedes/remixes.  For those at UNL, let us know, and we’ll try to feature the videos on our site.

O’Reilly Media, a publisher known for its computer and technical books, has an online repository of open books—books that have been released under an open license. Some of these books are out-of-print technical books; others are free because the author or subject felt strongly about open content. Not all of the open books are solely about computer topics; there are also several about the meaning of “freedom” in the context of intellectual property, for example.

At our last meeting we discussed the history of copyright law and the difference between intellectual property (IP) laws based on natural rights as opposed to an incentive-based system.  In a recent post, William Patry, former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary; former Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights; and current Senior Copyright Counsel, Google Inc., offers a couple of early Supreme Court cases that show clearly that the U.S. copyright system is not based on natural rights.  Patry points out that we should think of copyright as a privilege.  Outside of this limited privilege, the copyright owner has no natural right to restrict use of the work.

Those familiar with the Free Software movement are probably familiar with Richard Stallman’s complaints with the term “intellectual property.”  Stallman notes that we are not talking about physical property that you can steal.  ”Property” carries a bias, which connotes a natural right, and the rights we give to copyright owners are really limited monopolies.

Maybe as a compromise we can start calling copyright an “intellectual privilege.”  Eh, who’s with me?  That way we can keep calling it IP. 

One question:  §106(2) of the Copyright Act gives copyright owners exclusive rights to create derivative works based on their copyright.  However, if copyright law is an incentive-based system according to the Constitution, then we should only give copyright owners exclusive rights to the derivative works that would be necessary to let them compensate from their work.  Rights in derivative works extend only so far as is needed to provide incentive to create a work.

If this were the case, would a musician, for example, have any reason to claim rights against other musicians who sample him or her?

As another example that might be tougher to argue, should a fiction writer expect rights to films based on his or her books?  Would it be a problem that anyone could make a movie based on the author’s storyline?  How about if they could use the story without the original title?

(These questions are pretty clear in current Copyright law, so argue from a theoretical pespective based purely on incentives.)

The familiar software company Blackboard recently won a patent lawsuit against a rival educational software firm Desire2Learn. The lawsuit was based on a ridiculous patent which I won’t go into the details of. The result of the case is that Desire2Learn owes 3.1 million dollars and could face an injunction preventing them from selling their software in the U.S. You can read more about the patent and the lawsuit at Slashdot. There is also another blog, The Nose, that has been following the case for some time and has in-depth coverage of the lawsuit.

Our local organization tends to focus on the copyright aspect of intellectual property, since it is the most applicable to the most people here on campus.  It is also where we think it is possible to affect the most change. Patents are another large part of intellectual property and in a similar state of disarray, especially where software is concerned. If you are interested in learning more about software patents, there are tons of articles on the topic. As always, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Thanks to everbody who came to our Valentine’s Day meeting.  I hope everyone enjoyed the candy (thanks Laura) and the heart-shaped pizza.  Thanks to Brian for leading us through the history and current status of Copyright.

For those interested, here is some more information on the College Opportunity and the Affordability Act: story and story.

… that seems to be the question for at least two major internet service providers. The New York Times’ BITS blog reports that AT&T is gearing up to begin filtering copyrighted content on its networks. Verizon, on the other hand, opposes the concept, and presently has no plans to filter its users’ online behavior. The call to filter has come from the mouths of the RIAA and MPAA and has serious implications for network openness. Not only is it inherently difficult for network-level filters to distinguish between copyrighted and non-copyrighted works, such content controlling tends to ignore any distinctions between infringing use and allowable fair use. Moreover, placing the task of policing user behavior in the hands of for-profit companies raises troublesome questions about customer privacy, due process, and the liability of the ISP’s for their customers’ internet behavior.

Overall, Verizon seems to be on the right path. I applaud the company for holding its own in the face of industry pressure and preserving the integrity of user privacy and access.