Posters in the Digital Repository

Digital repositories seem to have very few poster submissions, which is unfortunate, because digital repositories are the ideal place to record and preserve of academic poster presentations. In this blog post, we will outline four reasons why we believe that digital repositories should prioritize adding poster presentations to the repository.

First, unlike articles, when people submit posters to a conference, the conference does not require the creator to transfer the copyright to the conference. Because the content creator (a professor or student) at the university is more likely to retain full autonomy over the copyright, he or she will probably be able to decide on the permanent home of the poster without consulting anyone.

Second, unlike academic articles, posters are ephemeral. When a journal article is published or a conference paper accepted, there is an expected permanent home for that work, and the author will always be able to find that article or paper, even if they no longer hold the copyright to it. That it is not true with posters, which often do not have a permanent home. Digital repositories can provide that permanent home for facsimiles of the poster, which have not existed before.

Third, because of the ephemeral nature of the posters, when individuals put the poster on their CV, there is not a way for people to review the posters later. By encouraging students and faculty members to place their posters on the repository, they can link to the repository on their CVs or in their grant applications and have their work become readily available.

Finally, by encouraging students and faculty members to upload copies of their posters to the repository, it should be easier to explain to how, why, and when to upload their articles to the repository and to continue to expand the content in the repository.

So when we think about advertising the digital repository to students and professors, let’s not forgot to talk about the importance of posters especially with graduate students. Do you have questions about copyright and the images in your posters?  If you have questions about this or anything else, please contact us in the Scholarly Communications Office.

You may be sued . . . or arrested

We often talk about the possibility of copyright infringement when discussing legal issues surrounding data or text mining. Often, the method for text mining is conceptualized as making copies from a database and then mining the copies on a new server. While that is one way to mine, it is certainly not the only way. Another way to text is to mine the database itself, instead of copies of the database.

When considering whether to advise our faculties and researchers on whether they can text mine a database without explicit permission of the publisher or administrator, we must examine the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) as well as copyright law. If we do not conform to the CFAA requirements, it is possible that our libraries and faculty members may face civil, if not criminal liability.

Without consent of the database administrator, mining may be a violation of the CFAA, specifically the hacking section of the act, which has been codified at 18 USC 1030. For context, this is one of the statutes that Aaron Swartz was charged with before his death in 2013. The CFAA is both a criminal and civil statute. This means that the federal government can either prosecute charges under this statute or private individuals or companies can bring a civil lawsuit for monetary damages. Courts have broadly interpreted 18 USC 1030(a)(4), which states that it is a violation of the statute to:

knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $5,000 in any 1-year period;

Courts have defined exceeding authorized access by including text and data mining as a violation of the Terms of Service, which has included text mining a public facing website. At this point, no one has been convicted for text or data mining, as a criminal manner, although this is possible.

In both the 1st and 2nd Circuits, the courts have found that plaintiffs could sue and win for text mining as a hacking standard under 18 USC 1030. In both cases from both circuits, the defendants had used robots to access public facing websites and publically available information. In the 1st Circuit case, EF Cultural Travel BV v. Zefer Corp, Explorica, used a robot, or a “scraper,” to crawl EF Cultural Traveler’s website, so Explorica could undercut EF Cultural Traveler’s already low prices. The robot scraped and downloaded the prices (and only the prices) of the flights from EF Cultural Traveler’s website for two years prior to litigation by reviewing the publicly accessible HTML Source code.  EF Cultural sued Zefer for downloading from their website, and the court granted a preliminary injunction.

In the 2nd Circuit case, Register.com, Inc. v. Verio, Inc., defendant, Verio, used a robot to submit WHOIS queries to multiple domain name registrars, including the plaintiff, to determine whether new domain names had been purchased. Verio would then solicit the purchasers for website design. Register sued alleging, in part, that Verio had violated 18 USC 1030 when the robot crawled the server. The 2nd Circuit affirmed the district court’s injunction against the plaintiff as the case went to the trial.

Court-issued preliminary injunctions are not final dispositions in cases but do have a high bar. Courts should only grant preliminary injunctions when the person requesting the injunction has demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success on the merits. As can be seen above, the courts have found that civil liability is possible under the CCFA. The CCFA is a criminal statute, and court could find criminal liability as well, although no court has. One requirement is that the infringer must do their action “with intent to defraud.” While this may be a bar for ultimate recovery or a defense to criminal litigation, this might have to go to trial for a jury to decide.

Last year, the House of Representatives introduced House Bill 113-2454, otherwise known as “Aaron’s Law” which would have made violations of terms of service not a violation of the CFAA. However, that bill died in subcommittee during the last Congressional section. Some members of Congress, including Senator Wyden, believe that the law could allow for terms of service violations to be violations of CFAA without clarification in the CFAA.

No court has decided whether faculty members, researchers, and libraries and would be immune under CFAA, and nothing in the statute guarantees that they would be. To advise faculty members to “mine away” without mentioning these issues is irresponsible and may land your library and faculty member in court, if not jail. If you have any questions about this issue or any other, please come see us in the Scholarly Communications Office!

Removing Articles from Predatory Journals

Here in the Scholarly Communications Office, we have had questions about predatory Open Access Journals. Typically, those journals will solicit articles from professors and students on a topic of their choice. Upon submission, the journal will request an Open Access fee. At this point or at other points in the process, if authors attempt to withdraw the paper from publication, the journal publishes the paper without the consent of the author. At this point, the author will generally try and contact the publisher or editor to have the paper removed and the Open Access Journal refuses to remove the paper. This is the point where the question often comes to the library or the Scholarly Communications Officer. Below, we have spelled out one way to get the article removed from the journal’s website. We have been advising authors to file DMCA takedown notices, which have worked fairly well.

It is unlikely that you will know who owns the domain name, so the first thing to do is to determine who you need to send the DMCA takedown notice to. We will be using Wikipedia as an example for a domain name search. To do this you should go to http://www.register.com/ Select the option “WhoIs Lookup” underneath “Domain”            At that webpage, type in the domain name. From the Wikipedia article on “Open Access”, the link is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access, the domain name would be wikipedia.org. Once you are on the “WhoIs Results page” You will find email contact information for the registrar abuse contact information, the registrant email, and the admin email. Additionally, we have advised the professor to email the editor of the journal with the information for the DMCA Takedown notice.

 

DMCA takedown notices have specific requirements which are the following:

 

  1. Identify the copyright holder
  2. Identify the work or works being infringed (the title)
  3. Identify the location of the infringed material (URL)
  4. The author’s contact information (this can be in the signature line)
  5. Statement of good faith belief
  6. Statement of accuracy under penalty of perjury.

 

Here’s an example of a DMCA takedown request from ipwatchdog: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2009/07/06/sample-dmca-take-down-letter/id=4501/

 

Finally, remind the professor that even after the material is removed Google will still have it indexed for approximately two weeks after they have taken down the paper, so he/she might still see the paper in Google Search or Google Scholar results for a period of time after it has been removed from the web. If you have any questions about this issue or any other, please come see us in the Scholarly Communications Office!

Buzzfeed and Copyright

Recently, Mark C. Marino, Assistant Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, wrote a Buzzfeed article entitled 10 Reasons Professors Should Start Writing BuzzFeed Articles. Marino’s article received a lot of press, including a Chronicle of Higher Education post, on whether members of the academy should start writing on Buzzfeed instead of in academic journals.

Whether Buzzfeed is a substitute for scholarly journals is not a subject for the Scholarly Communications Office, but Marino does provide an opportunity to illuminate an important contract term: Buzzfeed allows writers to keep more rights under copyright than many academic journals. When you submit content to Buzzfeed, you grant Buzzfeed “a worldwide, non- exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable [sic] and transferable license . . .” (emphasis added) Regardless of how you feel about Buzzfeed or its content, Buzzfeed does not require a complete copyright transfer that is common to academic journals. If an author posts the article on Buzzfeed, the author can use it in their classroom, put it on another website (like a course management system like Sakai or Blackboard), or in their university’s depository without receiving permission from Buzzfeed or determining whether a copyright exception, like fair use, may apply.

Compare Buzzfeed with academic journals. Oxford University Press requires an exclusive license, or a complete copyright transfer. APS Journals also requires a transfer of copyright, as does World Scientific Journals and AIP Publishing. Regardless of how you feel about academic scholarship on Buzzfeed, Buzzfeed allows the author to keep more rights than the previously mentioned academic journals do, and many others. These publishers may require that the author receive permission from the publisher to use their own writing in their classroom, put it on another website (like a course management system like Sakai), or in their university’s depository. You certainly don’t want to have to use a fair use exception to use your own article in your own class, do you? If you have any questions about this issue or any other, please come see us in the Scholarly Communications Office!

Digital Barbarism: A Writer’s Manifesto

On May 20, 2007, the New York Times published Mark Helprin’s infamous article “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” His editorial seeks to be a short defense of perpetual copyright. According to Helprin, after the article was published, the internet exploded in reactions against him and perpetual copyright. Even Lawrence Lessig has a dedicated page on his wiki reacting to the points raised by Helprin. After this article, Helprin wrote his longer book on copyright: Digital Barbarism, where he attempted to flush out some of his major points. While I disagree with Helprin, his article is clear and succinct and provided some interesting points that should at least be considered. However, his book, Digital Barbarism, is an exercise in a new form of non-fiction: persuasive stream of consciousness. When I was reading the book, I was never certain whether Helprin was going to argue about copyright or say why he would buy the flowers himself as Mrs. Dalloway once did. As one example, in chapter three, “Notes on Virginia,” Helprin interrupts his points on copyright law to attack lawyers and the legal field for 4 pages (pg. 121-125), which just came out of nowhere.  While he makes interesting points within the book, the points become lost within this larger stream of consciousness style. In his book, Helprin discusses how he fights for every comma and every word when he writes. In this case, he should have yielded to his editor. I admittedly disagree with Helprin on adopting a perpetual copyright, but I certainly found the occasional paragraph thought-provoking. However, I have to take umbrage with Helprin’s characterization of Creative Commons. Heprin’s primary legislative goal would be to make copyright law follow property law, which can last in perpetuity and be freely alienable. What Helprin either forgets to mention or does not know is that real property has exceptions that copyright law does not. With real property, if you accidentally kick your ball on a neighbor’s lawn, you can walk over on your neighbor’s lawn and pick the ball up. If this becomes part of the custom of the community, your neighbor may be unable to sue you. If you have a house, you can grant an easement for your neighbors to bring their car around to the backyard or maybe to allow your neighbors to go from the sidewalk to a forest trail behind your house. Copyright law has none of these granting abilities that real property does if you do not talk to the owner.  There is no “custom of the community” exception like what exists in property law. There is no ability to grant use of the copyright to the community without granting it to one member of the community at a time. The ability to grant a right to use the property without expecting monetary compensation is a fundamental property rights. Copyright law does not have this provision, so content creators must contract around this provision and thus, Creative Commons. Rather than Creative Commons being an attempt to circumvent copyright law, as Helprin suggests it does, Creative Commons actually gives content creators a bundle of rights that was unavailable to them before. His inability to see that suggests a passing and immature relationship with the real ideas of copyright and its place in the future. The most worthwhile aspect is to see Helprin and Lessig respond to each other.  Start with Helprin’s article “A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?” Then read Lessig and other’s response on Lessig’s Wiki: “Against Perpetual Copyright.” Then Helprin wrote Digital Barbarism. Lessig wrote his book review: “The Solipsist and the Internet (a Review of Helprin’s Digital Barbarism).” Finally, Helprin responds in an article on the National Review, which is available behind a paywall. His National Review Article is titled “In Defense of The Book: A reply to the critics of Digital Barbarism” from September 21, 2009. His response article is even worse than the book. His pompous bent is best illustrated by the following passage: “Perhaps because Digital Barbarism is embedded almost promiscuously with stories and anecdotes in illustration of its arguments, and because it is written densely enough that legions of critics that they can’t understand it (they can’t understand the Constitution, either), its 250 pages cannot be justly summarized in a few paragraphs.” (44). I enjoyed watching Helprin, Lessig, and others insult each other playground style but with longer words. I enjoyed it more from a rhetorical perspective than an academic or analytical one. Their works gave me new insults but little to consider. Skip the book. Just read his op/ed. Or maybe just read someone else entirely.

Google Reverse Image Search and Copyright

Sometimes, we have a picture that someone has given to us or we have found online and we would like to give credit to the picture or figure out whether the photo is in the public domain or if we cannot use that photo if we can find something close that we can use. Thankfully, Google has given us a new tool that we can use to have a place to start the search. Google has created a reverse image search option. There are several ways that you can use the Google Search image. Google has given their instructions here.

You start by going to image.google.com. There is a camera button to the left of the search button (or the magnifying glass).

Google Image Search 1 (1)

 

There is an option to paste the image URL, if you found the photo online or to upload the photo to google from your computer.

Google Image Search 2

If you are searching by URL, you need to search by the URL of where the photo is located, not the specific website where the photo exists.

Google Image Search 3

You can find that web address by right clicking on the photograph and then selecting “Copy Link Address.”

Google Image Search 4

From there, Google will search the indexed web to see if it can locate a copy of the photo. If it can, Google will give you its best guess of its name, websites that include the image, and visually similar images. While not perfect and not all photographs can be found this way, it does provide some help.

Google Image Search 5

The other thing that you can do is download a plugin for Firefox and Chrome available here. By downloading it, you can right-click on any image on the web and select “Search for the image on the web” which will do the same search as using the URL or uploading the image into the Image.google.com search engine without having to go there. This feature is similar to the proposed Plus Registry developed by the Copyright Office. We might be looking at having to do this anyway, but for now, it’s simply good practice.

Modernism and Copyright

When we teach or even conceptualize copyright law, we usually do so by genre and not by time period. One of the biggest differences on the copyright debate from 2014 from 1914 is technology. However, the concept and frameworks have not budged much since 1914. Modernism & Copyright helps frame that historic debate. Those of us interested in copyright law rarely discuss how the perspective on copyright from one industry affects artistic movements or how time periods conceptualize the copyright law of the day. With his collection of essays, Paul Saint-Amour’s Modernism & Copyright tries to recreate the way that the content creators of the Modernist period thought about copyright law, primarily focusing on writers of Great Britain and the United States.

For those unfamiliar with the Modernist period, the modernist period starts in the early 20th century and ends at or before World War II. It was one of the dominant artistic movements of the early half of the twenty centuries. Modern jazz began to develop in the modernist period as did Cubism. Major artists in this movement included Matisse, Picasso, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. Interestingly, Modernism occurs during and after the Copyright Act of 1911 in Great Britain and the 1909 Copyright Act revision in America.

The book is set up as a series of juxtaposing perspectives on copyright law. The book is arranged by type of material. These juxtapositions include the written word – comparing Ezra Pound who wanted copyright in perpetuity to Virginia Woolf who would have had them expire after death; music — from modern jazz and bebop in its joy of the riff to high culture’s classical music, which considered the rift akin to theft.  The authors of the collection of essays ground the articles in the law and history and while this may get repetitive when reading the book from start to finish, it means every article or section can be read in isolation without losing the context of the larger issues. Every section should be read together to understand the point-counterpoint that Saint-Amour constructs.

One of the strongest uses is going to be to help introduce issues in copyright law to different audiences from the perspectives of the people most in line with their own voices. English majors should read the section “Portrait of a Modernist as Copyright.” Film Studies or theater students should read “The Fall and Rise of Remix Cultures.” Historian should read “Biography, Copyright, and Privacy.” None of his sections are over 50 pages and would provide a great grounding in the varying issues and how modernists felt about copyright law at the time.

Saint-Amour reminds us that the copyright fight we’re having today isn’t that much different than the copyright fight we were having 100 years ago, and that the same values embedded in these arguments were as present in the wake of the 1909 act as they are today. This is a great read for anyone interested in the perspectives on copyright from artists, interested in seeing the juxtaposition, teaching a class in an artistic area on copyright, or just interested in this long term debate.

Book Drive

Few realize that the Constitution grants Congress the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” in Article I, Section 8. This clause has been interpreted as giving power to Congress to create laws governing copyrights and patents.

We now think of the word useful as meaning “being of use or service” or “to serve some purpose.” Useful has an interesting etymological history. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word use comes from Latin, which meant enjoyment with the other definitions we still ascribe to “use” including: to make use of, profit by, take advantage of, apply, consume. Courts and Congress have read enjoyment as part of the useful arts as we grant completely fictitious works copyright protection. So, when you think about “Useful Arts,” remember that is a broad definition where useful includes things that are useful solely because of our own enjoyment.

As you are thinking about all of the books that you have enjoyed, perhaps you can consider donating one of those books to the Library’s 6th Annual Book Drive for Pediatric Cancer Patients. You can drop them off at the following locations:

  • Davis Library Lobby
  • Undergraduate Library Lobby
  • Wilson Library Lobby
  • Health Sciences Library, 1st Floor Lobby
  • Law Library
  • School of Information and Library Science, Manning Hall lobby and SILS Library
  • School of Education, Peabody Hall,
  • Office of Student Affairs lobby, 1st floor
  • School of Social Work, Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building lobby
  • FedEx Global Education Center, Peacock Atrium
  • Bull’s Head Bookshop

In addition, if you can’t part with any of your old favorites, then you can always go to the Bull’s Head Bookshop, mention “Book Fairy” when you buy a book and receive a 25% discount. More information is available here. Remember Friday is the last day to donate!

And, if you have any questions about the purpose of Copyright law, then come in and talk to us in the Scholarly Communications Office!

Copyright and Development

Philip G. Altbach, ed. (1995). Copyright and Development: Inequality in the Information Age.  Bellagio Publishing Network: Chestnut Hill, MA.

As a law student, we often do not hear about the international effects of American law and policy, especially the codification of American Law in international treaties. As many others have pointed out, American copyright law did not respect international copyright law until the 1980s and since then has been a leader in the fight against international infringement. While we hear about America protecting American interests abroad, we less frequently hear about how American law harms interests or stymies development in other countries.

Copyright and Development: Inequality in the Information Age explores these issues and how the publishing industries have systematically stymied the content industries in these areas. While the book has 6 essays in it, I am going to focus on “International Copyright and Africa: An Unequal Exchange” by Henry M. Chakava. His article obviously focuses on the issues of copyright in the developing African world. Africa produces only 1.2% of the world’s books despite housing 12% of the world’s population (in 1993) (17). Chakava focuses on how the European publishing industry has maligned the African one. At the time of publication, Chakava states that 90% of the published books are textbooks, many of which are published by the publishers from Europe and America. (19). Chakava believes the solution to the African publishing crisis is for European and American publishers to allow African licenses to publish materials, which they have been disinclined to do. Chakava states, “. . .  International copyright protects the haves, not the have-nots, and is structured to serve the interests of those with something to protect” (21). His entire article focuses on the problems of Western Europe and America being the holders of copyrights and refusing to let go of their absolute control of copyrighted materials – even materials from local African writers, who found publishers abroad.

Ultimately, having any introduction to the problems of copyright law in the developing world brings an important and often ignored legal perspective to the conversation. All six of these essays give a perspective outside of the traditional copyright law classroom or discussion: like territorial rights in publishing; compulsory licensing, etc. All of the essays are under 25 pages. It provides a great perspective and easy perspective on international copyright law, and as there are articles on India, China, and Africa, it should present an interesting read for those interested in different parts of the world. Admittedly, the book is a little dated, as it was published before the internet become more widespread in the world, but ultimately still relevant to conversation. At 108 pages, the book is worth picking up and perusing for those needing an introduction to the issues surrounding international copyright law.

UNC Annual Book Drive

The UNC University Libraries and its partners (the Health Sciences Library, the Law Library, the School of Information and Library Science, the School of Education, the School of Social Work, the FedEx Global Education Center, and the Bull’s Head Bookshop) are completing its 6th Annual Book Drive for Pediatric Cancer Patients. They are looking for new or gently used books for ages one to mid-teen, especially English and Spanish language board books and sturdy picture books. More information is available here.

Bookdrive2014_450

When we think about buying a book, we encounter a common misconception of ownership over a physical item. Many people believe that owning of a physical item (like a book) gives them the right to reproduce the book. Copyright law, though, separates physical ownership of an item (like a book) from the ownership of the intellectual property rights in the book.  This is why we buy books for book drives rather than make copies. If the library (or anyone else) made copies of books donated from previous years, then whoever made that copy would commit copyright infringement and could be liable for upwards of $150,000 in fines. Honestly, that hypothetical $150,000 would buy a lot of books. So when you purchase the book, it gives you some rights, like the right to resell the book or the right to write your own notes in the book, but it does not give you the right to reproduce the book by making a copy of a loose page or copying the entire book to give to someone else to read.

 

So, we in the Scholarly Communications Office are encouraging everyone to go into the attic and see if there are any books to donate. The book drive runs through December 4th. If you can’t part with your childhood books, then you can always go to the Bull’s Head Bookshop, who will offer a 25% discount on books for the book drive. At the time of purchase, just mention “Book Fairy.” You can find locations to drop off the books at their website. If you have any questions about what you can do with books that you own or want us to help you find awesome books to donate, contact us in the Scholarly Communications Office!