Friday, September 08, 2006

Official Description:

Uncommon Ground? Intellectual Property in a Flat World

Ed Colleran, Publisher Relations, Copyright Clearance Center, Moderator
Thinh Nguyen, Counsel, Science Commons
William Strong, Partner, Kotin Crabtree and Strong, LLP
Ben White, Copyright Compliance and Licensing Manager, British Library

As the Internet has opened up the global distribution of content, publishers and libraries are facing changing attitudes and needs of readers and scholars who want access whenever and wherever, at no cost in this digitally flat world. How is the concept of intellectual property changing, nationally and internationally? How will new open access legislation and the growing popularity of depositing pre-publication content in institutional repositories affect a publisher's copyrights and business models? Does the trend for libraries to reshape their role to include the management of e-collections, e-reserves, and institutional repositories collide with copyright? What new rights and licensing models can we expect next?

My Live Blogging Notes:

"What are we to make of copyright in a world of infinite redistribution" - was it Bob yesterday or was it AKMA in the discovery tools session who said that?

Plenty of challenges - e-reserves, institutional repositories, open access, and the new legislation popping up all over the world.

CCC distributed 112 million dollars last year to publishers, an increase of 13 percent. Honor systems

Bill Strong, Kotin Crabtree and Strong

Enforcement programs in which he's been involved. going after copyshops, docdel cos, and other more exotic types. Major names (ELS, Sage, ACS, various university presses) who've been involved. Doc del providers who charge cc fees w/o paying it back to the publishers. "Whenever we sue a non-compliant shop, they're always surprised...." ActiMed (swiss based company) not charging c'right fees; suit filed in both Switzerland and in the US.

Other areas more problematic -- univ libs in this country and attempts to serve users (via the Internet) w/o verifying rights. Some success in changing their behaviors. somewhat shielded by the eleventh amendment. customer relation concerns make this a very difficult area to handle. Acknowledges that the bulk of the library community very concerned w/ copyright and trying to work w/in the confines of the law but otehrs push the envelope.

E-reserves and coursepack activity. In-house online coursepacks to be expected over the course of time - essentially indistinguishable from e-reserves. This is a growing area of concern. More and more widespread. There will be a lawsuit filed in the near future on this one because the parameters need to be established and publishers feel that this is a significant troublespot. His stance is that ILL is limited to bricks and mortar, print artifacts and is clearly not intended to apply to the digital environment.

Questions arise over what copyright protection extends to one version (say 90% of the final version of an article) placed in an IR and the final version as distributed by the publisher. Properly crafted copyright assignment/release form should protect the publisher in this instance.

Thinh Nguyen, Counsel, Science Commons

He's speaking from not exactly the opposing side but provide different perspective of what's needed in this new environment. He will speak about Creative Commons, Science Commons focuses on policy.

Creative Commons founded 2002; basically open-source licensing models (GNU is his example). Legal format, metadata format (machine readable) and human readable (set in terms appropriate to the lay person). They see themselves as accidental tourists in scholarly publishing; 30 law journals are using their creative commons license, PLoS is using creative commons license. Univ libraries are using creative commons licenses for some activities. Researchers funded by the Wellcome Trust are encouraged to make their research available via the Creative Commons license.

Scholar's Copyright Project - SPARC author addenda used to reserve some rights to the author. Right to archive in the IR after a certain embargo period is one such right. CCommons is still working on building this. Berlin, Bethesday, Budapest signatory.

Forces that he sees going on that require creative solutions. (1) Technological - basic problem is that there's lots of information. References the haves and the have-nots in the context of the Parable of the Talents. Need for immediacy of access in the research environment. Technology allows use of data to move towards uncovering new factual information. Now you can have a computer read stuff for you and uncover the patterns that used to require human effort to read and process. Time-efficiency of data-mining but we're slowing that process because so much of the literature under copyright and search engines can't do that w/o permission from the copyright holder.

Make facts available as a form of metadata (computer readable form) is one way out of this dilemma.

(2) Economic forces. Rising costs. (cites ARL statistics with regard to pricing of scholarly journal material). There are marginal audiences who cannot access content as a result. North-South divide in universities; forcing researchers from other countries to come here to the US because that's the only way they can get access to the literature they need. This brain drain is an on-going issue on an international level.

NIH public access policy (ended w/ voluntary recommendation of deposit) compliance just over 4 percent. References proposed legislation in 2003 (Sabo) and in 2005 (?) and the 2006 Corwyn-Lieberman proposal (doesn't look like it will pass). Clearly there is an on-going push.

The Wellcome Trust is requires the open-access deposit in PubMed (after 6 mos.) for the research it funds. This goes into effect next month so effects to be seen...

Need to extend the reach of the research they are funding.

Ben White, British Library

"Things happen differently where I'm from" and he states up front that he's not a lawyer nor is he a librarian. Digitization project w/ Microsoft for Xmillion pages that will go up under a creative commons style arrangement. They will be hosting a UK PubMed style repository. All of their projects (and he named a couple) indicate that they understand the value of the intellectual property to the UK economy but also the need to maximize access. They are active in a variety of sectors (publishing, database producer, etc.) so they understand the various pressures.

We're living in a paradoxical world ( a hybrid world) -- wrestling w/ idea of "digital lockdown" even as we don't want to yield up the rights and exceptions that serve a practical purpose and preserve a balance that is good for all. Issues include: DRM, anti-circumvention methods, commoditization of knowledge down to the most granular levels, contracts that prevent access (ie more restrictive in their terms than international copyright would allow).

Update by author: I realized that my comment to the panelists may not have been properly stated. I do believe that education of users is a key element here and I do think that we need to do more in that regard. The second portion of my statement however (and this may not have been stated clearly) is that we need to simplify what the rules are -- what we expect the user to understand and abide by. The practices currently in place that serve the publishers and the librarians are not simple or sensible or clear to users. Users will conform more readily if the rules we ask them to abide by are sensible and practical and perhaps most importantly, time-efficient!

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