US Public Affairs - 30/08/08

Huge and important news: free licenses upheld
"I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them "open source") copyright license, explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center." [Lessig]

An Inquiry into the Problem of Digital Copyright Law
"This is a draft introduction to an extended study on copyright law. The study examines issues of access, access to information and digital copyright law. Considering the major crisis in copyright law and the mismatch between the purpose of the law and its effect on society, the study concludes that copyright protection in principle remains justified and desirable also as applied to digital works in the network reality. At the same time, the study does not support the view that adjusting the current system may successfully survive the transition to digital markets and cultures. The study concludes that the present structure of entitlements is inherently inadequate for regulating the digital information environment. In modern reality and under digital infrastructural conditions, the smallest tradable unit of transaction is access to copyright subject matter. The positive law does not correspond to that reality. Traditional copyright law has not been designed to regulate the new environment, and it may only awkwardly accommodate new situations and problems." [SSRN]

Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of Determining Copyright Status
"It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923 to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This article discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this period do so at some risk." [SSRN]

The Free Jammie Movement: Is Making a File Available to Other Users Over a Peer-to-Peer Computer Network Sufficient to Infringe the Copyright Owner'S 17 U.S.C. Section 106(3) Distribution Right?
"The internet is a copy machine. . . . The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free. . . . Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave. Even a dog knows you can't erase something once its [sic] flowed on the internet.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), representing the major music record labels, knows this all too well. As technology advances and becomes cheaper, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), representing the major movie studios, also fears for the survival of its industry. In contrast, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), declaring that it champion[s] the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights, fears for the survival of free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today." [SSRN]