NUL Copyright

Section 108 Study Group releases its report

The Study Group formed by the United States Copyright Office to make recommendations about possible revisions to Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law has released its final report. Available from the Study Group web site in full version (202 pages, PDF) or executive summary.

Section 108 sets forth a number of exemptions for libraries and archives, is employed in a number of key library services, including Interlibrary Loan, Preservation, and some digital reformatting projects.

Turnitin.com wins suit -- transformative fair use

Turnitin.com has had a lawsuit against it dismissed on grounds that its use of student papers in its plagiarism detection service was transformative, and thus exempt under fair use. Turnitin's service, often accessed through course management systems, provides instructors a way to compare the texts of student papers with other texts (other student papers, web sites, and some proprietary full-text databases available on the web), calculating a score reflecting the amount of duplication between a student's paper and the other sources. As papers are submitted for such evaluation, their texts are added to the database for future comparisons. A Library Journal news story on this case is reported at http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6544790.html?nid=2673#news4

NIH hosts meeting on Open Access, 3/20

The National Institutes of Health are hosting a public meeting on Thursday, March 20, 2008. The event will be webcast live. Public comments about the NIH's new open access mandate are available via the site; many have been contributed by cancer patients and their families in support of free and open access to new scientific research. It promises to be a very interesting event.

Peter Suber speaks today: what can Universities do to promote Open Access?

Open access advocate (and NU alum) Peter Suber speaks today at the Harvard Berkman Center. Havard usually webcasts these events, and archives them on their events page.

The Open Access mandate recently adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences doesn't apply to the faculty in Harvard's other schools, including Law, Business and Education. This should be an interesting talk. For more background, read Suber's extended coverage of the Harvard vote in the March 2 issue of Open Access News.

SAE removes DRM from papers

As reported in its news blog, the MIT Libraries have re-established access to the Society of Automotive Engineers digital library after SAE agreed to remove Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures from its papers. SAE had been using an Adobe Acrobat plugin called File Open to restrict use of the paper after download.

Professor of Mechanical Engineering (and SAE fellow) Wai Cheng requested the DRM removal at a 2007 meeting of the Publication Board, and wrote about it in the Nov/Dec 2007 issue of the Faculty Newsletter:

"How would you feel about colleagues who wish to read a paper you wrote for a professional organization being limited in the number of times they were allowed to print it? Or you being restricted in the number of students to whom you could distribute another colleague’s paper? These are precisely some of the limitations imposed by organizations who employ the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology for their technical publications."

SAE is not the only publisher using DRM, of course: the File Open software is used by a number of commercial and educational publishers. Harvard Business School Publishing had used a similar technology formerly known as Sealed Media (a student user described his frustrations with this solution in a 2007 post on his blog) but has reportedly reverted to plain PDF download. XanEdu digital course packs use the File Open DRM software. I've struggled with the PDF restrictions Educause places on papers from its library.

Library copyright experts make statement to WIPO

As reported previously on this blog, the Library Copyright Alliance has a new international copyright advocates program. This week, they made a statement about the importance of fair use and the proposed orphan works legislation. As they mention in their statement, there is a hearing on March 13, 2008, about the pending orphan works legislation.