Digital Rights Network

The British Academy has just published its report on "Copyright and research in the humanities and social sciences". They find a variety of problems (detailed below) and also provide an extensive set of recommendations (see the Executive Summary linked from the main report page.

The findings of the Review

* Copyright law generally provides exemptions for fair dealing for private study and non-commercial research, and for purposes of criticism and review. These exemptions should normally be sufficient for academic and scholarly use.

* The problems lie in narrow interpretation, both by rights holders and by publishers of new works which refer to existing copyright material. These problems are acute in some subjects, particularly music, and history and film studies.

* Copyright holders have become more sensitive in defence of their rights, as a result of the development of new media, and are more aggressive in seeking to maximise revenue from the rights, even if the legal basis of their claims is weak.

* Risk averse publishers, who are often themselves rights holders, demand that unnecessary permissions be obtained, and such permissions are often refused or granted on unreasonable terms.

* There is an absence of case law, because the financial stakes involved in each individual case are small relative to the costs of litigation.

* Publishers and authors are very uncertain as to the true position and misapprehensions are widespread.

* There are well-founded concerns that new database rights and the development of digital rights management systems (DRMs) may enable rights holders to circumvent the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate research and scholarship.

Report is available at http://www.who.int/intellectualproperty/documents/thereport/en/index.html

The following is the summary of the report provided by the WHO as part of their FAQ

6. What does the report say?

Intellectual property rights are a general incentive provided by governments to promote innovation in all fields. In respect of public health, they are embedded in a set of other incentives which influence the pattern of innovation. They need to be looked at as part of a bigger picture.

On January 23-24, 2006, Intelligent Television hosted the Economics of Open Content symposium at MIT to bring together representatives from media industries, cultural and educational institutions, and legal and business minds to discuss how to make open content happen better and faster.

They've now released the whole set of the presentations under a CC attribution license including Terry Fisher on 'The Economics of the Music Industry' and Eric von Hippel on 'New Models of Creative Production in the Digital Age'.

The Yale Law School Information Society Project (ISP) and the International Journal of Communications Law & Policy (IJCLP - www.ijclp.org) announce their third interdisciplinary writing competition and a call for papers in conjunction with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Conference taking place on April 21-23, 2006 at Yale Law School. We invite students, scholars, policy makers, activists and practitioners to submit papers for the writing competition and/or for publication by the IJCLP. Key issues to be considered include, among others: the economics of A2K in a digital environment; A2K indexes and measurement techniques; the limitations to A2K; digital libraries and archives; government investment in information production; government procurement policies; open source software; the WIPO Broadcast Treaty; access to education and scientific knowledge; universal service in telecommunications; the digital divide; digital rights management; open access journals.

Source: scidev.net

A leading international scientific organisation has launched a global initiative to develop ways of increasing access to knowledge produced by publicly funded research.

The Global Information Commons for Science Initiative seeks to remove restrictions to accessing information that technological advances and new ways of protecting intellectual property have created.

The International Council for Science's (ICSU) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) launched the initiative on 14 November in Tunis, Tunisia.

On thursday the RSA's Adelphi Charter on on Innovation, Creativity and Intellectual Property was launched. It is available here and it's clear the commission's members put a lot of effort in keeping it to a side of A4. The charter is explicitly targeted at policy-makers with the statement: We call upon governments and the international community to adopt these principles and while, according to Jamie Boyle, its aim was to be banal, to just state the obvous its principles still pack a punch, in particular the longest, number nine which states:

LinuxWorld Conference & Expo will take place over two days, 5th and 6th October at the Olympia Exhibition Centre in London, UK.

Thanks to generous sponsorship space is available once again, FREE of charge, in the .Org Village for Linux projects, groups and campaigns.

Sadly space is limited at the Expo. However unlike other LinuxWorld Expo's we do not allocate space on a first come first served basis or based on the percieved size of you .Org.

Submissions are welcome up until the 1st August. At that time we will announce which entrants have been accepted. Whilst some priority will be made to UK based .Orgs the size of your Org will not be either a benefit or hindrance. Some space will be reserved specifially for small or new Orgs.

This is an email written back in February 2005 during a discussion of why activism on open knowledge/digital rights issues was as active as it could be (and specifically why there wasn't an EFF UK).

1. I think it /is/ essential that there is *more* coordination on digital rights/open knowledge issues.

2. Doing this through a large member-funded organiziation is difficult. Why? Because even if building such an organization were the optimal strategy it would take time and significant amounts of money. Money, in particular, is not /currently/ ubiquitous.

[Aside on EFF: My understanding was that EFF in the US was started off with a load of funding from various well-off high-tech entrepreneurs and that its core work is still funding driven rather than member-driven. Moreover the EFF model was, and continues to be, strongly oriented around litigation - a high-profile and costly activity which is suited to specialists]

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a subsidiary of the American Chemical Society (founded 1909), is unhappy because the Federal Government has funded an open scientific database called PubChem that *might* compete with their service. CAS President Massie stated: It would not only injure us significantly, it would put information for free in the hands of world scientists and do it all with taxpayer money. For me to wake up one morning and find I have to compete with my own government is extraordinary. (The fact that much of the money paying for subscriptions to the CAS come from taxpayer-funded scientists seems to have passed him by).

The first work of western literature, the Iliad, and indeed the second, the Odyssey, are usually attributed to someone called Homer. Modern Classical scholarship agrees that if such a person existed, he did not make up the poems from scratch and write them down. At most he was a 'master compositor' who collated traditional material; perhaps he was no more than the first bard who knew how to write; perhaps he was an invention of later Greeks.

If there was no individual claiming authorship, how do we come to have these enormous and masterful poems? Research carried out in the 1950s among the illiterate guzlari of Serbia showed that bards in oral cultures are capable of memorising and reproducing epics of comparable length. They do not memorise word for word, rather they inherit a template of stock phrases, lines, scenes and story-patterns that they recombine in performance. A good bard recombines imaginatively, adds pertinent details, and can even produce 'special effects' by knowing or incongruous use of formulae. Because a formulaic phrase is certain to fit the metre, it buys the bard time to retrieve the next line from the memory bank.