“Paging Dr. Chickering” or Urgent Care for Copyright Fair Use After the TVEyes Trainwreck
[Peter Jaszi] Since February 27, 2018, when a panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a reversal in Fox News Network, LLC v. TVEyes, Inc., there has been some speculation about how the decision may signal a “transformation of ‘transformative use’” in fair use jurisprudence. But while the outcome of the decision may or may not be sound, its peculiar method of decision is not. The panel majority’s strong views about the equities skewed its analytic approach – yielding an outlier opinion rather than a reliable precedent. Click here for more.
Communia Association: Our Study “Educational Licences in Europe” Is Out Now
[Teresa Nobre] The European Union is coming closer to approving a mandatory educational exception that may address some of the limitations copyright law places on everyday educational activities. However, the current proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market would allow licences that are easily available in the market to take precedence over the educational exception. Our new report “Educational Licences in Europe“, covering the analysis of 10 agreements in Finland, France, and the United Kingdom, shows that educational licences contain terms and conditions disadvantageous to schools. Click here for more.
Congress Funds $5 Million Open Textbook Grant Program in 2018 Spending Bill
[Nicole Allen] Update: The FY18 omnibus appropriations bill was signed into law on March 23, 2018, including the $5 million open textbook grant program. In a landmark victory for the Open Education movement, the U.S. Congress has included funding for a $5 million open textbook grant program in the Fiscal Year 2018 omnibus appropriations bill unveiled today. This marks the first major investment by Congress explicitly in open educational resources(OER) as a solution to the high cost of college textbooks, and underscores that course materials are a significant factor in making higher education affordable. Click here for more. Click here for more.
PIJIP Letter to Colombian Government on Art. 14 of the Proposed Copyright Reform
[Peter Jaszi, Michael Carroll and Sean Flynn] … We write today to offer our views on Article 14 of the proposed Copyright reform dealing with limitations and exceptions. Our central concern is that Colombia take advantage of the flexibility in the US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement to adopt a general public interest limitation and exception that can authorize future uses of copyright content that might not be envisioned today but that nevertheless would be fair under the standards of all international copyright laws. Click here for more.
Coalition Calls on US and Korea Trade Negotiators to Prioritize Public Health Over Pharma Corporations in Trade Negotiations
[Knowledge Ecology International] A coalition of 16 advocacy organizations in the United States and Korea asked trade negotiators in the U.S. and Korea to reject the demands of the pharmaceutical industry, protect human rights, and prioritize patient access to medicines in its trade negotiations with Korea. Copy of the letter here. Full press release here.
Project Gutenberg Blocks Access in Germany to All Its Public Domain Books Because of Local Copyright Claim on 18 of Them
[Glyn Moody] Project Gutenberg, which currently offers 56,000 free ebooks, is one of the treasures of the Internet, but it is not as well known as it should be. Started in 1991 by Michael S. Hart, who sadly died in 2011, Project Gutenberg is dedicated to making public domain texts widely available. Over the last 25 years, volunteers have painstakingly entered the text of books that are out of copyright, and released them in a variety of formats. Click here for more.
Estimating Displacement Rates of Copyrighted Content in the EU
[Martin van der Ende et.al.] In 2014, on average 51 per cent of the adults and 72 per cent of the minors in the EU have illegally downloaded or streamed any form of creative content, with higher piracy rates in Poland and Spain than in the other four countries of this study. In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. Click here for more.
Let Canada Be First to Turn an Open Access Research Policy Into a Legal Right to Know
[John Willinsky] Canada’s three federal research funding agencies – the Canadian Institutes of Health ($1 billion annual budget in 2016-17), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada ($1.1 billion), the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada ($380 million) – instituted an intellectual property law exception in 2014. It effects the publication of research and scholarship resulting from grants which they have awarded. What began with CIHR in 2008, evolved six years later into Tri-Agency Policy on Open Access Policy on Publications. Under this policy “grant recipients are required to ensure that any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research are freely accessible within 12 months of publication.” Click here for the full post on slaw.ca.
