I’ve become a fan of YouTube, even following the whole LG15 controversy. Yeah, I know. Still, every once in a while I run across something worth smiling about. Here’s one from Weird Al that you should all watch: a commentary on copyright. Very sweet.

I’ve been thinking about the Eyes on the Prize distribution some more. I’d called it “stealing” and “clearly illegal” in my prior post and comments (since edited). That was inconsiderate. Let’s consider the case more carefully. The claim made by Downhill Battle is that copying Eyes on the Prize for the purpose of showing it at screenings on 2/8 is fair use. Fair use must be evaluated by four factors, lets look at the four factors with regard to this case. Remember, I am not a lawyer. I am not even an expert in copyright. I’m just doing this exercise to help with my own thinking. Your milage may vary!

In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;In this case the copies are being made for showing during Black History Month and to illuminate the tensions between copyright and the transmission of culture. As long as these copies are used only for such non-profit educational purposes, I think there is likely to be a reasonable for fair use on this factor.Note that the use is not “transformational”. While the screenings at which the documentary is presented may create a critical context that changes its role (a conversation about copyright in addition to the lessons of civil rights), this new context does not seem to me to really transform the work. As a result, I would not anticipate a slam-dunk case for fair use on the first factor.

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

Eyes on the Prize is a television miniseries documentary. The courts seem to treat fact-based material more generously w/r/t fair use than fictional material. This is clearly factual material. On the other hand I think visual material, like TV or film, tend to get more protection than some printed works. This may be a wash or it may lean very slightly toward fair use.

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

Well, we are being asked to copy the whole show. In fact, each episode of the show is probably to be considered a complete work. I think this factor clearly tilts against fair use.

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Now this gets interesting. Since the producers and PBS are no longer selling copies of the series, is there a market at all? They claim to be working on re-securing the rights they need to distribute the work, and if they succeed there should be a decent market for the DVD or other distribution. Even so, does the mp4 distribution really take away from that market potential? I think a case could be made that this distribution and the publicity and screenings surrounding it will increase the market for this series, should it ever be distributed officially again. I know I am now interested in buying a copy, when I’d forgotten about the series before all this. In my mind this factor leans toward fair use.Hm. Factors (1) and (4) tilt toward fair use, factor (3) tilts against fair use, factor (2) may be a wash, but slightly toward fair use in my estimation. That adds up, in my view, to fair use! Downhill Battle has a point.Now, this is not a legal ruling in any sense, and you have to do you own analysis of the factors before making your own decision. And document your own decision in case you are ever called to defend it in a court.

An interesting day of copyright today. Kenneth Crews is with us in Minnesota and gave a great workshop for our staff today (faculty get a taste tomorrow). And when I got home I found Mary excited about a project at Downhill Battle to encourage people to copy Eyes on the Prize. This classic documentary about the civil rights movement of the 1960’s is not in legal distribution because the rights granted for the clips used have expired and new rights have not been cleared yet by the production company. Civil disobedience over copyright issues. Interesting times.So it may be a bit much to ask the Libraries to get on the criminal side of a copyright issue, but what if Libraries around the country (and ours in particular) took part in the Downhill Battle 2/8 Black History Month event to host public showings of episodes of the documentary? Of course, we would not show the illegally downloaded versions from the net, but the legal copies from our collections. The discussion fostered, though, could still be about the difficulty of preserving critical pieces of culture in an era of tough copyright enforcement.

It can be less than trivial to find you way into the Google print environment, since you need to know the id numbers of actual books.I just found this blog post from a month ago that provides links to several titles so that you can explore a bit. Just in case that site goes away, here is one out of copyright work and one still in copyright example.

Michael Lesk has made the US copyright renewal registry (1923-1963) searchable. This is a big help in identifying book titles which may be out of copyright even though they were published between 1923 & 1964.

A nice mainstream article on the many uses of Creative Commons licenses is available at Business2.0. If you don’t know what the Creative Commons is, you should. This article may make for a gentle intro alongside real-life stories of how it is making a difference. [Source: OAN]

Brewster Kahle gave the talk at the closing plenary of the CNI Spring Task Force meeting. Brewster just keeps on doing, he never seems to be daunted by the scope of large tasks. The amazing thing is that it works! He set out to capture the web, and the Internet Archive (IA) does that better than any other entity. He called on us to “put the best we have to offer within the reach of our children.” Within reach, to Brewster (and to our children) means “on the web.” He then walked us through a back-of-the-napkin calculation of what it would take, concluding that the goal is within reach of us today and within our budgets to boot. Are we ready to answer the call?

Books. The Library of Congress = 20M volumes = 26TB = $60,000 disk space. At 2 hours/book (without destroying the books) this is doable. Output back to book form costs $1/book. This print-on-demand solution is being demonstrated today by the BookMobile the Internet Archive has put on the streets not just of the USA, but also India, Egypt, and most recently rural Uganda.

Audio. 2M “saleable objects” of audio exist, but much of it behind IP regs that make it hard to deal with. The IA approached the “taper” community of people who have taken advantage of performance oriented rock bands who followed the Grateful Dead’s lead into allowing fans to tape their music and exchange it for non-commercial use. “How would you like infinite bandwidth and infinite storage for free?” the IA asked the tapers. Guess what? They love the idea. 500 rock bands have given the IA permission to archive this material and share it for free. The tapers have already produced 10-20TB of concerts available on the IA.

Moving Images. Don’t just consider the 100-200,000 mainstream films (half of them from India). Consider the 2M films created in the 20th century that document daily life. Some of these may be in your very own basement. One hour of film costs about $100 to convert. One hour of video costs only $15. The IA is also now capturing 20 channels of video from around the world 24/7 for about $500,000. It is estimated there may be about 400 channels around the world.Software. The IA has received a DMCA exception to circumvent copy protection for the purpose of ripping some of the 50,000 software packages that exist to date. They are only allowed to rip titles from no-longer-supported operating systems.Web. The IA now captures 20TB/month of web content. The WayBackMachine holds over 30B (yes, billion) pages from 50M sites on 15M hosts. Anna Patterson’s search engine based on this corpus searches 4 times the number of sites covered by Google.

The Internet Archive does all this on a budget of about $4M or $5M each year. I don’t know about you, but this leaves me breathless.In order to preserve this growing corpus (libraries, Brewster notes, traditionally burn eventually) the IA seeks out partners around the world who can host copies of the data. The more different they are from the US the better. Right now a copy is held at the new library in Alexandria and negotiations are under way with a northern european country. Brewster estimates that the resources needed to maintain a mirror of IA are a PB of disk (that’s petabyte), a GB of bandwidth, and $100M to set up an appropriate endowment for continued operation.

But if the “Universal Access to All Human Knowledge” goal articulated by Raj Ready of the Million Book Project is too vast, and even the “All Published Knowledge Available to the Kid in Uganda” is a bit far out, how about something easy, asks Brewster. What if we just tried to attack what we already have every right to collect? Let’s go for “Public Access to the Public Domain.”In the USA the public domain is pre-1923 publications. In fact, Brewster points out, with the aid of Mike Klezman’s (?) recently completed electronic version of the copyright registry, it is now easy to find out which material from 1923-1964 did not have their copyright renewed and are now also in the public domain. Let’s go get this material! His proposal: give the IA a book and $10 and the IA will return to you the book unharmed plus a digital copy. Will we accept the offer? Oh, and by the way, the IA is also happy to accept video and $15/hour for the conversion of that to digital format. Oh, and did I mention that the IA will also host the digital documents on their servers “forever”?

I think we should take Brewster up on this offer. How much material do we have in the University of Minnesota collections which we could part with for a bit to let the IA digitize and store it? We should seriously consider a project to pump this material and the limited dollars required to the IA as fast as we can. This is a crazy idea at a crazy price point, let’s try to sink Brewster under our enthusiastic response! The great thing is, we probably won’t, he has not sunk yet.P.S. Brewster also tossed off an idea about how to archive blogs in response to a question. His thought was that we should be able to subscribe to blog RSS feeds and simply archive everything we see announced via that mechanism. I wonder if we could auto-harvest RSS from UThink.

A group funded by the Mellon Foundation is trying to define the bounds of interaction between course management systems (CMS) and repositories. Their report should be available on the DLF web site by the end of May. In today’s presentation to CNI they made three fundamental points: (1) users will be getting to repository content through a broad set of “course management” tools that extend well beyond CMS into PowerPoint, Weblogs, Citation Managers and the like; (2) repositories need to attend to a Checklist of requirements and desirables in order to interoperate with this layer of tools; and (3) the process used to build course content can be expressed as “Gather-Create-Share”.This “Gather-Create-Share” seems like a weak echo of Apple’s “Rip, Mix, and Burn” campaign a few years ago. It is also the process that Lessig warns us is under threat given the intellectual property regime our country is putting into force. The session really didn’t touch on the impediments that copyright puts in the way of the “Gather” step, but I was told that IP issues will be part of the Checklist when the group reports out to the DLF.Another mention of Chandler and its higher-ed alter-ego Westwood, this is something I should pay some attention to. Chandler is an open source personal information management tool under development.

Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, was published with a Creative Commons license with allows for derivative works. The result has been an amazing flurry of derivatives, including an audio version launched by AKMA. Does this demonstrate in any way a relationship between freeing content and creativity? Are we well served by dozens of versions of Lessig’s work? Are we diminishing his own incentive to create?