The synthesis of opposing ideas, coupled with the ability to source knowledge freely leads to an infinite number of new combinations, and growth can become exponential.

50–70 years for a journal article

Dear teacher: copyright concerns you

Encourage researchers not to transfer the copyright on their research outputs before publication.

The prohibition on reporting bugs in systems with DRM makes those bugs last longer, and get exploited harder before they're patched. Last summer, the US Copyright Office collected evidence about DRM interfering with reporting bugs in tractors, cars, medical implants, and critical national infrastructure.

DRM exists to stop users from doing things they want to do and to stop innovative companies from helping users do things they want to do -- or would want to do, if they had the option. Your cable box, for example, will be designed to stop you from recording your favorite shows for long-term storage and viewing on the go.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the nonprofit body that maintains the Web's core standards, made a terrible mistake in 2013: they decided to add DRM

But, I still worry that some of the specific actions used to paint this picture are (1) potentially taken out of context, (2) are presented in a way that likely misrepresents the actual situation and (3) could come back to haunt other online services who are providing perfectly legitimate services.

We feel the pernicious practical effects of lengthy copyright terms every day. For example, a study last year of books on Amazon showed that books published after the critical public domain cut-off date of 1923 are available at a dramatically lower rate than books from even an entire century before. The result is a "missing 20th century" in the history of books.

sensible copyright policies face huge practical barriers, in large part because few are willing to challenge the default assumption of copyright law that every time a copy is made the rightsholder's permission is required. That assumption makes no sense in the digital age, but it's hugely difficult to dislodge

Of course, if you take my idea and use it to make money then my business will suffer and I will have less incentive to have ideas in the future. We need a period of protection for ideas to ensure that creators keep coming up with them because they are vital to our culture. It is, more than anything, part of what makes use human. But for exactly that reason protection periods should also be kept as short as possible. Once that period has expired, others should be free to reuse, rethink and remix those concepts and incorporate them into their own ideas.

News outlets have seen their content atomized and readers can now get their news from sites that bring together links to articles from a range of sources. Some providers argue that these aggregators should pay for the privilege of linking to them.

However, a German museum argues that photographs of public domain artworks don't fall under public domain license, because the photographs themselves fall under normal copyright law.

legal changes often lead to negative outcomes. New laws can limit use, introduce new payments or make open licensing incompatible with the given legal system. In such cases, OER advocates need to take a stance in defense of the existing rules.

not all of the resources needed for education will be openly licensed — for example, modern education requires use of cultural resources that are in copyright and will never be openly licensed. We therefore need good and balanced rules allowing educators acting in the public interest to use these resources.

the development of OER provides proof for the need of strong user rights in education. By looking at effects of successful OER projects we can describe a future educational reality, in which institutions, educators, and students benefit from a more liberal copyright law. Part of the success of Wikipedia as an education tool is the fact that no one accessing the site, or copying it for students, needs to worry: “Is this legal?”

Remixing books is popular on services like Wattpad where users write fanfiction inspired by books, celebrities, movies, etc. From a legal perspective, some fanfiction could be seen as copyright or trademark infringement. From a business perspective, the book industry would be smart to learn from the PC gaming business. Instead of fighting over pieces of a shrinking pie, try to grow the pie by getting more people to read and write books.

the virulent carrier of the patriarchal, colonial, canonical, proprietary, hierarchical and authoritarian values of a past that is no longer with us.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress issues new rules on Digital Millennium Copyright Act exemptions. Acting Librarian David Mao, in an order (PDF) released Tuesday, authorized the public to tinker with software in vehicles for "good faith security research" and for "lawful modification." The decision comes in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal, in which the German automaker baked bogus code into its software that enabled the automaker's diesel vehicles to reduce pollutants below acceptable levels during emissions tests.

beyond any tool, company, or institution.

required by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

public knowledge

software that searches web pages and images were so transformative as to be fair use.

Both of these works, she says, specifically sought a lawsuit from the estate of Margaret Mitchell.

Co nsequently, circumvention of the above TPMs for purposes of “per sonalization, modification, or other improv ement” is likely to encourage the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, and use of copyrighted software and content.

Anna von Veh

The dissidents of intellectual property have had a rich history among avant-garde artists, zine producers, radical musicians, and the subcultural fringe. Today the fight against intellectual property is being led by lawyers, professors and members of government. Not only is the social strata of the leading players very different, which in itself might not be such an important detail, but the framework of the struggle against intellectual property has completely changed. Before law professors like Lawrence Lessig became interested in IP, the discourse among dissidents was against any ownership of the commons, intellectual or physical. Now center stage is occupied by supporters of property and economic privilege. The argument is no longer that the author is a fiction and that property is theft, but that intellectual property law needs to be restrained and reformed because it now infringes upon the rights of creators.

Romanticism was born as a contradictory response to these developments. It was an opposition to capitalism, but one expressed through the language of private property and the assumptions inherited from the philosophical discourse that legitimated capitalism’s mode of production. Romanticism denounced the alienation and loss of independence spawned by industrial production and market relations, and portrayed the artist in heroic opposition to the drive for profit.

Ideas are viral, they couple with other ideas, change shape, and migrate into unfamiliar territories. The intellectual property regime restricts the promiscuity of ideas and traps them in artificial enclosures, extracting exclusive benefits from their ownership and control. Intellectual property is fraud - a legal privilege to falsely represent oneself as the sole “owner” of an idea, expression or technique and to charge a tax to all who want to perceive, express or apply this “property” in their own production. It is not plagiarism that dispossesses an “owner” of the use of an idea; it is intellectual property, backed by the invasive violence of the state, that dispossesses everyone else from using their common culture. The basis for this dispossession is the legal fiction of the author as a sovereign individual who creates original works out of the wellspring of his imagination and thus has a natural and exclusive right to ownership. Foucault unmasked authorship as a functional principle that impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of knowledge. The author-function represents a form of despotism over the proliferation of ideas. The effects of this despotism, and of the system of intellectual property that it shelters and preserves, is that it robs us of our cultural memory, censors our words, and chains our imagination to the law.

And yet artists continue to be flattered by their association with this myth of the creative genius, turning a blind eye to how it is used to justify their exploitation and expand the privilege of the property owning elite. Copyright pits author against author in a war of competition for originality – its effects are not only economic, it also naturalizes a certain process of knowledge production, delegitimates the notion of a common culture, and cripples social relations. Artists are not encouraged to share their thoughts, expressions and works or to contribute to a common pool of creativity. Instead, they jealously guard their “property” from others, who they view as potential competitors, spies and thieves lying in wait to snatch and defile their original ideas. This is a vision of the art world created in capitalism’s own image, whose ultimate aim is to make it possible for corporations to appropriate the alienated products of its intellectual workers.

a widespread consensus that copyright has been perverted into a tool that benefits corporations rather than the authors for whom it was originally intended. But no such golden age of copyright exists. Copyright has always been a legal tool that coupled texts to the names of authors in order to transform ideas into commodities and turn a profit for the owners of capital.

The fourth of the theories is as yet the least influential but seems to be gaining strength. Its key ideas are that human nature causes people to flourish more under some conditions than under others, and that social and political institutions should be organized to facilitate that flourishing. What, more specifically, are the conditions or “functionings” that enable people to flourish?

On one hand, there are infinite ideas, and so the taking of one idea as private property clearly leaves “enough,” and debatably “as good” for others (Locke, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 8   1690, Chap. V, Sect. 27).

Unlike in copyright law, where derivative works require authorization, new inventions can incorporate prior inventions wit hout permission — in these cases, the patents are independent of each other (the patent of one inventor does not give him or her any rights over the patent of the other inventor).

U.S. intellectual property law originates (as law) from the Constitution: Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution makes copyright and patent law possible (“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: POLICY FOR INNOVATION 4   respective Writings and Discoveries”) ,

First, the popularization of the Internet upset the copyright paradigm and led to vigorous public and governmental lobbying by copyright holders in the face of rampant infringem ent.

Keywords : anticommons, copyright, intellectual property, Lockean Proviso, patent, property rights, state of nature, trademark, utilitarian theory

National governments are also weighing in on the issue. The UK government aims this April to make text-mining for non-commercial purposes exempt from copyright, allowing academics to mine any content they have paid for.

“Our plan is just to wait for the copyright exemption to come into law in the United Kingdom so we can do our own content-mining our own way, on our own platform, with our own tools,” says Mounce. “Our project plans to mine Elsevier’s content, but we neither want nor need the restricted service they are announcing here.”

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES _________________ No. 11 – 697

These rights are quali- fied, however, by the application of various limitations set forth in the next several sections of the Act, §§107 through 122. Those sections, typically entitled “Limitations on exclusive rights,” include, for example, the principle of “fair use” (§107), permission for limited library archival reproduction, (§108), and the doctrine at issue here, the “first sale” doctrine (§109)

Section 106 of the Copyright Act grants “the owner of copyright under this title” certain “exclusive rights,” including the right “to distribute copies . . . of the copy- righted work to th e public by sale or other transfer of ownership.” 17 U. S. C. §106(3)

i t i s b e y o n d d i s p u t e t h a t c o m p i l a t i o n s o f f a c t s a r e w i t h i n t h e s u b j e c t m a t t e r o f c o p y r i g h t . C o m p i l a t i o n s w e r e e x p r e s s l y m e n t i o n e d i n t h e C o p y r i g h t A c t o f 1 9 0 9 , a n d a g a i n i n t h e C o p y r i g h t A c t o f 1 9 7 6

T h i s c a s e r e q u i r e s u s t o c l a r i f y t h e e x t e n t o f c o p y r i g h t p r o t e c t i o n a v a i l a b l e t o t e l e p h o n e d i r e c t o r y w h i t e p a g e s

Alexander v. Haley, 460 F.Supp. 40 (S.D.N.Y. 1978)

your use of the Website will not infringe or misappropriate the intellectual property rights of any third party

The copyright extension Clinton signed will expire in five years. Copyright holders like the Disney Corp. and the Gershwin estate have a strong incentive to try to extend copyright extension yet further into the future. But with the emergence of the Internet as a political organizing tool, opponents of copyright extension will be much better prepared. The question for the coming legislative battle on copyright is who will prevail: those who would profit from continuing to lock up the great works of the 20th century, or those who believe Bugs Bunny should be as freely available for reuse as Little Red Riding Hood.