The Laboratorium | Recent Comments

Inside the Georgia State Opinion

2012-05-21T21:04:12Z

I don’t understand how the judge can disavow the old guidelines(which I concur with), while creating a new one of her own. I feel a little sick over this ruling. GSU and education in general seems to have won, but I don’t think fair use, in all its subtlety, has really been worked out. You are astute in concluding that the real winner could be CCC. Aren’t institutions in for a tidal wave of new digital versions, which has the potential to trump fair use even further?

Inside the Georgia State Opinion

2012-05-17T15:23:45Z

Thanks for the very helpful analysis. I am curious about whether section 110 of the act might offer greater protection to faculty in cases where fair use may not be enough. It seems that faculty have a choice on whether to post online content through their own course management system, or hand it off to the library for inclusion in e-reserves. I know the Georgia State case did not address section 110, but I am grappling with the intersection of fair use and section 110.

Inside the Georgia State Opinion

2012-05-14T04:34:30Z

I’d like to point out one other issue that got somewhat submerged in the publishers’ poor recordkeeping: The US offices of two of the three publishers are notorious for treating works as work-for-hire that are outside the statutory eligibility criteria in § 101’s badly-written definition. A book-length work by a single author is not in any of the categories of eligible works… and especially not when the work preexists any agreement to treat it as WFH.

The less said about the insistance of many law journals that articles published in those journals are WFH, even when not commissioned for that journal, the better!

Spam Alert: The Institute for Cultural Diplomacy

2012-05-13T21:27:40Z

Hey, I can’t get off their list either!

Google's Wardriving: A Retrospective

2012-05-09T16:16:18Z

Well, one federal judge has held that Google’s conduct might amount to an illegal interception under the Wiretap Act. That decision is fairly debatable on statutory grounds, and is on appeal, but the point stands: employees acting within the scope of their employment shouldn’t generally commit federal felonies. Milner guessed at what the law says, and, based on the one decision so far in the case, he guessed wrong.

I agree that the substantive privacy harms are slight, compared with cases in which promises are broken or information is exposed. But we also have laws to establish safe buffer zones around privacy risks, and among those laws, the Wiretap Act is one of the most serious.

Google's Wardriving: A Retrospective

2012-05-09T16:00:06Z

Can you say more about what you mean when you say that Milner “made a mistake?” I’m still not convinced there was anything wrong with what Google did. We can see in retrospect that it was a PR blunder, since it forced Google to waste a lot of time explaining a program that sounds bad to a lot of people. But I’m not sure I would have predicted the intensity of the backlash if I’d been in Milner’s shoes.

Do you think what he did was illegal or unethical, or just that he created an unnecessary PR problem for his employer?

The ACTA Debate Gets Ugly

2012-05-07T00:48:14Z

Sorry

Edmond Burke said it better( About property generally)

The ACTA Debate Gets Ugly

2012-05-07T00:46:14Z

James
If Mr Hansen had said that democracy without; a Constitution , rule of law, high courts and separations of powers was not compatible with intellectual property he would be merely unoriginal - Edmond Burke said it better.

GBS: A Timeline

2012-04-27T21:01:35Z

Very usefull timeline for us. Thank you !

GBS: A Timeline

2012-04-26T10:36:04Z

In Authors Guild V. HathiTrust the NFB Intervenors http://bit.ly/JpoECu state on page 8 re: libraries and Section 121:

— In these cases, as Senator Chafee put it on the Senate floor, “groups that produce specialized formats for the blind no longer are required to gain permission from the copyright holder before beginning production.” Footnote 13

However, in Senator Chafee’s actual Senate floor remarks that day, the next 2 sentences state:

— It is based on an agreement that was reached last January between the Association of American Publishers and the National Federation of the Blind. It includes a very narrow definition of those who are eligible to undertake such production.

One might wonder whether such narrow definition includes every library or university disability services office which regularly or on occasion has produced an accessible rendition of copyrighted material.

Me and My (Copyrighted) Shadow

2012-04-19T02:25:44Z

Hi Jim. With all due respect to Jacob and his interesting paper, its focus is on extra-legal systems for protecting magic. The leading academic paper on the subject here actually is my article “Now You Own It, Now You Don’t: Copyright and Related Rights in Magic Productions and Performances,” also publishe in the same collection, a book entitled “Law and Magic: A Collection of Essays.” My article give the history and explores many of the interesting issues around copyright (and in some countries, performers’ rights) in magic. I think your comments are good, for the most part. To play devil’s (or Teller’s) advocate for a moment: it is possible that his “act”, assuming it is original (which I gather it is), is a protectible “pantomime”. As you note there’s no case law (my article explores some interesting early cases dealing with questions of “dramatic” work, and points out some decisions protecting somewhat comparable magic routines in films). The Compendium II defines pantomime as “the art of imitating or acting out situations, characters or some othe revents with gestures and body movement”. There’s some more discussion of that in my article. Teller has a registration of something like a script here, which claims a pantomime, so he may have presumptive validity. If he does have copyright, it would include the right to publicly perform the work, or display the work. Reproducing, distributing and adapting are a little harder to see in this context, although adapting/preparation of a derivative work seems possible (no fixation necessary, at least per the House Report). I suspect this will resolve on other grounds, but it would be great to have a decision, and it could affect a lot of magicians.

On Tenure

2012-04-17T21:56:40Z

congratulations!

On Tenure

2012-04-17T15:54:48Z

Congrats!

On Tenure

2012-04-17T14:53:53Z

Very well said. Congratulations, James!

On Tenure

2012-04-17T10:25:24Z

Congratulations, though tenure will be partly wasted on you. Tenure gives you the freedom to work on things that are either fun or hard, and what could be more fun than Sealand and harder than Google Books?