Towards Better Sharing of Cultural Heritage a Call to Action to Policymakers
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Category Archives: oa.copyfraud
Another example of how the playing field is tilted in favour of copyright owners – Walled Culture
“Assuming the details of this case are confirmed during the trial, they show how the digital copyright system takes on trust claims to ownership, if made in the right way – in this case, through an established royalty management firm. That trust contrasts strongly with a widespread reluctance by companies to recognise that people may be able to draw on copyright exceptions when they make copies, and a readiness to assume that it must be an infringement. It’s another example of how the playing field is tilted strongly in favour of copyright owners, and against ordinary citizens.”
The Neues Museum is claiming copyright over 3D-printing files of the Nefertiti bust.
“The museum never quite clarified its relation to the scans. But earlier this week, Wenman released the files he received from the museum online for anyone to download. The 3D digital version is a perfect replica of the original 3,000-year-old bust, with one exception. The Neues Museum etched a cop..yright license into the bottom of the bust itself, claiming the authority to restrict how people might use the file. The museum was trying to pretend that it owned a copyright in the scan of a 3,000-year-old sculpture created 3,000 miles away….
While the copyright status of 3D scans of public domain works is currently more complex in the EU, Article 14 of the recently passed Copyright Directive is explicitly designed to clarify that digital versions of public domain works cannot be protected by copyright. …
The most important part is that adding these restrictions runs counter to the entire mission of museums. Museums do not hold our shared cultural heritage so that they can become gatekeepers. They hold our shared cultural heritage as stewards in order to make sure we have access to our collective history. Etching scary legal words in the bottom of a work in your collection in the hopes of scaring people away from engaging with it is the opposite of that.”
Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain
It has come to the attention of Creative Commons that there is an increased use of CC licenses by cultural heritage institutions on photographic reproductions and 3D scans of objects such as sculptures, busts, engravings, and inscriptions, among others, that are indisputably in the public domain worldwide. A recent example is the 3000-year-old Nefertiti bust … Read More “Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain”
The post Reproductions of Public Domain Works Should Remain in the Public Domain appeared first on Creative Commons.
The Mueller Report Can’t Be Copyrighted, Is Flagged by Copyright Bots Anyway | Electronic Frontier Foundation
“Did you know that anything created by federal government employees, under American law, can’t be copyrighted? They go right into the public domain. That means it’s impossible for there to be any copyright infringement on, say, a report by the Special Counsel on the investigation into the President and his presidential campaign. But the copyright-enforcement bots on Scribd have been busy taking down copies of the Mueller report all the same….”
Public Domain Manifesto
” The following principles are essential to preserve a meaningful understanding of the Public Domain and to ensure that the Public Domain continues to function in the technological environment of the networked information society. With regard to the structural Public Domain these are as follows:
- The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception. Since copyright protection is granted only with respect to original forms of expression, the vast majority of data, information and ideas produced worldwide at any given time belongs to the Public Domain. In addition to information that is not eligible for protection, the Public Domain is enlarged every year by works whose term of protection expires. The combined application of the requirements for protection and the limited duration of the copyright protection contribute to the wealth of the Public Domain so as to ensure access to our shared culture and knowledge.
- Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. From neither the perspective of the author nor the general public do any valid arguments exist (whether historical, economic, social or otherwise) in support of an exceedingly long term of copyright protection. While the author should be able to reap the fruits of his intellectual labour, the general public should not be deprived for an overly long period of time of the benefits of freely using those works.
- What is in the Public Domain must remain in the Public Domain. Exclusive control over Public Domain works must not be reestablished by claiming exclusive rights in technical reproductions of the works, or using technical protection measures to limit access to technical reproductions of such works.
- The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-)use, copy and modify such work. The Public Domain status of a work does not necessarily mean that it must be made accessible to the public. The owners of physical works that are in the Public Domain are free to restrict access to such works. However once access to a work has been granted then there ought not be legal restrictions on the re-use, modification or reproduction of these works.
- Contracts or technical protection measures that restrict access to and re-use of Public Domain works must not be enforced. The Public Domain status of a work guarantees the right to re-use, modify and reproduce. This also includes user prerogatives arising from exceptions and limitations, fair use and fair dealing, ensuring that these cannot be limited by contractual or technological means….”
Paywall Watch
“Paywall Watch is a website dedicated to monitoring and documenting notable problems at academic publishers.
TL;DR we are like Retraction Watch, but we focus on incompetent errors made by academic publishers.
Unlike most multi-billion dollar industries there is virtually no regulation in the academic publishing market. Publishers can get away with seemingly anything. Poor service, poor ethics, and outrageous prices are a common feature of the market. We hope the aggregation of content on this website will empower funders, authors, readers, subscribers, research institutes and libraries to make better choices in future when it comes to entrusting scholarly research outputs with digital service providers.
Specific types of incompetence to be documented here include:
- Paywalled open access articles (whereby the original publisher should be making the article open access, but instead is observed to be charging people to use or read the article)
- CopyWrong (whereby a publisher incorrectly claims copyrights that they do not have)
- Other Significant Errors in Service Provision (e.g. losing the full text of articles, losing supplementary data, missing article content such as mathematical equations or figure images)…”
Chris Hartgerink’s open letter to the CEO and Directors of STM
“The matter that is primarily on my mind is that of the Public Domain. Copyright legislation is quite messy due to the various legislative changes that have happened in the last century, as I am sure you are aware. This potentially makes it difficult to pinpoint which works are copyrighted and for which works copyright has expired. Nonetheless, copyright on some works has clearly expired. Examples of such works are those that predate the Berne convention by several decades and whose copyright expired after approximately thirty years depending on the legislative area. This would mean that most works before 1850 are clearly in the Public Domain. I was surprised that there are still many works whose copyright has expired but are still available under your member publishers with an explicit assertion of copyright (e.g., Elsevier; I focused on scholarly publishers). An example is an index page from 1823 that is being sold for $35.95 [1]. I find this sort of behavior quite bewildering, and a touch ironic, given that Elsevier and others have a particularly strong stance when it comes to enforcing their own copyright, as emphasized in the ongoing legal battle against Sci-Hub and LibGen. My questions are thus as follows: 1. Do you condone or condemn illicit claims of copyright by your member organizations? 2. Do you view the asserted copyright as in [1] and [2] valid? 3. Do you believe it is ethically responsible to sell scholarly works whose copyright has expired at the same price as new, copyrighted scholarly works? 4. Is it your intention to put the works, whose copyright has expired, truly in the Public Domain to accord with your mission statement of “creating and supporting the means for disseminating this knowledge”? 5. What steps will STM take to avoid this sort of mis-claim of copyright in the future, if it believes it to be incorrect? …”
False claims of copyright and STM | Chris H.J. Hartgerink’s Notebook
“Recently, I have become interested in the issue of false claims of copyright (i.e., copyfraud) in publishing. I just wrote to the publisher’s association (STM) to ask them what their perspective is on copyfraud is and whether they condone such behavior by their member associations. Read my letter here. I will update this blog when I get a response….”
Where’s The Fair Use? – Nostalgia Critic – YouTube
“No more staying silent. The time has come to start some dialogue about Fair Use and how it’s constantly being trampled on via the YouTube claim and take down system.”
Where’s The Fair Use? – Nostalgia Critic – YouTube
“No more staying silent. The time has come to start some dialogue about Fair Use and how it’s constantly being trampled on via the YouTube claim and take down system.”