High-Ranking Web Site Administrator Sentenced in Peer-to-Peer Piracy Crackdown (PDF; 24 KB)

Daniel Dove, 26, formerly of Clintwood, Va., was sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge James P. Jones to 18 months in prison for his role as a high-ranking administrator of a peer-to-peer (P2P) Internet piracy group, Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich announced today. In addition, Dove was ordered to serve three years of supervised release and fined $20,000. A jury found Dove guilty of conspiracy and felony copyright infringement on June 26, 2008.

At trial, evidence was presented that proved Dove was an administrator for EliteTorrents.org, an Internet piracy site that, until May 25, 2005, was a source of infringing copyrighted works, specifically pre-release movies. Elite Torrents used BitTorrent P2P technology to distribute pirated works to thousands of members around the world. Evidence proved Dove was an administrator of a small but crucial group of Elite Torrents members known as “Uploaders,” who were responsible for supplying pirated content to the group. Evidence presented at trial proved that Dove recruited members who had very high-speed Internet connections, usually at least 50 times faster than a typical high-speed residential Internet connection, to become Uploaders. The evidence also showed that Dove operated a high-speed server, which he used to distribute pirated content to the Uploaders.

Dove’s conviction is the eighth resulting from Operation D-Elite, a federal crackdown against the illegal distribution of copyrighted movies, software, games and music over P2P networks employing the BitTorrent file distribution technology.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

Public Interest Groups Tell Copyright Office To Stay Out of Buffer Dispute

The U.S. Copyright Office should allow the courts to decide the crucial issue of whether a temporary copy of a song or other copyrighted work made by a computer must be subject to copyright royalties, public interest and industry groups said today.

The Copyright Office should not try to decide the issue, a group of public interest groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Public Knowledge (PK) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) said in a filing with the Office in response to a proposed rule published July 16. In addition, Consumers Union, Consumer Federation of America, U.S. PIRG, and the Computer & Communications Industry Association also signed onto the pleading.

Source: Center for Democracy and Technology

The complexity of sharing scientific databases

Creative Commons is a clever use of the copyright system intended to make it easier for people who want to, to share their work with others. Jonathan Coulton has used Creative Commons to enable an army of remixers and videomakers to produce promotional materials for his songs and albums. Authors like Dan Gillmor and Cory Doctorow have used Creative Commons to let people download, translate and make audio versions of their books. And Global Voices uses Creative Commons so that blogs and news sites can use our content without asking us for permission.

What about scientists?

That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relavence within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world.

Under US law, pretty much anything you write down is copyrighted. Scrawl an original note on a napkin and it’s protected until 70 years after your death. Facts, however, are another matter - they can’t be copyrighted. So while trivial but creative scribblings are copyrighted, unless you choose to release them into the public domain, the information painstakingly discovered about the human genome - DNA sequences, for instance - aren’t. But the containers they’re stored in - the databases they’re held in - can be copyrighted.

If I sound confused about this stuff, that’s because I am. And so were the folks at Science Commons, the project that spun off from Creative Commons to focus on open publishing of scientific information. For a couple of years, they offered a wonderfully complex FAQ on applying Creative Commons licenses to databases - the first question read “Can a Creative Commons license be applied to a database?” After a six paragraph answer to that question, the third question read, “So, a Creative Commons license can be applied to a database?”

The approach Science Commons is taking now is a different one - they’re now recommending use of a protocol that specifies how data can be made Open Access - the FAQ on that protocol explains that the complexities of asking scientists to release their data under Creative Commons licenses was so severe that Science Commons has ended up advocating for data to be released public domain, under the auspices of their protocol, instead.

Source: My heart’s in Accra (Ethan Zuckerman’s blog)

From the article:

The biggest challenge of all in the British Library’s vast digitisation programme has been copyright clearance, as Tracey Caldwell explains

Source: IWR

From the news release:

After more than a year of intensive study, the U.S. Copyright Office issued its report on whether to maintain, modify or eliminate Sections 111, 119 and 122 of the Copyright Act. It will serve as the basis for discussion for possible changes to the statutory licenses.

An electronic version of the report will be available under the “Hot Topics” section on the Copyright Office Web site at www.copyright.gov/.

From the announcement:

Handling about 550,000 copyright claims annually, the U.S. Copyright Office in the Library of Congress is making it much easier for the public to register and protect its collective creativity. On July 1, the Copyright Office will enter the next phase in the implementation of its multi-year business process re-engineering effort to modernize operations from a paper-based to a Web-based processing environment.

Source: Copyright Office, Library of Congress

The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs

The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.

The A.P.’s effort to impose some guidelines on the free-wheeling blogosphere, where extensive quoting and even copying of entire news articles is common, may offer a prominent definition of the important but vague doctrine of “fair use,” which holds that copyright owners cannot ban others from using small bits of their works under some circumstances. For example, a book reviewer is allowed to quote passages from the work without permission from the publisher.

Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

On Saturday, The A.P. retreated. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of The A.P., said in an interview that the news organization had decided that its letter to the Drudge Retort was “heavy-handed” and that The A.P. was going to rethink its policies toward bloggers.

Source: New York Times

Keeping Within the Law (KWtL): minimize your risk of legal infringement

A new copyright and information law website by Paul Pedley.

Source: CILIP Website

A new version (Version 2) of the excellent Google Book Search Bibliography is now online.

This bibliography presents selected English-language articles and other works that are useful in understanding Google Book Search. It primarily focuses on the evolution of Google Book Search and the legal, library, and social issues associated with it. Where possible, links are provided to works that are freely available on the Internet, including e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Source: Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital Scholarship

+ Twitter’s controversy over Terms of Service (via Ars Tecnica)
Thanks, Pete W.

+ Belgian Copyright Group Wants Up To EUR49 Million Damages From Google (via Dow Jones)

+ YouTube suit called threat to online communication (via AP)

A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube’s ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, YouTube owner Google Inc. said.

See Also: The Big Viacom Sues GOOG & YouTube Roundup (via Search Engine Land)

+ Google’s Geek Fest (via Forbes)

From the article:

Laura N. Gassaway, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who thinks a lawsuit against Georgia State University’s electronic reserve system has implications for other colleges.

Source: Wired Campus

Psst! It’s no secret: copying is plagiarism

“It is extremely easy for students to make the mistake of cutting and pasting from the Internet,” said Catharine O’Connell, vice president for academic affairs and academic dean at Defiance College. “In the old days, when one had to type in text from a source, there wasn’t as much temptation, and it would have been very difficult to use large sections of a source without realizing it. Now, it is so easy to cut and paste that students can end up using large sections of someone else’s work almost before they know it.”

In the freshmen courses, first-year seminar and global civilization, academic honesty and plagiarism are addressed.

“Many faculty members revisit the topic in other classes, but we believe it is important to have the conversation about plagiarism right at the beginning of a student’s career at DC,” stated O’Connell.

Source: Crescent-News.com

From the article:

With stories surfacing on news channels regularly about lost or stolen data or the ability to recover data from discarded or resold computers and their hard drives, Computerworld decided to look at some cheap methods of removing that sensitive data from your hard drive permanently. And, what better place to look than YouTube?

Source: Computerworld

USPTO Introduces New Intellectual Property Curriculum

The Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced the launch of a new, dynamic curriculum that inspires students to be creative and teaches them about the value of patents, trademarks, and copyrights, as well as the importance of respecting other’s intellectual property. The i-©®eaTM curriculum, developed by the USPTO in collaboration with i-SAFE—a leader in Internet safety education—is an interactive and age appropriate unit of instruction designed for upper-elementary, middle, and high school students.
…
The i-©®ea TM curriculum is a valuable resource for teachers to introduce students to the inventive process through cross-curricular activities, inspirational stories of young inventors, and practical hands-on patent and trademark searching on the Internet. Students apply their knowledge and skills to real life experiences and view themselves as creative individuals. In turn, young people, their parents, and their teachers gain an appreciation of the contributions inventors and artists make to our way of life.

i-SAFE trains and certifies educators to teach the i-©®eaTM curriculum through the i-LEARN Online video training modules (http://ilearn.isafe.org). The i-©®ea TM curriculum is the latest addition to the growing i-SAFE library of more than175 standards-based lesson plans offered at no charge and taught in classrooms in all 50 states. For more details on the i-©®eaTM curriculum, see: www.isafe.org/icreatm.

These news notes are organized by the strategic directions identified in the ARL Strategic Plan: Scholarly Communication; Public Policies Affecting Research Libraries; and Library Roles in Research, Teaching, and Learning. In addition, there is an initial section for Governance and Membership Activities and complementary sections on Diversity, Professional Workforce, and Leadership Development; Library Statistics and Assessment; and Other Items of Interest to ARL Directors

Source: ARL