Copyright Resource

Columbia University Libraries/Information Service has re-designed and updated it Copyright Advisory Office. From the site:

The Copyright Advisory Office of Columbia University has a central mission to address, in a creative and constructive manner, the relationship between copyright law and the work of the university in order to best promote research, teaching, library services, and community involvement. To that end, this office:

• Addresses issues of fair use, copyright ownership, and publishing arrangements in furtherance of higher education and the advancement of knowledge;
• Provides copyright information and education resources for the university community;
• Supports innovative policies, practices, and contracts to foster the creation, preservation, and accessibility of information resources; and
• Undertakes research and exploration of copyright issues to provide original understandings of the law and its importance.

The site includes an extensive section on Fair Use, including a fair use checklist (PDF).

Fair Use Discussions Continue

This New York Times article Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt discusses the issues around the bloggers' practice of quoting content from other sources. This has usually been considered fair use under current copyright law,

But some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content.

While some of the discussion is focused on loss of revenue, there are interesting points and speculation about the future of fair use, blogging, and copyright. In an information world without physical boundaries, the easy ability to copy and paste, and the difficulty of tracking your words online*, these issues will only continue.

*New services like this one called FairShare are popping up to help content creators better track their work online. (via ReadWriteWeb)

Fair Use?

AP claims copyright infringement--and wants credit & compensation--of the photo Shepard Fairey used in his iconic Obama poster. What do you think--fair use?

Update:

Diane Wallace-Reid from Minneapolis shared this link to an NPR story on the issue.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100301384&sc=emaf

The Tangle of Copyright, Fair Use, and YouTube

Here is an interesting article on the issues of copyright, fair use, and user-generated content. It is a complicated issue, as you can see from the discussion of the various court cases and different perspectives from copyright holders, users, YouTube and other hosts for user-generated content, viewers, and others.

The article seems particularly timely in light of Mr. Rother's Rants and Raves post about his group's video being taken down from YouTube.

Article Citation:
Seidenberg, Steven. "Copyright in the Age of YouTube." ABA Journal Feb 2009 3 Feb 2009 <>.