The Open Access Directory’s wiki lets universities & organizations post & events they’re sponsoring during this Open Access Week. For example, Wayne State University  in Detroit launches Open Access Week @ WSULS with 3 Open Access events this year, held as part of the global initiatives discussions. The first is a lecture given by Molly Kleinman, Special Asst. to the Dean of University of Michigan, on “Copyright in Practice: Fundamentals for Librarians & Other Humans.” This is on Monday Oct. 18, at 1 PM in Wayne State Library’s Kresge Auditorium. Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 19th there’s  a ARL/ARCL Webinar available on ”Broader Library Development on Scholarly Communication – Librarian Training & Development. Thursday Oct. 21st is a workshop on “Scholarly Communications Initiatives @ WSU” is also being held.  This location is just one of many places around the planet where the idea of Open Access publishing will be discussed, promoted and furthered during Open Access Week. What’s available for you to explore the issue as it’s definitely a hot topic for future development? You’ll find links for the wiki & to Jennifer McLennan’s blog on Open Access Week page http://tinyurl.com/2f96u6s & can see what gets discussed in the UK & Europe, in Australia & other places that decide to join in. Hope you enjoy getting absorbed in a subject & the range of opinions that will, no doubt, add much insight for us into how copyright & educational fair use practices are impacted by new trends like this and use of educational information use will grow and evolve in new ways on a greater scale.

Why start with the basics? Isn’t a lot more copyrighted materials getting used without meticulous observance? Yes, but part of our profession gives us a unique role to play in this question, and the basics will prepare you to handle what quickly gets more complicated.  New technological possibilities and how they are first adopted in use may lend to impressions that we’re living in a virtual Wild West situation where ”anything goes.” But that perception - proves false. Even current e-Dodge City landscapes are subject to rules, whether or not they get enforced at all times. As educators and librarians, we use definite standards of practice and policies and answer to the expectations for our profession. We do not put our educational institutions in a risky position, one that could well end up in legal hot water, as services and some impromptu filesharers from Kazaa to BitTorrent risk doing.

Do “fair use” interpretations actually change a lot more quickly in popular use than they do for educational institutions and libraries? Or do users just enthusiastically try the legal limits of use with some practices, and then adapt to the limits later on? You can develop your own views on such questions as you get familiar with the highpoints of copyright law, with educational fair use practices and the concepts of making more material available via open access publishing. You’ll get more details and form your own viewpoints along the way.  Note that the U.S. Copyright Office did make a new change in interpreting exceptions to the Digital Millenium  Copyright Act this summer. I discussed that in a late August post if you want to see it, but I think it helps you more to start out with the basic concept of copyright and fair use exceptions.

You’ll be off to a good start when you ground yourself with an outline of how we’re obligated to honor the law even as we use the exceptions to copyright provided by educational fair use so we can provide access to educational information and to develop literacy.  The bottom line on all the debated practices right now? A lot seems to be debatable about popular social usage, but what risks are incurred with easy acceptance? Look at the legal controversies possible for audio/video filesharers, and see ALA’s position to understand why librarians and educators go low risk despite the popular debates.  (We don’t have to live in an ideal world, but we have immense amounts of materials available, between what can be used via educational fair use and  already in the public domain like on Gutenberg Press, etc. Your professional and personal viewpoints may end up leaning more toward the push for more open access, or for more careful observance of intellectual property ownership, or a mix of the two. So first get some basic concepts of copyright law( which stay about the same back to a foundation set in the American Constitution.) Some details shift but the concept embodied in the law changes much more s-l-o-w-l-y than all the new technological means of communication and sharing resources. Once you’ve jumped into the copyright water, enjoy the swim through peaceful shoals and turbulent currents! Thanks to Deb for her fresh view on this, and she’s still nearby to pitch in although left me to mind the blog on a more regular basis.

1) Late in July, the Library of Congress added new exceptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Now it is legal to bypass Apple Corp’s control over what aps can be used on iPhones. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights non-profit organization, had asked for new exceptions to DMCA to make “jailbreaking” of such electronic devices okay. They want to let phoneowners decide what they wanted to load and use on their phones — without Apple store’s direct permission and sale of their “approved” aps. The Library of Congress also ruled it okay for phone owners to “unlock” phones and use other service carriers if they want. Wonder what that does  to the merry-go-round of contract offers from Verizon, Sprint & AT&T?  Don’t know, but bet the fallout from this change will be interesting. Let’s see what impact this exception to copyright & corporate ownership brings in a rapidly changing elecronics. Will it change  iPhone use and how as Apple adjusts some of its business practices? If you want a more detailed account, check out the July 26, 2010  New York Times article by Jenna Wortham. She quotes a figure from EFF saying this Library of Congress ruling is a “victory” for phone owners. But Wortham does give Apple’s objections & lists problems they say these changes will cause. We’ll have to see on that, but…there was another DMCA copyright exception mentioned!

2) Another new  DMCA exception briefly mentioned at the end of Wortham’s article caught my eye and I wonder if that can have some real impact on educational fair use:  Library of Congress ‘granted  an exception to artists who re-mix copy-righted video content for noncommercial work.’   Okay, for artists, but I read that line about 3 times and kept asking if that can also help for educational uses? What about teachers who awant to use brief remixing to put more media in their lessons using students’ interests? What about librarians also trying to find and use media materials for instructional work?  It seems like this shift must be applicable for our efforts, so I’m sifting blogs and comments to see if this exception can be used for our lessons and possible “re-mixing” of materials. It may be a stretch to instantly label us ‘artists’, but we shouldn’t have to cross many boundaies on this – isn’t teaching an art as well as a profession? And can you think of anything more ‘non-commercial’ than educational  instruction and making educational information and instructional materials more accessible?  Maybe  ’thinking outside the box’ can help with applying this exception?

3) Now for a “golden oldie” of copyright info to refresh the basic groundwork as we enter the back-to-school stampede. The Copyright Office’s “Reproduction of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians”  or Circular 21 is available at  http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circular21.pdf and it’s another quick back-to-school favorite to scan. I’m also on the hunt, looking around for recent charts that show how many copies, downloads, views, uses, etc. are permitted for specific instructional uses. I know the numbers allowed have increased for educational fair use, and will post a link as soon as I can locate some credible sources for us. But of course,  if you have or find something sooner than I do, feel free & share – please add your links here too! This is crunch time to get ready for September, and the more of us sharing resources while getting all into study routines, the better! Oh, & how many times can I legally and ethically hum “Over the Rainbow” to myself while directing lost students to their classes? (Please say as much as I want.)

4) On Gold, Green and other kinds of open access publishing: I’m still trying to digest some of the educational “corrections” that Stevan Harnad sent in response to the post on trends toward more academic “Open Access Publishing.”  He sent a more detailed comment to our “About” page; although we’ve both tried to make that comment public, haven’t been svery uccessful so far. If I can find a way to attach that comment to the post, other readers can see how he distinguishes between kinds of open access publishing too. (So I’ll keep trying ways to copy or paste until it’s visible. He seems very passionate about his views on this subject, and the trend for open access is a path worth exploring. Hopefully it can be explored in academic life without the fireworks we see in the news about Oracle  & Google fighting over open source software.! ) Dr. Harnad can discuss all this in a far more advanced way than than I can hope to as one library staffer. But this trend of open access academic publishing can be of major importance in the academic world, and it can have implications for the students who can’t easily afford the course texts they need as well as tenure-track faculty who need to publish, administrators struggling with budgets while licencing and journal costs soar. Maybe the intensity of discussions between some advocates and academic proponents comes from the stage we are in right now, where more see a need for this project, but there’s not a clear consensus on what form will succeed, become more widely developed and most used in future… I admit that I personally started trying to frame issues and searching for information because I had a few questions. I no doubt have as many gaps in my understanding as the prof claims. At least I’ve had one close exposure: I work in a university which shares its “Digital Commons@WSU” as an on-line library resource at www.lib.wayne.edu. I feel I can be proud of the voluntary self-archiving efforts by some of the faculty here, even if the amount of academic work published here may seem a very modest effort to Dr. Harnad or any of the others who try to formulate ways to launch and fund more large-scale “Gold” Open Access, “Green” or hybrid publishing ventures. No doubt, other institutions will have done as much or more than here, but at least this is a positive step. And some institutions have way more resources to invest in this effort than any one public university can do right now, so someone else may have to shoot for the moon and let those of us close to educational front lines stretch our resources to work on the details of our major and most basic commitments. 

But I hope it can help to follow the discussion and research or touch on the topic when possible. If we learn more from others’ input while the heavyweights discuss various proposals of how to proceed with open access academic publishing, that’s a plus. If more of us can learn and become more knowledgable about the prospects this may offer on the way, it can’t hurt our academic work, can it? And perhaps one or more of these experiments wins support for more formidable publishing plans down the road, eh?… But the main point of discussing educational fair use? I think it’s to make it possible for educators to interest more in the project of lifelong learning, and have accessible resources to whet the learners’ appetite with a taste of educational interest and successful exposure.  So on that note, have good success with your September classes –  and a bit of fun too. Let’s hear it for more educational “Fair Use.”

     It appears that Davis, Shieber and Harnad don’t share the same perspective or ideas about what it means and should be done to develop the healthy growth of new open access scholarly journals in which academic authors can credibly publish their articles and discuss their research. But they each have opinions to share.

     Stevan Harnad is a cognitive scientist at University of Quebec and he responds with comments in Shieber’s blog and posts “Open Access Archivangelism” to his own site at http://openacccess.eprints.org and his main answer seems to be that universities need to to “mandate” that their faculty use open access journals to publish. There are not so many to publish in now but he thinks that a “mandate” will produce them fast. (Quality and character produced by such a mandate may raise a few new questioens, eh?)  Harnad does discuss the expense of “double-dipping” where universities already stretch scarce resourtces for current journal subscriptions and would have to earmark funds to fund open access publishing as well. At least he mentions fear and “publish or perish” pressures in academia which force faculty to worry more about getting work published now rather than consider whether they can find a credible scholarly open access journal available in their field or would have wait for one to start up at some point or wonder how to successfully start one up as well as teach, research, write and publish. Harnad hints at possible impacts on the tenure track pressures to publish in this three-ring circus act and certainly the pressure to publish early and often would be complicated by demands to do it in open access journals when right now, most available scholarly journals require authors to sign author agreements about copyright.  

   Harnad’s objections to COPE seem to be that a much broader institutional effort is neccessary to get the open access journal publishing in gear. He surveys whether academic authors would comply, willingly or reluctantly, to bolster his argument  that it will take an institutional mandate to force a change to OA. It’s a different focus to discuss individual versus institutional efforts.

    Davis has a perspective about scholarly publishing and open access as a fairly new undertaking that will develop out of current efforts by using it as a learning experience. He doesn’t want it judged right now on its accounting successes or failures, which suggests participant universities have lessons to share in their experiences and can involve other universities in COPE along the way. Sounds much more voluntary than that call for a mandate, doesn’t it? Shieber’s chart shows how some participants earmark funds for this despite economic pressured faced by public and private academia today, and the discussion is bound to continue about open acccess publishing  and scholarly communication, how it can develop to handle publishing in new ways. Experiment is a key word here and I suggest we stay tuned and follow where these academic discussions may lead us. If open access publishing develops for scholarly work, it may take our fair use questions to whole new answers and new practices developed in short order! 

   If you have time go check out the blogs I’ve mentioned. Comment or  let me know if you think I got the quist of their views.

2) ARL’s Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resource Coalition posted a call for proposals on July 15th. The proposals they accept would get presented at the 2010 Innovation Fair to be held November 8010, 2010. Go check it out at www.arl.org/sparc/ and I’ll try to pass on any other good info topics that SPARC shares, like their July 23, 2010 post about UNESCO’s commitment to Open Access.

http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher/incomemodels/

http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2842

Alternatives to copyright got proposed in first rush of collaborative efforts in the first decade of the Internet’s digital life. Cyberspace’s ease of communication and speed was seen as optimal for cooperative exchanges that encourage creativity in free, unfettered ways. Has it worked out that way? Not quite but collaborative digital efforts do generate much more free material. So it’s fair to ask if that helps academia deal with all the work involved in using materials with copyright protection? NO is the short answer. Does it give alternatives? Yes, creative commons share-alike licencing was developed and we can use their copyright material as long as the materials created are shared in similar ways (“share and share alike.”) Do educators, librarians or researchers still have to deal with the steps needed to exercise copyright exceptions and test fair use exemptions – steps to assess, obtain permissions and licencing? Short answer: YES. Assessment is still very important. Now there is more work to assess if ease of cut & paste images, quotes or hyperlinks leads down a slippery slope to errors - in multiple media forms.  Using the free material floating on the web? Yes, but better assess more than surface presentation to see if copyright-protected nuggets are involved. I recommend Gretchen McCord’s excellent, detailed explanation of fair use for educational purposes and copyright issues on the web. Her clear tips in Copyright in Cyberspace 2 give the basics. It’s geared to handle crucial things that libraries do: provide Internet access and technology, give library instruction for the web, plus do course reserves that are pertinent to academic libraries. Her essential section on how to write web policy to protect libraries is vital information for professionals, and her Sourcebox is a keeper. If you just start reading her book right now, you’ll make me happy. Why? You can rely on her info to get a sense of the good, bad and ugly involved here: how a “Mickey Mouse or Sonny Bono law”  where copyright is perpetuity minus one day and similar ideas can threaten sensible copyright and fair use practices, so librarians best be involved. I want to raise again, as several sources we cited earlier point out, how quickly copyright and fair use issues surfaced with web’s fast growth. If uncharted web space got promoted as more free, it led to more confusion about what’s acceptable or fair use in a digital  commons. Digital use and its “creativity” brought a new mass of materials, in both very informal or more formal style, in the decade-plus life of public Internet’s Information Age, but remixes of many works that are not yet in the public domain. Blog or Twitter on any topic, in any media or genre, long or short as 140 characters. Is it any wonder that an experimental era saw a rush of intellectual property issues pop up, then morph into new ones even as some practices seemed stopped or resolved?  Copyright or fair issues grow in this petry dish of web confusion faster than computer viruses, so we need to develop more skill to identify and check if materials we want to use are all free, public domain or share-alike licenced, or part free but with yikes!, some copyright or attributable materials mixed into it that take fair use tests or copyright permissions to use. So we have our work to do, more to sort and work to develop the strategies we need to use while more gets ironed out and new issues solved. Like cooking and laundry: new tools and wrinkles appear for same essential work. 

 Why is identifying copyright and what’s fair use more complicated and crucial in the digital commons? New stuff in the honeypot! Why do I raise digital relationships to copyright and fair use here? Because as educators and librarians, we have to deal with it right out of the gate. We do have to handle intellectual property issues with direct questions and straight-forward discussion about policy or community choices. We do it almost before one develops a basic grounding for fair use practice, and we learn to test and evaluate fair use every day after. Although we have others to rely on in our professional life, we are information professionals who have a hands-on role, but most of us aren’t lawyers-in-training. We take responsibility toward upholding fair use for educational purposes, but we’ll need to balance issues and know how to discuss simply or explain our limits. So a background view helps. Some early use of electronic media in Internet infancy was suggested as “free culture”  as a concept of open access is popular, but gets mixed up with “wide-open” access. Some of those practices have played out well, like the Creative Commons licencing. Others ran afoul of intellectual property law, and efforts to rectify problems with new laws like Digital Millenium Copyright Act and TEACH also cause issues. We try to balance and watch if it errs too far one way or the other to endanger library and fair use, or learn to get involved as Hoffman suggests. So please use experts and good source materials, like Hoffman and Rebecca Butler. Use as much of this blog as you find helpful, or as little. It may help us scope out a framework for digital commons issues and develop viewpoints in discussion, answers and better strategy to handle patrons and students. Some of them will expect to download or freeshare whatever they want, although we don’t allow it. Our institutions work hard to put policies in place to uphold law and give us tools to help use correctly. If we face users who say, “Copyright? Huh? Fair use? huh?” we still want to be ready to give them appropriate access and tools. If that’s all you need, get to it. Or if you can stick around, we’ll try to grasp the background of how digital commons’ space was marked as different for sharing info, and get a handle on how it impacts our work with copyright and fair use. Be warned as this info and analysis rambles from one part to another. I appreciate your input, patience in reading and digesting it and any help in working through the ideas that are involved.

Why did digital life get SO complicated on this issue so fast?

Some original visions of a digital and creative commons were utopian –  about an amorphous, unknown web that hadn’t yet been tried, and the new relationshps grew and got promoted in ways that have had to tested in practice. After 15 years of public Internet use, we see that promises of social and communication transformation have already been realized! But some rules, and ways to implement them, are still in flux or be worked out with a process of global acceptance. To craft agreements, a 2010 World Conference on Information Technology this month may help that process. We accept that more agreement about rules will come in time, but certainly not before we get back to the virtual reference desk or out in front of the class. We have to deal clearly and firmly with the expectations we meet today, in the midst of some ambiguities. So it is fair to ask how that that original idea of open exchange to generate lots of new creativity from “open access” has played out so far? Yes. How did popular ideas, the thought-bubbles originally floated around the web, play out in practice for us so far and for our community? Look through a decade plus of practical experiences in the digital commons and assess?  Look simple? It got very complicated very fast! Look at the news of lawsuits over web intellectual property ownership: The New York Times lost a lawsuit and had to pay its writers for their online author rights, Napster sued over its free music download practices, scrutiny of freesharing venues and pirating. How much do we need to know? It depends… but know that our schools and libraries definitely mind the Ps & Qs and rework policies and practicecs to follow ALA Code of Ethics and uphold copyright, and we must too. Academics can run into trouble over something as simple and fair as e-Reserves like Georgia State University did in 2008. So be aware of how crucial it is to know the policies and learning practical safeguards and practices your institution develops to be used. That’s basic. For professional development, it helps to get a historical perspective of how some first views of the digital commons that became popular also skewed acceptance of copyright law. What started out in the public domain included lots of remix of copyright materials and we’ve seen many incidents of people and new start-ups “sort of ignoring” copyright law – until they are checked. A lot is mixed into web that should be cited and credited and professionals try to be meticulous and welcome if any errors are brought to their attention, so we can correct as paart of the process. Trying to just “go with the flow” or make open access all free on the street is not professionally acceptable, although web communication acts more informally, both for instant and asynchronic talk, but we will have rules, so accept and submit to that as an operating rule.  (I worked with a techie in insurance, with a funny Andre screensaver to explain how computers and code rules must and would be observed - it said, “Submit. Resistance is futile. Submit to the code. Resistance is futile- …”  It’s not futile, but part of the social conversation that creates the rules for our organizations’ interpretation. Professionals play a role in that conversation at work, so we have a social role and I’ll say it upfront: the digital commons may make it seem even more complicated, in mixing copyright-protected references in “public domain” work posted to digital commons’ venues. It may make IDing copyright issues more work as it increases public domain work of mixed quality and credibility, and we have to review it. If we submit to same assessment of whether materials are in the public domain, or if we see it’s copyrighted materials, then we use the 4 basic tests of fair use for educational purposes that will apply. We do our due diligence for copyright and fair use, adjusting for more free materials in the public domain and handling remix issues may get simpler. Oh, and if online items we use have a “Creative Commons” licence and handle their copyright issues credibly, we still give credit to acknowledge their gifts for our community’s free use.  End of intro.      

More if you want a fuller picture, with historical perspective on “free culture” in the digital commons

But if you’re interested enough to want to know how the water got so turbulent and murky in the digital commons, let me introduce the topic a bit or go look at some of the early theoretical discussions that promised of a new future lay in developing a new digital commons for society.  Some of this was linked to how having instant and widespread means of communication would break down old hierarchies and power structures in the digital commons and widespread creativity would develop in so many different ways that it would become a whole new creative commons. (Sorry, but I will have to go look up some of the titles from 1996-2001 courses in Literature and cross-cultural theory to find the sources for exact references where I was first exposed to some of this culture will be free business. I will and add as a Postscript when I locate them, but it made a strong impression, as I was from the business world and it came as a shock to discover some idea writers and artists, like in my family, were expected to just forget any future claim to own their work or expect royalties after the virtual community got under way. Sometimes creators and producers can bypass or shift copyright considerations or protections, and do. It’s always been a source of discussion in the real world from Mozart dying poor like in the film, Amadeus and critics of how fair Chess Records was to its musicians, or Berry Gordy’s share of Motown profits or whether a publisher’s price fair for an author’s work or a buyer and reseller of artwork. Legal disputes over dopyright and distribution in all kind of media were not new, but the discussion was complicated for a global Information Age by some claims that the access would become more important than where the creativity came from or to whom new “original” creative productions could be attributed. This idea didn’t just come out of the blue, and it wasn’t just because of new technology or new horizons of access. Open source programs from Linux to Unix worked on a premise of doing it yourself and tailoring code for your specific needs, and in a similar way, new platforms were developed to share on a different basis, so this idea of sharing in digital global discussion was not proposed in a vacuum, but on this basis, amopng others. The collaborative practices that were  developed and encouraged quickly with these new technologies to offer a common arena has grown in importance over the past decade, and extended our capacities to innovate, but not without issues related to those of crediting sources and ownership claims. No rest for these issues.

So here we are — on the digital creative commons!

This blog is on WordPress, a platform which began in 2003 as b2/cafelog, set up to so bloggers can set up shop and exchange ideas as a free function. This blog on an on-line commons lets us explore and share questions, ideas, resources and discussion about fair use and copyright and explore topics that touch on it.  Blogs, wikis and other aspects of this creative commons are an enjoyable way to more easily collaborate, as cyberspace extends our horizons every day. Use of the creative commons to exchange opinions and access archived material is so common now that even traditional newspapers and magazines have websites and a comment feature for most on-line articles. For example, look at how the Detroit News column of Dr. Paul Donahue, has changed to include past columns. (When we worked at the same insurance company, we’d go ask for clippings to read his advice from the past month – quaint, huh?). Increased ease of reader & writer online input and exchange has reshaped communication habits over the past decade and has generated freer access to some things. But I don’t plan to renounce use of copyright-protected materials any time soon. Do you?  

Nor do I expect to see the basic copyright premise set in motion a few centuries ago by the Statute of Queen buried by the creative commons in cyberspace. Nor will we see the disappearance of copyright and fair use from the legal and social landscape over the next decades, although real questions will have to get sorted out as it’s messyto sort out the increased practices involved. A blog can discuss how librarians and educators observe copyright and tests of fair use, and it’s complications certainly include the many other social views that pressure to use materials without upholding copyright or testing whether it can be used as a fair use exemption that limits copyright privilege. If we decide it’s useful to examine why the early visioning about a creative commons had more impact to go that route, we can choose to do it another day but it would be a worthwhile study. In the meantime, accept a view that ease of many virtual relationships was part of the original visioning of an online commons where creativity happens in a mix of new ideas and expressions based on cultural history and memory, speeded by flashmobbing and memes (Richard Dawkin’s term for a unit of cultural ideas & practices in The Selfish Gene.) The sell is that the sharing process of creativity in the commons wouldn’t have the same attributes as it was produced by sharing freely. What about claims to individual originality in online commons, credit or copyright rights? Ah yes, there seemed to be wildly different ideas about that, as “sampling” and remixing of bits and pieces from old sources to transform and interpret in different ways. Some practices that started ran counter to traditional views and openly challenged copyright and fair use practices, which is why it’s important to include the topic in this blog. An example that does not openly challenge copyright law, but remixes copyright Disney images and transforms to a copyright tutorial is the Fair(y) Tale video on our Blogroll.

There are many plusses to having a Digital Commons and a venue like WordPress. We are thankful for the ease to post information that we find to share, with sources we review and give opinion to add some  perspective  about  this subject, even on a free cyperspace platform alternative that may seem to make ignoring conventional ideas about publishing and copyright simple. WordPress  format has bloggers set profiles, so we are not anonymous. We can credit other sources we quote, share or discuss, although I don’t say a “standard practice” has exactly developed for informal online discussion.  This alternative sphere has been enthusiastically discussed and employed in novel ways. Sometimes it’s viewed as a silver bullet for global society’s future in the global Information Age. But it’s messy and a few kinks turn up to cause headaches and more work to sort out and solve, or filmmakers wouldn’t be tearing their hair about amateuring phone-filming a new film in a theatre and sharing the pirated videos, etc. Some of the creativity that pirates and bootleggers use could take them far if applied sensibly, but it means we will meet some strange cases face to face or in distance education and virtual reference. So how do we understand enough of the stranger aspects that appear in innocent guise or sift out? Handling copyright and fair use is only one part, so let’s try a sense of humor and use a gentle or mocking approach to it.

The cooperative aspect of the cyberspace effort is often called the creative commons in academia, where it works for the common good but not always as it seemed to promise. A provocative approach like Lessig’s may garner popularity with students and a reputation on what Woody Evans calls “the authority of the people.” (Stay tuned - I’ll get back to Evans’ writings again.) But first it amuses me no end that sometimes declaring “code is law” in a particular way like Lawrence Lessig did early on , particularly as it’s paired with a few all-purpose rants against cyberspace regulation and such. First remember that Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law School professor, and I think he has tenure so he knows his stuff. I often use Lessig’s writings to illustrate my points, review his views of free access, based on his premise about free culture but mostly because I can actually understand his ideas (I struggle with William Jamison & some of the cultural theories I was forced to read so I apologize - any jokes I make about rhetoric swirled with hot air to produce postmodernist free culture sundaes comes from cross-cultural lit crit studies, not Lessig’s take on their expression.) I’ll use several perspectives, to discuss the plusses and minusses of using the digital creative commons to “simplify” copyright issues in the process. Let me remind all readers that the actual creative commons has developed a licence and particular set of alternative practices, but do not assume that all digital media function on that copyright alternative or exempt works other than those found in such digital venues from tests of fair use for educational use. 

Some frustrations with DMCA attempts to set digital limits, even for librarians  

Even a mainstream text like Gretchen McCord Hoffman’s can reflect frustrations about copyright specifications for fair use get handled with the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. She refers to ”the dark side of the DMCA” but remember Digital Millenium Copyright Act attempts to deal with all the downloading and increased bootlegging that easily circumvents copyright in digital media. DMCA rules are meant to prevent and/or set a basis to challenge each morph of Napstering and similar widespread circumvention of intellectual property ownership, but this effort involves a combined effort and new rules for the library, complete with password protections and filters which also generate questions about intellectual freedom. In Copyright in Cyberspace 2: questions and answers for librarians, Hoffman has an excellent discussion about writing copyright policy and advice on how to handle licensing agreements to use essential materials, but I wonder if calling “the dark side” of a law somewhat implies there’s a problem if we control any online access?  Remember how the combined efforts are supposed to serve the community, and so there are many public discussions and the conflicts and social frictions involved are referred to do the work needed. Educators and librarians are definitely part of that conversation and the efforts to sort out framework and practices at each stage of new technology as they see it happen.

The question of a digital creative commons may seem like it has an simple, easy answer on the surface, but it depends on the information we use to discuss it and how deeply an issue takes us into the different social questions involved. A digital commons will supposedy helps us “simplify” fair use while increasing participation and producing new material as a result of all the possible creative activities it makes available in a virtual world, and it has certainly done that in many ways – let’s hear the applause for social networking’s capacity to let us generate and develop new information users into more information-seeking, better informed participants in society and as citizens who use their information and social literacy wisely.  But in fact, many essential materials we continue to need in our professional and personal lives, and that no doubt others will use in many fields, still do involve copyright protections. So we’ll still need an active assessment of how to handle fair use or the work to get licences or permission. And remember, opinions do vary about the wonders and uses of the digital and creative commons. No decision’s made yet as to whether it’s a serious contender to replace copyright or patent protections for a small part of society’s creation.

Do we want more utopian visioning or a more realistic assessment of  alternative practices? 

There are critics even among those in creative fields, where open source venues are most promoted. One example of criticism to check is another blog on WordPress.com called Jesseaxe’s blog.  There Jesse James Burnitt critiques “free culture” and Lessig’s viewpoints with scathing wit. As jessaxe, he openly discusses how this free practice promotes more mediocrity in the arts, rather than pooling the most talented where they can be most easily found and recognized and hews a new viewpoint of what it can and cannot accomplish. He also points out that it asks artists to do their most unique and best things — for free, without pay but without saying how they will also live or earn a living while they produce their masterpieces if the work can’t possibly generate any income. Even a miniscule 2 or 2.5 cent/online royalty per time written into a writer’s contract to include online author  rights looks like a big improvement over the expectation of only do it free-for-all. Doesn’t that expectation of only free take us back to a situation like the 16th century when Milton was expected to sell his Paradise Lost to the Stationer’s Guild for a pittance in order to get it printed and published at all? If so, how is that any gain for all the creators and innovators involved? In essence, the impact of stamping that expectation on creative commons practices would be not progress, but forced Miltonian sacrifice to share one’s works publicly.

 I’ll get to an example that shows how that may actually play out in a moment. The alternative to saying it’s “the alternative” is to form and state some shared expectations up front. But as a critic, Jesse makes some very good points and doesn’t ignore that people will still have to deal with all those little “details” that basically add up to what Maslows calls a ”hierarchy of needs” in life. Even characters in virtual worlds – like the Sims, Second Life, and Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars – operate on fulfilling needs. If some theorists seem to conveniently ignore that aspect of the creativity discussion in high-minded way of posing issues, I imagine the gullible possibilities, reminded of dumbed-down outcomes that can happen from whole-hog acceptance of easy slogans. Think of the film Idiocracy, where insisting on convenient “culture” consumption ignores tying effort to striving for goals, and the outcome of setting goals and overcoming obstacles to meet some self-activated and social goals looks — pretty grim. If I remember right, questioning, striving and mastering new things for a purpose calls forth a sense of agency. Why do humans use the capacity for agency? Someone famous said they need it in love and work (hmm, Freud and I wonder what he’d say about the “too much outside control – so we must rebel” spin? Maybe Stass and Howe covered that in Generations: History of the American future, 1584-2069.)

Where do these ownership and copyright alternatives lead?– for good, for bad & for (re)mixed results…

But even if we just accepted cultural theorists or Lessig’s claims of “too much control” and regulation of cyberspace out there, or that social control is done in wrong ways by the wrong people, does it imply that switching to his favored authority mode is the solution? What about proposing or encouraging more realistic approaches to resolve observable issues to use digital commons as one of several modes of communication?  I personally give Lessig and others credit because they use Stanford’s non-profit Creative Commons and figured out a specific set of ways to develop an alternative and ask that credit be given to the free materials that people licence as part of that. But what will we get if we don’t do like they did and also examine what consequences can come in turning all creativity into rule-free “free-for-all” That’s a phrase that can mean chaos as much as free-to-take, if the utilization is done without agreeing to mission, policy or spelled-out rules and procedures.  What kind of situation will result if all digital creators are just left free to use, reuse or re-mix and exchange creativity without any awareness of the details of the process? Are they free to roam and to “grow” or grow what? Art? or Air-ferns? Poetry? Code? Bread & chocolate?  Analysis? New technology or the buildings to house them, transportation to get everything distributed and real world exchanges? Someone else has to explain how we categorize uses of digital creativity, but I don’t think having some rules diminishes the effort or cultural impact. Rules let us systematically discuss issues and desired outcomes and lets us work out HOW to agree on doing it. 

2010 World Technology Congress on Information Technology in Amsterdam to model: copyright observance one of discussion item

That’s how it’s done so it can be worked out in the open, make it more agreeable to every group and accept to share our creativity with each other across global society. Humans and cultures do that and developed the cultural capital to keep working out issues. (Okay, I laughed the first time I saw the book title about using technology and law to lock down culture, etc. Laws are definite and that’s one thing. But as cultures grow, it’ s a porous media and social conflicts and clashes over culture – endless! Lockdown didn’t work for the Puritans with religion, nor for King George III with his colonists, nor in prohibition or in many other examples through history where folks try something new. “Locking down” culture ? Clashes and misguided attempts to lock it down is possibly why the ALA has a Freedom to Read Statement- and practices to deal with challenged books. Locking down culture didn’t exactly work for J. Edgar Hoover raids against Henry Miller’s books or when samizdat was quite popular in the USSR , where I’ve been by those who did it that it took enormous effort to reproduce and distribute! But the digital commons needs to have conventions so one doesn’t drive on the wrong side of the road and cause confusion and cultural smashups with their “mash-ups.” In comparison, ask what has been produced without some methodology involved? How can we assume that what is proposed with a digital commons to produce anything out of the ozone: science, cultural works or even practical exchange of basic objects outside without using current social conventions, without specifying we will expect all to credit or add references. It’s done that way in popular culture and short or informal venues like Twitter with its 140 characters per tweet or blurb.

But a solution like totally open access or free culture is not a proposal without its own value judgments and social implications. In fact, a  solution like that seems like it could just reinforce social disparites and make them greater than the digital divide today, which is why I brought up the sociological implications that talking about Maslow’s basic needs is supposed to remind to include in any social analysis. Since universities get grants and funding to do a great deal of research for society, they are able to explain the proposed benefits and social improvements new discoveries and research provide. WSU also has TechTown and an Innovation incubator to help innovators get patents and develop it into practical efforts that generate business and jobs, and copyright agreements for books researchers and profs write about their work, which all takes a spelling out terms to do.

Copyright as part of academic social literacy

Copyright and fair use are woven into the fabric of academic life in many ways beyond each educator or librarian’s physical location and digital niche. We need to develop our social literacy and an awareness of how we fit into several layers of the wider community and how copyright affects each area.   If discussions of literature or scientific discovery were somehow freed from daily life and human needs and motivations, it would still need to find some other basis for art and creative/scientific expression which would lead to issues of attributioin, credit and fair use, even if not expressly ties to today’s copyright laws. If the digital utopia was in flux and we could imagine we’re doing this under ideal conditions, we might not need intellectual property protection like patents and copyright to have ongoing social and technological progress. But if we think of visioning in relation to its stated purpose in generating results and accept the rest as speculative or as science fiction, we cannot forecast exactly how visions and original theories and plans will all get played out in future, not even in the digital creative commons. We can ask how are the ideals being supported by real social exchange and what trends get acted on? How is that likely to develop? I trust that each generation steps up to solve its tasks in history in its turn and its own way. Human cycles presented in Generations: the history of America’s future, 1584-2069  suggest how the cycle of cohorts do gain from previous generations repeats come concerns, even if the groups don’t all notice that fact. That cycle fits with how Lessig’s Code and other laws of cyberspace got redone in its second edition from an wiki, Code verson 2.0. Is there a mystery about his announced plans for the book’s royalties and are the details for use clear? 

We share the accumulated cultural capital as best we can from one generation to the next so each group can reference and remix or re-use as its social groups choose.  But if that’s used and remixed for artistic expression versus solving basic problems, it depends on motivation and shared messages. For example, I don’t always understand some trendy social message in particular tatoos & frankly find barcode tatoos just odd body decoration – even the spots they leave when lasered seem just another tatoo, but hey, some folks like them. Me? I’m too personally grateful for how socially useful barcodes are and they’ve made my life more convenient, and not just in the library, for stores and the UPS. Stores originally wanted to use barcodes for inventory purposes and it worked beyond expectation. When my co-worker, Oliver Lagman, discovered the invention of BC, he slapped them on every item in the insurance company warehouse, and locating items at work has been easier ever since. Computer indexes and cataloguing are great for similar reasons, and better than sliced bread in the information world, even if maybe they won’t be taken up with the same passion by the electronic music crowd as remixes and barcode designs. (If you’re asked about practical everyday and also about how some fun uses happen around us, do check out www.howstuffworks.com - much quicker to find one interesting thing than watching all their TV shows.)

Why such a rush to judgment ?

But back to the main on-topic aspect of the digital commons and implications for copyright to affect what we as librarians do or don’t do for fair use: Some of the most avant-garde digital rebels and postmodern theorists rushed to exalt the potential of the creativity in the digital commons. They declared it the wave of the future, which it is, but many seem to ignore some implications involved in practical life aspects, for which educators and librarians must account and adapt as we function in our professions. Open source code and  its digital creative commons certainly have a place and many uses in our world. It generates lots of materials and will bring us more, evolves into more new technologies, medias and genres in this century which we will use, adapt and master. Libraries find many new technologies and venues invaluable and essential to involve more people, to participate in media and social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Now it’s crucial for us to participate to play a recognized role in our communities online. But even if you can imagine this potential being extended in many ways, go ahead and try to estimate what possibility there is that a creative commons and growing media will produce enough valuable free  materials or quickly enough to become the replacement for the rest of this global society’s copyrighted materials any time soon. So how do we adapt to recognize and use both systems?

 I don’t see non-copyright free materials as a replacement, but as supplementary sources of materials being generated in new and different media and technological forms. As popular and exciting as these new forms are, and as useful as the free materials are, they deserve and will need cultural references to link them back to current and historical materials which involve copyright and fair use for educational purposes until they also enter the public domain. Some of that important reference “stuff” is what Thomas Sowell, among others, calls our “cultural capital” and it’s an important legacy to preserve and pass on to and for future generations. So we won’t set out to throw out the essential works and historical awareness and references that already developed around them; we will use vital materials, even if their copyright’s not yet expired and they are not available as public domain items. Works created and produced long before this cultural baby arrived should continue to be important for use? I think they will be valued. Will we also just throw this baby out with the bathwater even if it doesn’t live up to the current silver-bullet hype? Probably neither will happen soon, even though we’re supposed to be a disposable society, interest tends to get renewed and refreshed in each era’s views. But the social perspective will, no doubt, change how the commons of cyberspace gets used and adapted or evolves with new technologies and practices put into place somewhere down the road. But for right now? OK, as librarians, we have to figure out how to balance the ambuities inherent in the situation as it exists for now.

AND FOR NOW? Savor and enjoy the  ambiguities

Open source and non-copyrighted materials as a main replacement for the materials with copyright protections that educators and librarians use and rely on today? We want to use it to increase participation and social exchanges as well as to help learner-centered education and skill building. It’s a terrific resource, but let’s step back and get a perspective on where it’s useful and where something else is a better resource. Do we want to be limited to only a small slice of what we need? Wil we be left to suggest only the most new and unassessed if it’s a free wiki or blog? Yes, I do and sometimes it’s vetted information or resources and sometimes a source like the teen poetry wiki promoted by ALA and Uof M’s LIS program, which I use and suggest it to young writers looking to sample what their peers are creating)  …or very old materials in the public domain literature like when we suggest the free stories, novels and poetry on bartleby.com and Project Gutenberg. These things are free and easily accessible but do they always fit the criteria or the person we are assisting? We want to have the best items in a subject and a bibliography, and the most current items available too, even if copyrighted and we need permissions or licencing to share with our communities to meet their needs. Balancing the various needs is part of our professional expertise, so we really don’t have to just hop on the first anti-copyright bus that pulls up. Can we really serve our community well if we let our patrons ride around only on the free digital or creative commons? If not, how do we do the work to meld best practices and make more access available?

I don’t hold my breath that all copyright-protected materials we now use will be swept out into the information sea and forgotten, just because use of the digital commons is expanding. We’ll certainly have more media forms and more free materials generated; we’ll use social networks which socially generates more interconnectivity in the process. But in the meantime, we also need ongoing advice to be current on copyright and fair use as information practices evolve. One good source is Rebecca Butler, the copyright columnist for American Association of School Librarians journal, Knowledge Quest. Her Copyright for teachers and librarians  is also an excellent one-stop source of information about how to manage the complicated tasks involved in handling copyright and fair use in our professional lives. Several library journals have columns like Butler’s where we will search for and find theory and practical tips to share with each other in future too.  One resource that offers a lot of perspective on this issue is Woody Evans, in his Building Library 3.0: issues in creating a culture of participation. He talks about fundamentals of Web 2.0  to emphasize participation with, games and Second Life’s Library, using social networks and RSS feeds to create “authority of the people.”  Because of his focus, he talks about how the Creatives Commons makes workshops simpler because there are no copyright issues, but also asks if we want our own organization to have a right to reproduce the materials that get produced in these workshops and discusses handling that. I appreciated Evans’  interview with writer and librarian consultant Jessamyn West of Vermont. she is very direct on how questions of privacy and copyright issues are impacted by new forms of computer use. She doesn’t back off from possible privacy problems connected with RFIDs or having all the computer info and metadata available to subcontractors, and suggests Zotero, an internal citation tracker that can help librarians manage how an open source tool like Foxfire works inside a library community. If this seems to go too far afield from the issue of copyright and fair use, think about how important questions of attribution are to maintaining privacy or to building on pieces in an open source venue or turn it into a product for which an author may want joint or sole “custody” when published. Don’t laugh at that idea yet. Ownership arrangements have to get spelled out, even with a wiki on the web.

A story about licencing, and how the real Creative Commons — got royalties

And remember that book of Lessig’s that started as a wiki? Time to get around to how that’s played out in the real world.Lessig, the Harvard Law professor, knows a thing or two about copyright details. Remember how he talks about “code is law” and has expressed issues with who controls it and how since 1999? He doesn’t just contort such a concept into pretzels for “free culture” lectures, so tell me who you think gets the  royalties from Code version 2.0, his book that started as a wiki?  Do you think he does, or that he includes portions to all his TAs and students who wrote the wiki with him? I raise this as a hypothetical question to see what you think may fit with his ideas of that.

The real answer? The book’s web link says that all royalties go to the “Creative Commons.” That probably means that the Stanford non-profit by that name that Lessig mentions in Free Culture gets the royalties from the printed book. I don’t know how this Foundation uses the funds involved, and he doesn’t give details on project or platforms it funds to ”express freedom” or use free “content to rebuild a public domain” (Free Culture, 283) or how it matches with his vision or specification, but here’s a step to match up different owner forms. Without the time here to dig up more research just to score mini-points (no, we’re not like printers once paid by the letter or word to set lead type), I’ll simply make the point with a few broad strokes, period.  I’ll say right that doing a wiki for a library would make me more comfortable because its ownership and outcome was set ahead, but Lessig steps out into new terrain and then created a form to manage the discrepancies in a workable way.  If efforts to make a wiki are combined with discussions and controlled by policies set by leaders, we acknowledge, if you will, the upfront decision-making process and parameters about choices, which can be spelled out and annouced to the world and that is true in other social settings where there is a history of practice. When the new creative commons and collaborative practices started, some of the over-the-top rhetoric – its avant-garde claims colored my appreciation of how mash-ups of different practices could also lead to good results and that’s partly what leadership literature talks about. Otherwise vision loses a little luster if it can’t translate into action and let people follow some of Joseph Campbell’s architypical paths and the socially respectable roles and practical uses that we encourage our students and library community to attain and use with pride. The claims to build on freedom without much need for copyright didn’t turn Lessig into the copyright or fair use expert that he is, and in my estimation, it’s humorous that Lessig’s  got an interesting reputation as professor, teacher and lecturer but also by becoming one a free culture digital (techno?) rebel of teh lecture, book circuit. He knows how to handle intellectual property ownership and is enough committed to the Creative Commons to give them the royalties. In creating a public and   provocative discussion about the complaints of  cultural control and raps about use of property rights as limiting freedom, he gets it into the public eye which can educate the younger generation which wants to just use all they can freely. In discussing how social control includes “whose” rules should get used to govern in cyberspace, he is entitled to his ideas just like everyone else, but do the young consumers know that they might want the economic benefits from their own creativity someday too?  Copyright rules and changes get instituted in response to fairly wide social discourse of issues, as they develop with new technology in each era, and so an increase in discussing various issues can help here.

 And we can trust Lessig on copyright but with the Wild-West no-rules attitude first encouraged for the digital creative commons, does an instructor just tell his students to download someone else’s paper and change the name to their own before turning it in to him for a grade? Of course he not, and instructors use anti-plagarism software to make sure their students don’t do that, so most can’t be silly enough to think they can download & sign as their own homework without consequences and a stink being made about plagarism even if they claimed freedom from having to observe crediting standards or copyright! Real consequences come when programs instructors use that scrolls for plagarism find it, and they enforce educational discussion, so in practice, free access still isn’t really so free use and will stay that way. In the same way, Lessig has to sign a publisher’s contract and says who receives his royalties, so the publisher still wants the copyrights upheld out in the real world, so the big drama about rebuilding an amorphous “freedom” to create still functions as an educational discussion.  Lessig can proudly discuss proudly his ties to the Creative Commons and how that’s one of his roles like professor and lecturer, suggesting a path or goal that his listeners and students can hope to try. That’s a bit more mainstream than pumping a rhetorical swirl of ideas into a a cultural theory cone of digital all access, no economics nonsense to suggest being a free on-line or graffiti artist will somehow support a family or needs and increased responsibilty of creators in real life., It’s really no different than publicly acknowledging other public commitments, and we can see some paths like that develop and get acknowledged as the real digital commons takes shape and clears the murky water of practices a bit. Maybe more will take the route of non-profits, with the acknowledgement and ties of those who accept civic positions or sit on various boards of corporations or non-profits, and can say what they plan for digital commons projects amd how to fund operations. 

But I think in Lessig’s case, a public stance that positions him as sort of a social rebel rock-star lecturer, expert about cyberspace code law and how its meaning can reshape society (if only it’s freed!), is sort of contradicted by his other roles and down the road, Lessig’s image make get a less dramatic and more realistic makeover if it includes more details of how the creative common operates, and generates new works. You know, if it becomes widely used and somehow profitable, they can show their gains can be modestly plowed into another modest effort to extend works in the commons the creators agree to try next. Or does that route sound more familiar for the business report page than a blog on academic work and copyright fair use. so still to that topic and let the stories of the multi-media, digital creative commons play themselves out into the future as they will? 

But remember the hop-skip-jump pleasure of  using the digital arena? Would focus to one topic and integrating roles into one dim line tame the rhetoric of the ideas in the digital universe and can maturity still garner the same level of “authority of the people”  as these media forms are used more and more? Authority of the people” is a term that Woody Evans uses about popular exchanges and tone developed on the web, but what if any odd re-use and remixing was noticably identified and if  the dissing of current copyright and fair use limits slowed down, would that really change the nature of the digital commons “free for all” into a differently used form that’s less popular? I don’t know. It’s possible, but it’s why I like to use the Lessig work as an example because he does have visible ideas, expressed ideas, of how to work it out as an alternative. Is it a fairer analysis of Lessig’s project than just a quick read of the digital commons’ early rhetoric suggested to an audience? I think this suggests, despite names and crediting claims for all involved, that his de facto claim to more fame or credit for him as rebel doesn’t change that he was leader and wiki director/book editor suggest for all those who assist him in the wiki project or in the book that then evolved from online efforts. I think that’s okay – if it’s acknowledged without turning it inside out to make his argument. It’s “all right with me” that he steps up and says it’s fair to have royalties but directs how they are used for the Creative Commons. He can decide as author and editor, or with a consensus of all involved if they choose to do that, and I bet he probably also functioned and led direction on the decision-making. Why did I start out to ask about split in royalties to unpack and show all of that inside relationships tied to a free wiki and the resulting book? We know wikis are generally common work, shared as a project for a workplace, an interest group, a library or a foundation. Some wikis even turn into books, and decisions are part of doing that. If a  creative commons non-profit group gets the profits, it doesn’t make it less surreal that Lessig’s over-the-top ideas seem to suggest we demand that our society will attach other meanings to ownership and freedom has to take another direction for other social outcomes than get handled in the usual mix of creators wanting to choose whether they claim copyright or post free, and if there is copyright and economic benefits, how those benefits gets used. So maybe I share a bit of Jesse’s skepticism about all “free culture” as goal, but I think that it’s worth raising for discussion and anyone else who wants to comment on what that suggests or means, feel free to go ahead.

Personal practices/public responsibilities and discourse

I started a line of thinking here that seems problematically tied to present use of copyright and fair use for which we’ve been trying to find resources and illustrate or discuss. But I don’t claim to have great answers about how this would be better or fairer than copyright with fair use exemptions. This is only one example in what has to be a public discourse. There are plenty  of past trajectories used to discuss copyright, fair use exemptions for science and educational uses. Yes, reasons for fair use tests count economic impact on compensation for the creator most heavily, and most take the risk to create without knowing results or if there will be any payoff as outcome for what they produce. It has been as problematic for producers of scientific discoveries and inventions as cultural producers in art, literature and music. That’s been true from ancient times, from before John Milton, right up to and including for Muddy Waters and Motown musicians among many others. We’re not talking about “Anonymous” here, but those recognizable as creator of something just as tangible as a gas engine or an  intermittent windshield wiper in Flash of Genius deserve some credit and it’s okay if they ask for copyright protections and limit how we use the fair use exemptions, because that makes the world go around and we can handle the balancing act and work out how to do it for educational purposes and honor the relationships within our community and among those we serve and teach. Cultural trends and fashions are harder to parse economic gain to creative inspiration and ounces of effort expended, aren’t they? Maybe that’s why as proponents of participation and transparent leadership, librarians professionally want to build increased participation in our communities, information literacy, social literacy and participatory democracy. I think we can do it without falling too hard for every easy hard-sell pitch to only do it “this way” and how can a creative commons be a one way street? That would pretty much contradict its ability to stretch our relationships around the globe to communicate and operate in many different ways, wouldn’t it?

We tend to want our leadership that sets policies and has transparency so people know, without believing – or insisting that there’s only control from the top. It’s not really fair to pick out one writer to make this point about authoritarian edgy tone, but I’d be remiss if I used his works’ provocative points without pointing out that some irony is involved. It seems especially easy when Lessig’s one book is titled Free culture: how Big Media uses technology and the Law to lock down culture and control creativity. Is it just me or  does it sound like a rant against outside control from a proponent of Creative Commons, to maybe justify to audiences ignoring the practical uses for intellectual property ownership that could limit their desire to only use the commons? If copyright give some credit and appropriate recompense to producers and originators, and some hearing the free culture argument might want that same rights later, just like the Motown musicians and songwriters did. So take the smartcrack question about who gets the royalties from that book in this context, as it’s just meant to illustrate part of the problematic nature of using development of digital commons or even the Creative Commons licencing just to ”simplify” life or avoid fair use issues before we see how some more of that experience gets played out and interests get decided.  There’s more opportunity for us to discuss digital commons and fair use.  

References:

Burnitt, Jesse James. jesseaxe’s WordPress June 11, 2010 blog,   ” ‘Free Culture’ is the birth of mediocrity in the arts”  at http://www.jesseaxe.wordpress.com

Butler, Rebecca P. Copyright for teachers and librarians. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2004.

Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Evans, Woody. Building Library 3.0: issues in creating a culture of participation. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2009.

Hoffman, Gretchen McCord. Copyright in Cyberspace 2: questions and answers for librarians. New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2005.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code and other laws of cyberspace. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

          – Code version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, 2006. 

          – Free culture: how big media uses techology and the Law to lock down culture and control creativity. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Strass, William and Neil Howe. Generations: the history of America’s future, 1584 – 2069. New York: Morrow, 1991.

 It will help you approach fair use of copyrighted information in the library if you first ask how much information you really need on the topic and decide if you want an appetizer, a small catch or a banquet hall menu or want to jump right into the whole copyright ocean. If you just want a quick first gloss on the topic, or just enough to know what is generally involved, then I suggest you start by dipping a toe in the water with the brief introductory comments in our course text, The Portable MLIS . On page 146, David A Tyckoson mentions the topic in “Reference Service: the personal side of librarianship,”  cautioning that copyright issues arise as more control is asserted on intellectual rights by vendors. In “Librarians: the best Googlers in the world,” Linda Main mentions that librarians get trained to know the basics about fair use is determined, the valid length of copyrights, about how public domain works, ownership and licensing works for librarians. She tells you these basic questions so you’ll want to hunt down the answers. In Library Ethics, Jean Preer discusses a new  provision added to Article IV of the ALA’s Code of Ethics in 1995, “we adhere to standards of intellectual property,” so that librarians state publicly that as informational professionals, we assume responsibility toward copyright laws but without discussing how to meet challenges .  

Denise K. Fourie and David R. Dowell also give a brief introduction to the topic in their 2009 text, Libraries in the Information Age: an introduction and career exploration. They warn us not to accept publishers’ definitions of fair use (118) and to develop an “awareness of the associated legal minefields planted along the way.” (212) This introduction gives us a taste that copyright is indeed serious business in the library, but that it’s balanced by “legitimate fair use.”  I also found a chapter in Academic Librarianship in the Twenty-First Century, edited by C.M. Garcia and T.A. Flores helpful. Angela Weiler explains how the Fair Use doctrine has been recently tested in courts and gives an overview of how new legislation may further inhibit educational fair use in her essay, “Fair Use in the Twenty-first Century: a Librarian’s Perspective.” 

More in-depth

After considering all these legal red flags, we may have to resist the temptation to immediately page a copy of Linda A. Tancs’ new Understanding Copyright Law: A Beginner’s Guide and bone up in advance on all possible legal details before taking a spot at a reference desk. But resist! Yes, Tancs’ book is useful as reference material when you have particular aspects to look up, and she helpfully reproduces sample copies of permission forms to handle aspects of the process. but it’s not necessary to start by diving into this book, a release  from Oceana’s Law for the Layperson Legal Almanac Series.

Getting an Overview of Fair Use 

It’s more useful and important to get a basic understanding about how issues are framed first and some ideas of how the subject will come up in particular settings. We can get that grounding and workable examples of how fair use issues come up and get handled in public and academic libraries with other books and articles, or by attending a conference. For example this coming October, the American College Research Libraries sponsors an educational to be taught by Tomas A. Lipinski, who is now the Executive Associate Dean of Indiana University’s School of Library and Information Science and has taught for University of Wisconsin and University of Maryland’s Center for Intellectual Property among others. His invaluable text, Copyright Law and the Distance Education Classroom helps educators and librarians in instructional roles deal with rights and limits outlined in the Technology, Education and Copyright Harmonization Act of 2002, commonly called the TEACH Act, to explain how to handle Fair Use under new rules and  how instructors can use the  privilege of  recording for distance education.Clearly this is a deep pool of knowledge where one at first scan of the scene can decide on doing a basic information dog-paddle as needed or can choose to dive into deep water and plan to work on becoming a life-long surfer in the ocean of  copyright and fair use ambiguity.  

For instance, we can scan through the outlines of several texts to get an overview. One good choice is Kenneth Crew’s Copyright law for librarians and educators: creative strategies and practical solutions. Crews was a professor at Indiana University when the first edition was published by ALA in 2000, and now is Director of Columbia’s Copyright Advisory Office. His updates in the 2006 Second Edition add some excellent and creative problem-solving approaches meant to deal with TEACH Act requirements. If we also scan the outline of Tomas Lipinsky’s treatment in his text, Copyright law and the distance education classroom, and of Steven Armatas’ book, Distance Learning and Copyright: a guide to legal issues  we can get a quick assessment of the wealth of information available for the treatment of Fair Use. That will let us see how they organize their topics and materials. Each of these are worth the investment of time and can add more to our understanding of how to use and test Fair Use in practical terms. We can gauge how useful each will be in helping us sort out topics we’ll want to delve into as we develop our own analytical approach as an underpinning to our assessing and practice of fair use.  They complement each other in many ways, and there are many other additional articles And then where will we want to start our reading and note-taking, after we scan outlines of books by these experts…?  Okay, but what about all those peer-reviewed articles found in American Libraries, Library Journal or other scholarly publications. The pile of books and journals is growing, so maybe just a few more minutes and first a few more page-turns before we select and focus on just one.  Where exactly to start reading and working on these copyright questions…

What about online ? and how to know the hot-button issues?

…but what if you don’t want to just read a whole book? Well, there are articles aplenty on this subject in Library Journal and other professional journals; many are available online. For a digital take on the subject, check out Eric Faden’s 10 minute video on Copyright (a link is on our Blogroll.) Faden teaches film production at Bucknell  University, &  he’s produced this tutorial from snippets of Disney character cartoon images and voices. It certainly provokes thought and discussion by viewers. Check out Peter Friedman’s blogs,What is Fair Use? (on Blogroll) and Ruling Imagination: law and creativity http://www.geniocity.com/friedman  or try Lawrence Lessig’s website when you’re ready to hit all the hot-button issues. When you go there,  check out one of his books which began as a wiki, Code v 2.0 which evolved from Code: And other laws of cyberspace. He has a link to see what it originally looked like as a wiki and blurbs on the site about his other writings. His dramatic, provocative treatment in Free Culture: how Big Media uses technology to lock down culture and control creativity has made him a brand, known not only as a Harvard University Law professor but for his position on the spectrum of ideas about this subject.  Which gets us to one vital point to make in this day and digital age: there are so many media resources to try and check out, to go in as many directions as you choose to check, so scoping out an information  landscape on the subject is crucial. Developing  a judgment about how to put them in context and to gauge strengths, weaknesses, variance and credibility of treatments and approaches on the subject is useful for an informational professional, in theory and in practice.  Choosing to rely on professional and peer-reviewed educational information for yourself will help to meet that ALA Code of Ethics to uphold intellectual property rights and make use of the fair use exceptions in ways that reflect well on yourself and your organization which expects you not to create issues of liability that cost in community support or unneeded expense.  Understanding how to handle the essentials and navigate some current trends and hot-button fads helps a librarian to also give assistance to patrons. Some want specific information because they have futures and dreams to pursue, and may ask for a popular treatment of this subject in hopes of generating fame, future or a business off one of their own ideas, stories or songs. You can better assess whether or not they want info on the most open-source variations on the topic or  if they will also need to know about copyright or patent protections are available to help them support their interests and creativity too.  Not every artist can just generate the income of Banksy on their graffiti, nor can every songwriter uploading their work for free on YouTube so it helps us know how to share a sense of our community members’ options if we study the issues as they come up on the horizon and are discussed in the news. Our investment in understanding fair use and due diligence to know how and where to locate basic information about copyright may also be of interest to some of the people we assist and serve.   

References:

Armatas, Steven A. Distance learning and copyright: a guide to legal issues. Chicago: American Bar Association, 2008.

Crews, Kenneth D. Copyright law for librarians and educators: creative strategies and practical solutions. Chicago: American Library Association, 2006.

         - Copyright essentials for librarians and educators: a project of the Copyright Management Center (Ind. U-Purdue). Chicago: American Library Association, 2000.

Friedman, Peter. What is fair use? blog at www.whatisfairuse.blogspot.com 

         - Ruling imagination: Law and creativity blog at http://www.geniocity.com

Fourie, Denise K. and David R. Dowell. Libraries in the Informaion Age: an introduction and career exploration. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2009.

Lessig, Lawrence.  www.lessig.org

        – Code: And other laws of Cyberspace. NY Basic Books, 1999.

          – Free Culture: how Big Media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity.  New York: Penguin Books, 2004.

         - The Future of Ideas: the fate of the Commons in a connected world. NY: Random House, 2001.

Lipinski, Tomas A. Copyright law and the distance education classroom. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2005.

Main, Linda. “Librarians: the Best Googlers in the World” in The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon, editors. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2008

Preer, Jean. Library Ethics. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2008.

Tancs, Linda. Understanding Copyright Law: A Beginner’s Guide. New York: Oxford University Press Oceana’s Law for the Layperson series, 2009.

Tycokoson, David A. “Reference Service: The Personal Side of Librarianship” in The Portable MLIS: Insights from the Experts. Ken Haycock and Brooke E. Sheldon, editors. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2008.

Weiler, Angela. “Fair Use in the 21st Century” in Academic Librarianship in the 21st Century. Claudia M. Garcia and Teresa A. Flores, editors.  NY: Nova Science Publishers, Inc, 2009.