DigitalKoans

What was new and interesting during the week of 12/18/06? (Brief quotes follow article/Web page titles.) Next Flasback on 1/12/07

• "2nd Circuit Affirms Fair Use with Collage Containing Copyrighted Photographs"
  

  On October 25th, 2006, in Blanch v. Koons, the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Second Circuit ruled on an important case dealing with the fair use of copyrighted material in an artistic, "collage" setting, affirming that artist Jeff Koons’ incorporation of a photograph into a collage painting was fair use.

• "Australia Court: Link to Copyrighted Material, Feel the Wrath"
  

  Bloggers, MySpacers, and anyone else who links to copyrighted material without permission is fair game for legal action, a court in Australia has ruled.

• "Bloggers Beware: Debunking Nine Copyright Myths of the Online World"
  

  A handful of myths have spawned practices, particularly among bloggers and website owners, that turn copyright law on its head. These myths are rooted in the assumption that everything is up for use online unless and until proven otherwise.

• "Book Publishing in the U.S.: Bigger Than We Thought?"
  

  Well, I ran into a surprise in this morning’s paper, and it’s verified by the U.S. Census bureau’s website: the adjusted number for 2005 is $51.9 billion (including ebooks, to be sure, but that’s certainly less than 3% of that number, no matter what definition you use).

• "CC Changes"
  

  Five hours later, in the Creative Commons party in the virtual world of Second Life, I [Lawrence Lessig] made for me an announcement. As I removed the CC torch from my bag of objects, I told those in world, and in San Francisco, that Joi Ito, a venture capitalist from Japan and a key driver in the “sharing economy,” would be replacing me as Chairman of Creative Commons. I will remain on the board, and as CEO. But from the moment I handed him the torch, he is CC’s new Chairman.

• "Curation and Access Services"
  

  I just ran across the C21st Curation: access and service delivery lecture series.

• "Deep Web Research Research 2007"
  

  This article and guide is designed to give you the resources you need to better understand the history of the deep web research, as well as various classified resources that allow you to search through the currently available web to find those key sources of information nuggets only found by understanding how to search the "deep web."

• "Google’s Book-Scanning Efforts Trigger Philosophical Debate"
  

  The latest tensions revolve around Google’s insistence on chaining the digital content to its Internet-leading search engine and the nine major libraries that have aligned themselves with the Mountain View-based company.

• "How Web Providers Dodged a Big Legal Bullet"
  

  Web site providers can take a deep breath. The California Supreme Court has ruled that they are not legally responsible for content posted by third parties on their site

• "The Information Model to End All Information Models"
  

  ICA-AtoM must be flexible enough to support a wide variety of potential uses. Firstly, as an archival description package for individual archival institutions as well as a union catalog application that can combine descriptions from multiple repositories (e.g. http://humanrightsarchives.org).

• "Journal Ends Peer Review Experiment"
  

  Citing a lack of participation, the British journal Nature said Thursday it was ditching a closely watched online experiment that allowed scientists to comment on their peers’ research before publication.

• "Mass Digitization for Art Libraries and Special Collections"
  

  The Alfred P. Sloan foundation has granted $1 million to the Internet Archive for digitization in 5 US institutions to boost the materials available in the Open Content Alliance (OCA).

• "Milestones: Stanford’s HighWire Press Passes 1.5 Million Free Full Text Articles in Database"
  

  Whatever the case may be, congrats to the HighWire team on passing (or soon passing) the 1.5 million free article mark.

• "Piracy Suit Being Dropped Against NY Mom"
  

  The recording industry is giving up its lawsuit against Patti Santangelo, a mother of five who became the best-known defendant in the industry’s battle against music piracy. However, two of her children are still being sued.

• "PLoS ONE Is Launched By the Public Library of Science. A New Era Begins for Scientific Publishing on the Internet."
  

  In almost all other journals, publication of a research paper is a full stop. The next significant step forward will be the publication of another paper following on from the previous work. But in PLoS ONE, as soon as an article is published, a conversation between authors and readers can begin.

• "Report on Scholarly Cyberinfrastructure"
  

  The American Council of Learned Societies has just issued a report, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” assessing the current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged and maintained in the future.

• "‘Returning Author’s Rights: Termination of Transfer’ Beta Tool Launched"
  

  To help those of you who don’t have a live case to test and who are unfamiliar with how the provisions work, we suggest you try one or more of the hypotheticals included on this page so that you can see the different aspects of the tool.

• "Robots Could Demand Legal Rights"
  

  Robots could one day demand the same citizen’s rights as humans, according to a study by the British government.

• "Sharecropping 2.0? Not Likely"
  

  Nick Carr has an interesting post arguing that sites like MySpace and Facebook are essentially high-tech sharecropping, exploiting the labor of the many to enrich the few. He’s wrong, I think, but in an instructive way.

• "Sony Has Far to Go in Rootkit Case"
  

  Sony BMG is making amends in California and Texas for secretly loading antipiracy software onto customers’ computers. But the record label has a long way to go before putting the public relations nightmare behind it.

• "Using METS and MODS to Create XML Standards-Based Digital Library Applications "
  

  Morgan Cundiff and Nate Trail describe the creation of "Library of Congress Presents: Music, Theater, and Dance" (LCP) and the "Veterans History Project" (VHP).

• "Workshop Pieces Together European Library Digitisation Project"
  

  In an initiative launched through the European Digital Library Project (EDLProject), representatives from the European Community’s (EC) various eContentPlus funded programmes which are designed to create easier and improved access to digital collections, have gathered for a workshop held at the Austrian National Library.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 12:16 am and is filed under Flashback: Weekly News. Comments closed here. Read and add comments at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/.