LibraryLaw Blog

Sect. 215 of Patriot Act Lawsuit commentary

FindLaw's Writ - Cassel: What An ACLU Suit Challenging An Important Section of the USA Patriot Act Tells Us About Surveillance and Secrecy

Elaine Cassel, June 9, 2004:

In April of this year, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a "John Doe" Internet Service Provider (ISP) sued Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller. The suit was brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. (The case is ACLU v. Ashcroft et al..)

The plaintiffs challenge a portion of Section 215 of the notoriously controversial USA Patriot Act. The provision allows the FBI to access your personal financial, medical and business records, along with emails and logs of computer use.

In particular, in this suit, the plaintiffs challenge the provision insofar as it grants the government power to obtain subscriber information, billing records, and "electronic communication transactional records" from electronic communications providers. ("Electronic communication providers" are defined to encompass anyone who provides services for the receipt and transmission of electronic or wire communications.)

Call for help: Million Book Project needs more books to scan

Please post to relevant lists you are a member of - thanks

Michael Lesk tells me that the Million Book Project is running out of books to scan. They are looking for libraries that are willing to lend large numbers of books that can be legally scanned (tens of thousands preferred.)

This might be...
a) A library doing large-scale weeding of old books
b) A library closing down a branch facility
c) A library renovating a building with a plan to put books in storage for a year.
and if you happen to know of this
d) A large used book store going out of business (but with old enough books to be useful -- piles of Stephen King novels from the 1980s are not helpful)

Copyright Renewal Database for Monographs - breakthrough!

Breakthrough: There is now a database you can check to see if a monograph's copyright was renewed. A big improvement over searching the catolog for copyright entries year by year. http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html

According to Michael Lesk, Carnegie Mellon University sent the records to India where they were scanned and proofread by Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreading. Michael then ran the lookup with 150 lines of PHP. The more recent years were screenscraped from the LC site.

The database covers works from 1923-1963. Before 1923, U.S. works are in the public domain. After 1963, works got automatic renewals. The database covers monographs only, no scores, audiovisual works, etc.

This database is a big deal. It means that library digitization projects can FINALLY easily check renewals. U.S. published works from 1923-1963 that were not renewed are in the public domain. See Peter Hirtle's chart and look at published works for more detail.

Thanks to Christa Easton and Megan Prelinger for alerting me to this resource.

Copyright Surgeries this week in the UK

from Paul Pedley's Keeping Legal: Legal Issues Affecting the Information Profession [U.K.]

June 8, 2004

The Copyright Licensing Agency Limited is carrying out free copyright health checks for businesses at this year’s Sunday Times UK Business Week Exhibition.

...Decision-makers and senior management attending the conference and exhibition are being offered the opportunity to visit CLA’s ‘copyright surgeries’ at exhibition stand W60 during this week’s show. Delegates can complete a small questionnaire and receive one-to-one advice regarding their current information management practices, in light of the changes to copyright law that took place at the end of October 2003.

Sounds painful!

The changes in the new UK copyright law per European Directive are summarized by Charles Oppenheim in Freepint #154 Feb 2004. Click here to go right to the paragraph on libraries.

Crawford's copyright catch-up

The latest issue of Walt Crawford's always interesting Cites & Insights is a special issue devoted to copyright. Walt discusses some recent publications on file sharing; summarizes (and critiques) the statements at the 12 May hearings on HR 107, the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act, and provides several brief abstracts on some recent articles on database protection.

I was particularly interested to read his discussion of Jason Griffey's thesis on ALA's publishing practices. Crawford points out a number of the many errors in Griffey's analysis of ALA's author agreements, but concludes that Griffey's thesis is nevertheless an important wake-up call to ALA.

If you are looking for a quick review of some of the major copyright issues of interest to librarians, Crawford's newsletter is a good place to start.

Help fight removal of works from the public domain

As a followup to this post concerning the Kahle lawsuit, an update about another lawsuit -- this time concerning foreign works.

This lawsuit, Golan v. Ashcroft, filed in 2001, is attempting to restore to the public domain foreign works that were in the public domain, but have subsequently been "lost" to the public through the reintroduction of copyrights.

These include foreign works that were published post-1923, such as the silent film Metropolis, the works of Stravinsky, and Orson Welles's The Third Man.

A website has recently been set up to collect the stories of those who have been harmed through the restoration of these copyrights. This project is not limited to libraries and their collections, but is intended to find the harm to the whole American public.

Stories so far posted include the inability to play Peter and the Wolf at children's concerts and a corrected edition of a piece of music is unable to be published.

Rant: Tread Lightly on Mickey - Think about the Real Message

Anti-Disney Protest Scheduled for ALA Conference [info-commons blog]

I posted comments at info-commons blog on the anti-Disney protest planned during the annual American Libraries Association conference. I paste them in here:
_____________________

I hope the message doesn't get muddled. There are lots of people like me who love Mickey. I bet most of Florida will come to his defense.

I'd hate to see the message sound like librarians are putting their limited free time into bringing the Mouse into the public domain. We're already seen by some as porn-pushers, privacy freaks (at expense of terrorism) and this protest, if not planned carefully, could help our growing reputation as pirates.

None of these characterizations are at all fair - it's just that the opposition messages are simpler to enunciate than the nuanced messages we try to get across. Filters overblock, the Patriot Act sweeps away too many civil liberties and copyright owners have pushed content protection way off balance.

The extra 20 years tacked on by the CTEA protects not just the mouse but all the good stuff in library/museum collections, that could be shared with the world.

Support Digital Promise legislation for digitization projects

A number of School for Scanning participants asked me for updates on the Digital Promise project. This is a proposal by Newton Minow and Larry Grossman to earmark a part of the billions of dollars from public spectrum auctions for a Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, or "DO IT." The money would go to schools, universities, libraries and museums for digitization and related projects to reach outside their walls to millions of people in the U.S. and throughout the world. It would support research and development of new educational models and prototypes, and is modelled in spirit after great American educational innovations of previous centuries such as the GI Bill of 1944 and the Land Grant Colleges Act of 1862 that helped transform the nation's economy and strengthen its democracy.

Read more about it and ask your senators and representatives to support legislation by Christopher Dodd (D-CT), Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) and by Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA).

Last spring, Congress passed FY 2003 Appropriations Bill directing $750,000 to the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust. The funds will be allocated through the Federation of American Scientists to be used to develop a detailed proposal for DOIT.

School for Scanning copyright presentation

Here are the slides for my School for Scanning presentation on digitization projects in the U.S. and legal issues. I'll leave them up through July 31st.

SAFE Act/Senator Durbin talk at Book Expo

Quick blog from BookExpo 2004 (hot off the convention floor) - Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) just gave an inspiring talk sponsored by ABFFE on the importance of freedom to read even in the face of terrorist threats. He's cosponsoring the SAFE Act with Larry Craig (R-ID). Says this and the pledge of allegiance are the only things the two agree on ... but this is the basics of what it means to be an American. We need more accountability. He supports law enforcement - but mistakes can be made (e.g. Atlanta Olympics bomber) and we need to be asking questions.

Durbin also said that John Ashcroft has appeared before the Senate about once every 14 months ("he avoids us") and it's hard to question him. In contrast, Janet Reno was there every 14 days ("or so it seemed.")

How can booksellers and librarians help? Get more Senate Judiciary commitee members to cosponsor the bill. Invite your Senator to your library and invite 300 people to discuss your concerns. He said that can make a big difference.