DEC 15 Creative Commons Policy Roundup

[Timothy Vollmer]

Information Policy under a Trump administration

Here's an informative post by David Wojick that explores some of the possible scenarios regarding public access to publicly funded research and data under a Trump administration, especially in relation to OSTP's 2013 policy which requires that U.S. federal agencies with extramural research budgets in excess of $100m/year to make that research publicly available no later than 12 months after publication. Researchers are also concerned:

“While we may not see the straightforward deleting of data, we expect to see access to data starved out,” Michelle Murphy and Patrick Keilty, who are spearheading a “Guerrilla Archiving” event at the University of Toronto, told me in an email. “It takes effort and money to keep databases and portals updated and maintained, and to make them publicly available. Moreover, data can move from being publicly shared through portals that make it immediately accessible to less accessible, but still technically public forms of availability.” 

Academic publishing houses lose appeal against Delhi University & photocopy shop

A Delhi High Court confirms that photocopying materials for educational course-packs is not an infringement of copyright. Good.  

AAP, news publishers congratulate Trump; remind everyone they need more rights, more enforcement

The Association of American Publishers sent a letter to Trump: "Surely you understand the role that meaningful intellectual property rights play in American entrepreneurial success..." A nefarious nod to the publisher's opposition to the fact that the public should get access to the research, education, and data its tax dollar pay for is expressed in this little jab: "Publishers also need to be able to operate in an environment free of overreaching regulations and unfair government competition with the products and services they provide." And one news publishing association went so far as to suggest that fair use must be curtailed, because, you know, news publishers never rely on fair use in their reporting. 

The rent is too damn high!
The Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany wrote a letter to Elsevier about the unsustainable pricing for access to scholarly journals for academic and research institutions.

Despite its current profit margin of 40 percent, the publisher is still intent on pursuing price increases that are higher than the licence fees paid until now. The publisher rejects more transparent business models that are based on the publication service and would make publications more openly accessible. 

 Now it appears that more than 60 major German research institutions will have no access to the full texts of Elsevier journals beginning 1 January 2017. 

Senate moves ahead legislation to improve access to research, data

The OPEN Government Data Act which would make government data assets open by default (when not otherwise prohibited by law). "To the extent practicable, Government data assets published by or for an agency shall be made available under an open license or, if not made available under an open license and appropriately released, shall be considered to be published as part of the worldwide public domain." Another piece of legislation passed by the Senate is the 21st Century Cures Act. It includes language that clarifies that the NIH director has the authority to mandate the sharing of data and research outputs. It also provides funding for the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative.

Commercial sites must check all their links for piracy, rules Hamburg court

Reported by ArsTechnica, a Hamburg court ruled that "the operator of a website violated copyright by publishing a link to material that was infringing, even though the site operator was unaware of this fact." This decision goes further than the earlier judgment, which held that linking to freely available material placed on the internet without consent of the rights holder could be considered an infringement if the person sharing the links knew the permission had not been granted, but they still shared the link for financial gain. 

The German case was unusual in that it concerned a link to a photograph originally released under a Creative Commons (CC) licence, thereby making it freely available subject to certain conditions. On the site where the copy in question was stored, the terms of the CC licence were not observed properly, which meant that it constituted a copyright infringement. The website owner that linked to that copy was unaware of this fact, and did not check that the CC licence had been followed.

IPKat questioned the potential implications of this ruling: "It is obvious that such an interpretation means that basically every kind of website run by a person or company in business can trigger the obligation to rebut the presumption that the link was posted in full knowledge of the unlicensed nature of the publication linked to. It is most questionable if such outcome was really intended by the CJEU." 

Launch of the Open Research Funders Group

Today marks the launch of the Open Research Funders Group, a coalition of mostly philanthropic funders that will work to increase access to research outputs. Inaugural members include the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the American Heart Association, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Copyright Reform in the EU

COMMUNIA has been providing analysis of various parts of the European Commission’s proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. It's released position papers on the education exception, text and data mining, and the proposal to create a new right for press publishers. More to come. 

Copyright Reform in the U.S.? 

The Judiciary Committee released a single-page copyright reform proposal, mainly focusing on changes to the Copyright Office. Says TechDirt, "the proposals in question are not horrible, but they're certainly not good either."

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