July 13 Creative Commons Policy Roundup

[Timothy Vollmer]

Battle for the Net: A Day to Save Net Neutrality

Even with massive public pushback, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai wants to reel in the net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. If Pai’s proposed changes are adopted, the FCC will give companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T increased control over what users can see and do on the internet, with the power to slow down or block websites and charge apps and sites extra fees to reach an audience. Yesterday was a massive day of action calling on people to send comments to the FCC and Congress to protect net neutrality. Fight for the Future published some numbers on the scope of the response. 

Digital Rights Management is eating the world
July 9 was the annual #DayAgainstDRM, and we wrote about it in the context of the European copyright reform. Some of the new provisions having to do with limitations to copyright tabled by the Parliament contain clauses that would forbid not only contractual restrictions, but also technological protection measures (another phrase for DRM) from overriding the exercise of the users’ rights. So, for example, this would mean that a researcher could freely conduct text and data mining on a collection of scholarly works to which she already has legal access, and the journal publisher or other rightsholder would be forbidden from enacting contractual barriers or DRM that would thwart the researcher’s work. These additional user protections are important to include so that the rightsholders cannot simply sidestep the law through the application of private contracts or technological restrictions.

In the U.S., the Copyright Office released a report on section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which prohibits the circumvention of DRM, as well as sharing methods or technologies that enable others to circumvent. The Copyright Office is also going into their triennial rulemaking on acceptable exemptions to the 1201 rules. Users submit arguments to the Copyright Office to be granted the right to break DRM for particular activities, such as to conduct security research. The comment period ends on 13 September. 

EU Copyright Reform setbacks

The EU Parliament committees responsible for the copyright reform docket have introduced their amendments to the Commission’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Now the committees are negotiating their proposed changes and finalizing their opinions. The Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) voted on its final opinion on 8 June. This week, both the Culture and Education Committee (CULT) and the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) decided on their finals opinions. They will be published next week. One of the most controversial aspects of the Commission’s proposal is the introduction of a new right for press publishers (a.k.a. “the link tax”) to extract fees from search engines for incorporating short snippets of—or even linking to—their content. In the votes this week for the CULT and ITRE committees, the press publishers right was also carried through—and even expanded. Both of the recent opinions remove the restriction that the right apply to digital uses only, meaning that if adopted it would cover all uses—digital and in print. In addition, ITRE—the committee responsible for policy relating to the promotion of research—voted to extend the press publishers right to cover scientific publications.

It also appears that in Spain publishers are setting up aggregators to pay themselves for their own content to prove the press publishers right is working just fine.

CC files amicus brief in copy shop case

In this litigation, Great Minds sued FedEx Office for making copies, at the request of a school district, of educational materials it produced with public funding and licensed under the BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Great Minds doesn’t argue that the school district’s use of the materials violates the NC restriction, but that FedEx Office does when it makes copies solely at the direction of the school district. We urge for the interpretation that a school district may permissibly use FedEx Office as a means by which the school district exercises its own licensed rights. The license does not restrict the school district to using only employees to exercise those rights; it allows the school district to engage anyone— employees and non-employee contractors alike—to do so.

Is for-profit scholarly publishing a long-running public scandal of epic proportions?

Yes. 

The Streisand Effect

Someone tell Zillow about it.