July 31 Creative Commons Policy Roundup

[Timothy Vollmer]

Trade negotiations around the world

USTR released its "negotiating objectives" with regard to NAFTA, and will hold the first round of talks in the re-negotiation in Washington, D.C. from August 16-20. Assuming that the public will be barred from participating or even observing the proceedings, civil society groups are considering holding side events to raise public awareness around key issues like intellectual property and ecommerce. CC Canada and CC submitted comments to the Canadian consultation on NAFTA, and CC joined comments from Derechos Digitales and R3D on feedback to the Mexican government. There was another round of negotiations of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) in Hyderabad. The IP provisions in that agreement are typical: amplifying copyright enforcement with little consideration of user rights, mandatory DRM, extending broadcasting rights, and secret negotiations. EFF released a nice infographic that explains the situation for some of the ongoing trade negotiations around the world. 

Scholarly publishing, open access, sci-hub

Four major academic institutions in Berlin are cancelling their Elsevier subscriptions beginning in 2018. PLOS announced it has published 200,000 open access (CC BY) journal articles. I was surprised to learn that ~175,000 of those were published in the PLOS mega-journal PLOS One. FASTR, the bill in the U.S. that would require that requires that Federally funded research be made publicly available within 6 months of publication, was re-introduced in the House of Representatives. Editors are leaving a commercial journal published by Springer and opening their own open access version. The editors say, "It has been becoming more and more clear that commercial journal publishers are charging high subscription fees and high Article Processing Charges (APCs), profiting from the volunteer labour of the academic community, and adding little value. It is getting easier and easier to automate the things that they once took care of." Researchers have been analyzing Sci-Hub, the pirate site that provides access to millions of scholarly articles. According to one of the paper's authors, Sci-Hub contains 69% of all scholarly articles. In addition, they estimated that "Sci-Hub was able to fulfill requests 99% of the time—that suggests the 31% of articles that aren’t covered by Sci-Hub are things that people really aren’t requesting."

Canada ramping up for copyright reform

Professor Geist has provided a detailed response to the Canadian consultation leading into its copyright reform process. Geist also responds to the recent court case regarding fair dealing and payments to Access Copyright for educational uses of copyrighted content. Says Geist, "In other words, all the evidence of a changing industry, open access, hundreds of millions on licensing, and transactional licenses do not matter. What matters to the trial judge is that Access Copyright, one of many intermediaries for authors, is generating less revenue. That conclusion is a striking rejection of the Supreme Court’s careful approach to economic evidence in fair dealing cases."

3D printing legal fiasco

Mike Weinberg from Shapeways helps untangle the mess that is the defamation lawsuit (about a claim of copyright) involving Just 3D Print and Stratasys. Why does it matter? Says Weinberg, "we are still in a formative time in the context of 3D printing, copyright, and Creative Commons licensing. While there is some ambiguity, there isn’t total ambiguity. Throwing settled areas of copyright law into question does not help work towards a solution for the complicated stuff. When there are legitimate disagreements about the intersection of 3D printing, copyright, and Creative Commons licenses, they are important to explore. But if someone is bringing dubious claims into a discussion it is important to identify them as such as quickly as possible."