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fun fact! google image search allows you to search for images that you are legally allowed to use for example as textures for your art or as assets for your blogs and websites
I keep forgetting that not everyone knows about this.
Creative Commons is boss and people should know about this!
Written by former congressional staffers, the Indivisible Guide empowers Americans to stand against the Trump agenda. Together, we will win.
This whole website is pretty good for resources, but I'm specifically going to go with the Guide. It comes in English and Spanish and as an audiofile if that's your preference. It's written by former congressional staffers, who definitely know the best ways to make your Congress members listen to you. I've always found specific suggestions about what to do to be the most useful; if you do too then definitely check this out!
Indivisible. (March 3, 2017). The Guide. Invisible Guide. Available under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Retrieved from https://www.indivisibleguide.com/guide/
A nice little overview of (United States') copyright and how it interacts with the public domain. I wrote a paper similar to this in library school, but it was longer and more academic (see: impenitrable to people who aren't already interested in the topic), so I appreciate that there's something easily-readable that I can share.
Adams, S. (2017, January 16). Copyright and the Public Domain. Center for Democracy & Technology. Retrieved from https://cdt.org/blog/reservoir-clogs-copyright-and-the-public-domain/
Samantha Payne's startup Open Bionics allows anyone in the world to download and 3D print their own bionic limbs
Open Bionics is bringing kids in need of prosthetic limbs 3D printed options from Marvel, Disney, and Star Wars. Plus the designs are online for free so people can print them off and assemble them at home.
Looks like, in this case, you really can try this at home!
Reynolds, M. (2016, November 05). Print Your Own Prosthetic: This Code Can Be Used By Anyone To Create Their Own Bionic Limbs. Wired UK. Retrieved from http://www.wired.co.uk/article/samantha-payne-bionic-arm-builder
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It’s Open Access Week, which for scholarly communications librarians and institutional repository managers is one of the big events of the year to reflect on our work and educate others. Over the y…
Don't worry, it's not as dire as the headline makes it seem! But as Open Access grows and becomes more successful, it also becomes more complicated, and when things get complicated there is opportunity for people to develop products to help people navigate the system. Librarians just need to keep in mind that a balance of solutions is needed, and products available right now may not be the most appropriate long-term solutions.
I do kind of like the Open Access/Punk Music analogy though.
Heller, M. (2016, October 27). 2016: The Year Open Access Broke? ACRL TechConnect Blog. Available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Retrieved from http://acrl.ala.org/techconnect/post/2016-the-year-open-access-broke
Here's a subject that's near and dear to by heart: teaching copyright! Because people need to know how copyright works to understand what they can and cannot do with materials protected under copyright. It's important, and not a lot of people even begin to understand it.
Teaching Copyright by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license at https://www.teachingcopyright.org/
Back in August, NASA launched a public web portal, making all of its published research available to whoever wants to take a look at it. This is in response to a new policy stating that all NASA-funded research articles in peer-reviewed journals need to be made available to the public after a year. You can search it for articles on a specific subject, or you can browse to your heart's content. So if you know anyone who's writing some space-based science fiction, you should probably toss a link in their direction.
Dockrill, P. (2016, Aug. 18). Science Alert. Retrieved from http://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-just-made-all-the-scientific-research-it-funds-available-for-free
Here’s a refresh of a post from almost a year ago, looking at the different colours produced by metal ions in flame tests: http://wp.me/p4aPLT-4L
Because science is cool and so is fire! I actually got to see the copper one myself back in high school, even though we didn't do any flame tests in my chemistry class. My friends and I decided to burn some of our (graded and returned) homework because we'd all found the project particularly frustrating, and one of the projects happened to contain copper wire. We, being huge nerds, were delighted.
Flame Test Colours, by Compound Interest. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
Gracious Calamity
Our latest CCThing is Gracious Calamity, gorgeous CC licensed folk music from Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. They’re hometown favorites there, where our Communications Manager met them this month.
When asked why the band licenses under Creative Commons, they told her, “It just seemed like the right thing to do!”
Listen at Bandcamp.
Gracious Calamity's music is available under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. That means that you can share and even remix or build on their music so long as you provide attribution, don't use it for commercial purposes, and license the result under the same license.
While most faculty members are still unaware of open educational resources, use in introductory courses nearly rivals that of traditional textbooks, study finds.
A lot of educators dislike the costs of traditional textbooks that they have to pass onto their students. Unfortunately, most of them either don't know about open educational resources, or don't know how to find suitable ones for their classrooms. Sounds to me like someone needs to tag in some librarians...
Straumsheim, C. (2016, July 26). Study finds use of open educational resources on the rise in introductory courses. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/07/26/study-finds-use-open-educational-resources-rise-introductory-courses
A Houston-area girl gets a new prosthetic limb thanks to a library makerspace, 3D printing technology, and a community of designers and volunteers.
Apparently, one of the cool things you can do in your public library is literally give a kid a hand. And the reason I'm talking about it here instead of on my other blog is that some of the designs for "e-NABLE hands" are licensed under Creative Commons or GNU, so they're available for free if someone wants to take them and print out their own parts for a prosthetic. Pretty cool!
Perrero, M. (2016, August 9). Printing for a Cause. American Libraries Magazine. Retrieved from https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/printing-for-a-cause/
DC's clinging to these two like Norman Bates clings to his mother's corpse.
Whether or not you like the way DC Comics and Warner Brothers are handling these two characters, it's hard to deny that they're pretty important to our culture. This video gives a good overview of US copyright and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, and also why it's important that characters pass into the public domain. Though you might have to grit your teeth a little if you're a fan of the Batman v. Superman movie...
Schmidt, A. (2016, July 13). Why Everybody Wins If Batman & Superman Are Public Domain. Cracked.com. Retrieved from http://www.cracked.com/video_20010_why-everybody-wins-if-batman-superman-are-public-domain.html
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the US government over ‘unconstitutional’ use of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Copyright is a bit of a passion of mine (otherwise I probably wouldn't be running this blog) and...yeah, it's pretty broken. So I'm going to be watching this case avidly. I hope you guys do too -- after all, it's your technology too.
Doctorow, C. (2016, July 21). America's broken digital copyright law is about to be challenged in court. Guardian News and Media. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/21/digital-millennium-copyright-act-eff-supreme-court
You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry.
But if you don't have that kind of money to drop on an art catalog, you can also check it out in digital format for free online. Also available is a whole boodle ("more than 400,000") of free images, but I'll let you link-walk to that through the article to spare me having to write up two citations for this post.
Marshall, C. (2015, March 28). Download 448 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Open Culture. Retrieved from http://www.openculture.com/2015/03/download-422-free-art-books-from-the-metropolitan-museum-of-art.html
Do you want some ebooks? Here are some ebooks! Also an open library where you can go and make lists and add pages, because their goal is to have a web page for every book ever published. Does your favorite book already have a page?
The Internet Archive. (2016). Open Library. Retrieved from https://openlibrary.org/
There’s an awesome Facebook group of hundreds of librarians talking about the impact of PokemonGo on their libraries and their patrons - especially the kids and teens - and they had some questions about fair use, permissible use, the PokemonGo Terms of Use and nominative use of logos. I thought some of my answers might be of interest to the wider world of educators, museum-folk and Pokemon fans - with a warning that all of this is not legal advice (nothing posted on @fyeahcopyright is), it’s US-law focused and will not apply to any other country, and may change based on changes to their ToU and/or US law.
One of the librarians asked about the Terms of Use on the PokemonGo website. It’s basically silent when it comes to fair use, which isn’t unusual; companies don’t want to explain what they consider fair use at a specific moment in time for a certain area, because the laws are actually different all around the world - most countries don’t have Fair Use, as a matter of fact. But in the US, we do, and Fair Use is a lawful use of copyright. It’s not a defense to infringement, and since it’s a lawful use, it means that creating follow-on content that includes third-party copyrighted content (ie drawings or printouts of Pokeballs, Pokemon, Pokestops, Gyms, and even Trainers) can be lawful, especially when it’s not done for commercial purposes - and promoting library services and/or activities has never been found by a court in the US to be a commercial purpose. (I’m not sure it’s ever been litigated, but it’s definitely never been ruled commercial.) Copyright is NOT a monopoly in the US - or, actually, any other “western” country. Therefore, creating follow-on works is not a violation of the bit in the ToU which mentions that PokemonGo content is “protected by United States and international copyrights, trademarks and other intellectual property laws.”
A question was also asked about “fannish purposes” - but Fair Use is so much broader than that. An explanation of a lot of aspects of Fair Use is at here, on @transformativeworks legal committee FAQ; you don’t have to be doing something as a fan for it to be Fair Use. You just have to do something transformative, or add commentary, educational content or discussion to it - or use it in a nominative way (ie to identify what you’re talking about).
You can think about it this way: If something ‘adds value to the original’ and allows for ‘the creation of new information, new aesthetics, new insights and understandings’ then it tilts towards Fair Use, especially if it’s noncommercial, and only a small section of the source work is taken.
If a biz/school/library/museum wants to create buttons or badges - the metal or plastic kind - that might be seen as a derivative work and thus printing things off the Internet to make hundreds of them might not qualify as Fair Use, unless the image found online was modified in a way that would be transformative. However, having a submission process for kids to submit their own fanart of Pokemon characters, or even PokeBalls or the Library as a Gym or PokeStop, and then using that content on badges (or stickers, or buttons, or “Gym Cards”) likely would be Fair Use.
Also, buying stickers, books, etc at dollar stores or party stores and repurposing all of that onto badges, buttons, gym cards, dioramas, IRL Pokestops, whatever - is not fair use but also not a copyright violation because of the First Sale doctrine. That states that if you purchase something you can do anything you want with the physical item you’ve purchased. (That’s why you only purchase a license from a stock photo site, not the rights to the image itself; they can then control how you can legally use it under the contract you enter into with them.)
A question was also asked about putting logos on a Library Website; I’m also going to talk about using that sort of content on a FB page, or using things on Twitter or tumblr or SnapChat, Instagram, etc.
You can do this. You can do this because you’re using the trademark elements in a nominative/descriptive way, which is Fair Use because in the 1980s a court said that a newspaper could have a 976-style number of New Kids on the Block stuff and advertise it that way and because they were using the brand/trademark to identify the band (ie what they were talking about) and it would be impossible to identify the b®and without using the trademark, such descriptive and nominative use was Fair Use. There are some elements of weirdness about not using more than you need to, to identify what you’re talking about, but as your audiences include kids who may not be strong readers yet, the arguments are very strong in your favor to use images, even pulled from the Pokemon website.
However, if a library - or school, museum, store or other business - wants to use fan-created art content, I strongly recommend getting the fan’s permission - or embedding the content if it’s a video on YouTube or Vine - because fans hold copyright in the elements of their work that are original to them, even if it’s based on someone else’s something. Even if they’re three years old. If submissions are happening on-site, it’s a good idea to have the submitter fill out a form - which can be the size of an index card - including their name (at least a first name), the parent’s name if the kid is under 13, and a tickybox for them to, er, tick that says they grant a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to the library to use their submission for all library-related purposes would cover all the rights necessary in an IRL context - and in most online contexts too - but not the contexts that involve sale of the fanart or fanfilms, or use of them for marketing purposes.
Pokemon Go seems to be taking the world by storm, or at least the corners of the world I regularly interact with. Here's a write-up on fanwork, copyright, and libraries, which are all things I'm very fond of talking about (I'm sure you've all noticed).
hllangel, travelingheidi. (2016, July 17). ef yeah copyright law. Retrieved from http://www.isfanficlegal.com/post/147575468844/theres-an-awesome-facebook-group-of-hundreds-of
A reminder that your instagram photos are actually, totally and really yours (if you’re the one who clicked the shutter/button); only a licensee/assignee can legally sell them for $90,000
In other words:
(a) The Washington Post article yesterday was very wrong (and when writing about legal issues, even for the Style section, they should really ask at least one lawyer who specializes in the topic); and
(b) There are attorneys, organizations and clinics that may be able to help you sue if someone makes a copy of your art, adds no transformative content/elements to it, and sells it for $90,000.
The 4th paragraph of the Washington Post article says this:
This month, painter and photographer Richard Prince reminded us that what you post is public, and given the flexibility of copyright laws, can be shared — and sold — for anyone to see.
They’re half-wrong. Yes, what you post publicly is public - but that does not mean that it is in the “public domain”, and it definitely does not mean that “flexible” copyright laws allow for it to be legally sold.
Yes, it’s probably true that, given the flexibility of copyright laws, what you post publicly can be shared for anyone to see; most social media sites, including Instagram and tumblr, state in the Terms of Use that when you make a public post, you license the content in it to anyone on the site.
But that’s not what Prince did. With most of the prints in “his” show earlier this year, he printed out photos that he found on Instagram - with a single comment added - and sold them for nearly six figures each. He said they’re transformative works, it’s fair use.
But he’s not looking at his own case carefully enough when making that claim.
A Fair Use analysis, as the Second Circuit said in the 2013 Prince case, must look to the extent to which the new work contains new expression as embodied in such elements as composition, scale, color, media and general aesthetic. While the general aesthetic may have changed between instagram and gallery print, the rest of the elements do not seem to have changed, at least in the mid-resolution versions of the images that most of us have seen online. A change in the size of a print - combined with the commercial aspects of the sale of the art - are likely not enough to meet the transformativeness test.
The Cairou photos at issue in the 2013 Prince case were painted over, and significant changes were made in some of the images’ aesthetics; that didn’t happen here. Absent that, Fair Use only exists in the presence of commentary or criticism of the original content; it’s unclear whether the captions Prince engage in such actions. It’s not brilliant, it’s not ballsy, and it’s not way beyond its time; to call these all these prints inherently transformative diminishes the artistry of every follow-on creator.
The thing is, the only people who can ask the courts for redress over copyright infringement are the copyrightholders of the original photos, and at least tow of them have said they don’t want to do so. That doesn’t make Prince’s work noninfringing, and actually, the photogs can change their minds in the next few months and opt to sue even if they haven’t thus far.
Back in October, when the Instagram prints were first shown in a gallery, Prince was hit with a cease & desist letter from Donald Graham, a photog whose pictures he used - someone else had posted Graham’s photo to Instagram, in that circumstance. We haven’t been able to ascertain whether the photo taken by Graham was in the recent exhibit, or whether Prince has settled the dispute with Graham, although we’re trying to find out.
RT about this post on Twitter.
Update 5/29/2015
suicidegirlsoficial (possibly NSFW) have decided to sell the same exact content that Richard Prince sold for $90,000 for $90, and all the profits will go to support the EFF. He used five Suicide Girls instagram posts - and they’re now on sale in the Suicide Girls’ store.
hllangel, travelingheidi. (2015, May 29). fuck yeah copyright law. Retrieved from http://fyeahcopyright.tumblr.com/
