- Google Wins Book Scanning Case (Giga Om) — will probably be appealed, though many authors will fear it’s good money after bad tilting at the fair use windmill.
- IBM Watson To Be A Platform (IBM) — press release indicates you’ll soon be able to develop your own apps that use Watson’s machine learning and text processing.
- MiniMetalMaker (IndieGogo) — 3D printer that can print detailed objects from specially blended metal clay and fire.
- MicroPython (KickStarter) — Python for Microcontrollers.
"fair use" entries
Four short links: 15 November 2013
Scan Win, Watson Platform, Metal Printer, and Microcontroller Python
Fair use: A narrow, subjective, complicated safe haven for free speech
Attorney Miles Feldman on the ins and outs of fair use.
Litigation and intellectual property attorney Miles Feldman addresses issues of fair use, including the deciding factors courts consider, research tools to determine the status of works, and Creative Commons licensing.
On pirates and piracy
The media industry's wholesale takeover of creativity is the real piracy.
Mike Loukides: "I'm not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven't paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity."
Film Criticism and YouTube Don't Play Nice
In an essay catalyzed by YouTube's removal of a film criticism archive, which included ripped clips from copyrighted movies, Matt Zoller Seitz addresses the disconnect between takedown policies and the gray areas of digital culture: There should be a way to distinguish between piracy-for-profit (or unauthorized, free redistribution) and creative, interpretive, critical or political work that happens to use…
News Roundup: Sony Reader Arrives in UK, Google Scanning Newspaper Archives, Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use
UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom: Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of interest from customers, and the rumour mills (or well-planned leak??) put a 6 figure number on the Sony Readers sold by the morning of Thursday 4th September. As I'm sure…
Colleges Weigh Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use Rights
The Copyright Clearance Center is extending its offer of blanket licenses to larger universities. In a 2007 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required), some school administrators expressed concern about the implicit waiver of fair use assertions: But some librarians are ambivalent about blanket licenses, Mr. Rehbach [Jeffrey R. Rehbach, the library-policy adviser at Middlebury College] says,…
Ruling: Consider Fair Use Before Issuing Takedowns
A fairly significant ruling came down Wednesday in Lenz v. Universal, a rather infamous case where Universal Music Publishing Group issued a takedown against a YouTube video of a young child dancing to a song in the background — a song in which Universal maintained some rights. Universal later acknowledged that this was a fair use of the music,…