Copyright News (July 11)
Internet Archive revives MTV, Brazil bans books, US affirms musicians' termination rights for streaming
Preservation
MTV News Lives On In Internet Archive (Deadline, 2 July)
“Days after Paramount Global purged online content of MTV News, as well as Comedy Central, TVLand and CMT, MTV News has resurfaced on the Internet Archive. There is now a searchable collection of more than 460,000 web pages previously available on MTVNews.com now accessible on the organization’s Wayback Machine link here.”
Policy
New UNESCO publication: “Celebrating the Living Heritage of Indigenous Peoples” (I July)
“The publication weaves together testimonies from Indigenous People’s communities in regard to their efforts to safeguard their intangible cultural heritage, some of which are inscribed on the UNESCO Lists.
On 11 June 2024, UNESCO launched a new book Celebrating the living heritage of Indigenous Peoples in the presence of Leslie Urteaga Pena Minister of Culture of Peru.”
Creative Commons and the Balance of Interests in Authors’ Rights/Copyright
A Master’s Thesis (in Arabic) by Rafic Chaker Hachem
“Abstract: Striking the Balance: Creative Commons and the Evolution of Copyright in the Digital Age Introduction. In the age of rapid
technological advancements, the realm of intellectual property rights has faced unprecedented challenges. As society embraces the digital revolution, traditional copyright laws struggle to keep up with the evolving landscape of knowledge dissemination and creative content.
Recognizing the need for a paradigm shift, Creative Commons emerged as a beacon of innovation, proposing a unique copyright framework founded on the principle of “Some Rights Reserved”….Read the full thesis in Arabic: https://creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/رفيق-شاكر-هاشم-المشاع-الإبداعي-وآثاره-على-ميزان-المصالح-في-ضوء-قوانين-الملكيّة-الفكريّة-الرسالة-النّسخة-الإلكترونيّة-الأخيرة-ا.pdf”
Big Telecom Prepares For The Final Killing Blow Against Net Neutrality (TechDirt, 11 July)
“Back in April the Biden FCC once again voted along party lines to restore net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump FCC in a flurry of sleazy industry behavior that included using fake and dead people to create the illusion of public support…
With the return of the rules, the telecom industry is once again taking the matter to court, filing a flurry of lawsuits in late May claiming the FCC lacks the authority not just to enforce net neutrality, but to protect broadband consumers at all.”
Chicago police misconduct files will soon be made public. ‘This is a huge step forward for transparency’ (WBEZ Chicago, 31 May)
“The Chicago Police Department announced Thursday that records of all misconduct investigations will soon be made public, bringing light to a disciplinary process that has long faced criticism for being secretive and overly lenient.”
AI
Kacper Szkalej and Martin Senftleben
“This article maps the impact of Share Alike (SA) obligations and copyleft licensing on machine learning, AI training, and AI-generated content. It focuses on the SA component found in some of the Creative Commons (CC) licences, distilling its essential features and layering them onto machine learning and content generation workflows…. the CC community can use copyright strategically to extend SA obligations to AI training results and AI output. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to use rights reservation mechanisms, such as the opt-out system available in EU copyright law, and subject the use of CC material in AI training to SA conditions. Following this approach, a tailor-made licence solution can grant AI developers broad freedom to use CC works for training purposes.”
GOOGLE RESEARCHERS PUBLISH PAPER ABOUT HOW AI IS RUINING THE INTERNET (Futurism, 4 July)
“The study, a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper spotted by 404 Media, found that the great majority of generative AI users are harnessing the tech to "blur the lines between authenticity and deception" by posting fake or doctored AI content, such as images or videos, on the internet. The researchers also pored over previously published research on generative AI and around 200 news articles reporting on generative AI misuse.”
AI pushes Google emissions upward (Axios, 3 July)
“This climate yin-yang is on display in the tech giant's latest environmental report.
-Google's corporate emissions rose another 13% last year and are up 48% compared to their 2019 baseline.
-That's partly because data centers serving AI and other applications are using more power.”
A Sociologist Finds His Place in the Tech Industry (ASANet Footnotes, 50:3)
“But how do designers know what the “house” should look like and how it should work? This is where researchers come in. Some of the studies we run help designers think carefully about the day-to-day lives of the people for whom they are building. What do people need when they are trying to accomplish a particular goal? What is it currently like to accomplish this thing in their day to day lives? How could it be different, and perhaps even better, for them?”
Clippy returns! (Alan Dix, 9 July)
“For those who don’t remember Clippy, it was an early AI agent incorporated into Office products. If you were in Word and started to type “Dear Sam”, Clippy would pop up and say “it looks like you are writing a letter” and offered potentially helpful suggestions. The problem was that Clippy was a modal dialog, that is, while it was showing you couldn’t type. So of you were in the middle of typing “Dear Sam, Thank you for your letter …”, everything after the point Clippy appeared would be lost. This violates a critical rule of appropriate intelligence, while Clippy did “good things when it was right”, it did not avoid doing “bad things when it wasn’t”
New York Times Co. fights OpenAI’s request for reporters’ source materials in copyright dispute (GeekWire, 8 July)
“The New York Times Co. is asking a federal judge to deny OpenAI’s request to turn over reporters’ notes, interview memos, and other materials used by journalists to produce stories that the media company alleges were used to help train the tech company’s flagship artificial intelligence models.”
The developers suing over GitHub Copilot got dealt a major blow in court (Verge, 10 July)
“A judge has tossed nearly all of the claims a group of developers brought against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit filed in 2022, as reported earlier by The Register. In a court order unsealed last week, a California judge left only two claims standing: one that accuses the companies of an open-source license violation and another that alleges breach of contract.”
Education
Laura M. Bernhardt, New Directions for Teaching and Learning
“This essay uses an example of a library instruction exercise in which otherwise competent online searching goes wrong as a springboard for reconceptualizing digital literacy as an environmental ethics of information. This reconceptualization is presented as a corrective measure for teachers and students grappling with the uses and misuses of AI tools and search technologies.”
Georgia lawsuit challenges anti-LGBTQ+ book bans over ‘real harms’ (Guardian, 3 July)
“The Southern Poverty Law Center and another group have amended a federal lawsuit against a Georgia school district to include a transgender student and a grassroots youth organization, effectively becoming the “first case challenging anti-LGBTQ book bans” in the state.
The move – done anonymously to protect the student – widens the case’s focus from how teachers are affected by censorship laws and policies in Georgia, to how those same policies affect children.”
Collection Wall (TU Delft)
“TU Delft Library is undergoing a transformation, turning its iconic book wall into the Collection Wall—an interactive experience designed to inspire exploration, discovery, and serendipity. This innovative project will visualize and activate both our physical and digital collections, fostering new connections and narratives for educational purposes and cultural programming. It stands as a key component of our mission to engage visitors through our library collections.”
Why PragerU is trying to get its videos into schools (NPR, 7 Mar)
“Despite the suggestive sound of its name, PragerU is not a university. It's a content creator. The conservative media nonprofit makes short, well-produced videos crafted to appeal to college students and young people. It has polished animations and titles like "What Radical Islam and the Woke Have in Common" and "Is There Really a Climate Emergency?”…
Arizona recently became the latest state where education officials have embraced online videos produced by PragerU. It follows at least four other states that approved Prager's material for use in public school classrooms”
Music
‘Landmark Victory’: Copyright Office Finalizes Rule Change On Streaming Royalties (Billboard, 9 July)
“The U.S. Copyright Office has finalized a new rule aimed at ensuring that songwriters who invoke termination rights to regain control of their music will actually start getting paid streaming royalties after they do so.”
Universal Music UK to Merge Island and EMI Labels in Next Stage of Restructuring (Billboard, 9 July)
“Universal Music Group is to merge its historic Island and EMI label divisions as part of a widespread restructuring of the company’s U.K. business that will also see the launch of new Audience and Media Division to support artists and labels.”
Art
Mary Beard and David Olusoga tackle Parthenon Marbles debate in British Museum panel (Art Newspaper, 8 July)
“In eight years’ time, Olusoga reiterated, it will be 200 years since Greece first asked for the marbles to be returned, having contested ownership since 1832. “I think the case is overwhelming that they are an essential part of the culture of Greece and they belong in the beautiful museum that the Greeks have built in anticipation of receiving them.” said Olusoga, refercing the the Acropolis Museum in Athens. The former diplomat Rory Stewart, another speaker, agreed that the marbles should be returned.”
Sanderson, R., (2024) “Implementing Linked Art in a Multi-Modal Database for Cross-Collection Discovery”, Open Library of Humanities 10(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.15407
“Yale University has implemented a knowledge graph based discovery system that brings together the various art, natural history, archival, conservation and bibliographic collections using Linked Open Usable Data standards such as Linked Art and IIIF. This system comprises more than 41 million records, which would expand to more than 2 billion RDF triples, and is thus at a similar scale to Europeana. This paper presents the lessons learned from the five year effort around the usability of linked data structures across the organization, the technologies needed to make use of the knowledge in a performant way, and the appropriate design paradigms for front end applications which make the graph easily and intuitively accessible to researchers and the public, including the necessity of consistency in data modeling, that records are an essential concept to maintain through multi-modal systems, and the use of hypertext and web caches to maintain the separation between systems.”
Freedom of Information
Brazil’s unparalleled spate of book bans is page out of US culture wars (Guardian, 2 July)
“The American Library Association reported that 4,240 unique titles were banned in US schools and libraries in 2023, more than in any other year. Many of them are related to issues of LGBTQ+ communities or race.
No similar survey has been carried out in Brazil, but experts agree that cases are rising and have even drawn comparisons with censorship during the 1964-85 military dictatorship, when the regime banned about 350 titles.”
Artwork featuring Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters removed by Sydney council after threats of violence (Guardian, 8 July)
“A Sydney council has removed a “playful” artwork of Jesus Christ overlaid with Looney Tunes characters after a torrent of online abuse.
Sydney artist Philjames’ work, Jesus Speaks to the Daughters of Jerusalem, was removed from the Blake Art Prize exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre after fierce criticism was directed at the artist and gallery on Friday, just two days before the eight-week exhibition ended.”