In early February, Columbia University Libraries and LYRASIS launched the Virtual Copyright Education Center (VCEC) pilot project. With a stellar faculty drawn from experts in research libraries and museums, “the project will introduce new classes to enable cultural heritage professionals to move beyond a basic understanding of copyright. The project also includes business planning to develop a sustainable service model to…

Today kicks off Fair Use Week, an annual celebration of the important doctrine of fair use/fair dealing. Previously, ARL has debunked common fair use myths, and reviewed the fundamentals of fair use. This year, in acknowledgement that our world has changed since February 2020, we highlight three ways that fair use has allowed us to move our lives online during the COVID-19…

If you make and share things online, professionally or for fun, you’ve been affected by copyright law. You may use a service that depends on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in order to survive. You may have gotten a DMCA notice if you used part of a movie, TV show, or song in your work. You have almost certainly…

Advance Warnings About Consequences Of Australian Link Tax Problems. In advance of announcements by Facebook and Google this week related to the Australian Code Proposal, Jonathan Band and Sean Flynn warned about how the proposal would disrupt free expression rights and international law. While Public Knowledge also warned about the negative consequences for the public interest and potential for news…

Musician & Educator Uses Social Media To Have Copyright Strikes Lifted. Musician and songwriter Rick Beato, who testified before the Senate IP Subcommittee this summer about the importance of the DMCA, took to his YouTube channel with a passionate post about his first two Content ID copyright strikes in over five years. He’d received these after rightsholders submitted notices on…

France and Australia have moved forward with plans to force Google (and, in Australia, also Facebook) to pay existing media companies for linking to news content. In theory, the laws adopted in France and Australia are designed to compensate these news organizations for the benefit Google and Facebook derive from linking to news. But both […]

In all the madness that made up the last month of 2020, a number of copyright bills and proposals popped up—some even became law before most people had any chance to review them. So now that the dust has settled a little and we have some better idea what the landscape is going to look like, it is time to…

Virtual Opportunities To Honor Black History Month. With limited in-person celebrations this year due to the pandemic, a number of museums and organizations are offering virtual opportunities to honor Black History Month. Mashable’s Chase DiBenedetto lists out some of the best online exhibits available, such as: Portraits of African Americans at the National Portrait Gallery, Slavery Narratives from the Museum of…

The CASE Act Still Faces Challenges. The controversial Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act), which passed as part of a year-end Covid relief bill with almost no public debate, was signed into law in late December, but still has a long road ahead. Re:Create provided some clarification to the misinformation being shared about the bill and how the…

While you may not have heard, the controversial Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) was passed and signed into law just days before Christmas as Hollywood’s version of coal in the stocking for millions of vulnerable Americans. If you are wondering how you missed such an important change to our nation’s copyright laws, go easy on yourself. It…