Author Archives: Authors Alliance

University of Michigan Press to build digital scholarship platform

Posted March 31, 2015

A much-needed boost to digital scholarship is in the works at University of Michigan Press, which announced this week that it will be receiving a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a durable, open-source platform for digital companions to printed publications. From the Michigan press release:

The grant will fund an effort to meet the growing needs of authors to durably connect their publications to related datasets, interactive information, video and other non-text based online content. The ultimate goal is to create a shareable, open-source solution for born-digital complementary monograph materials as well as a working model that maximizes the publishing strengths of university presses and the preservation expertise of libraries.

Authors Alliance applauds this effort and its promise for preserving the kinds of digitally-enabled scholarship many of our members create.

Scholarship should be lasting, but the web can be all too transient. To take one common example, citations to web-based resources run the risk of pointing to pages that have moved, changed, or are simply no longer there. Perma.cc is one approach to solving the citation problem, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the long-term preservation of “born-digital” scholarship.

Companion sites allow authors to provide complementary resources that work best off the page. Where datasets and “non-text based online content” are integral to a text, we need to make sure that they too are preserved and kept accessible. This newest effort from the University of Michigan Press is an admirable step in that direction.

Source: Michigan News

Fair Use Best Practices and Creative Communities

Posted February 27, 2015

Guest post by Founding Member Michael Madison

For a week about fair use, let me make fair use about authorship, and the shared goals of copyright, and in a very specific way.

First, some background: I first wrote at length about the purposes and law of fair use in a long paper published in 2004, A Pattern-Oriented Approach to Fair Use. I surveyed fair use cases and offered four related conclusions: To begin with, fair use decisions were (and are) more predictable and consistent than is commonly thought, and fair use decisions can be clustered around the idea that fair use should align with a “pattern” of creative practice. More broadly, as I wrote in a later paper (Some Optimism About Fair Use and Copyright Law):

creativity and knowledge production is an emergent property of patterned social behavior; … those patterns exist concurrently with but distinct from market-based production of knowledge goods by individuals and firms; [and] those patterned behaviors can be identified as institutions, and exempting those institutions from the discipline of copyright’s scheme of exclusive rights is likely to increase the social welfare produced by the copyright system as a whole and is likely to not diminish the social welfare produced by the market side of copyright

In short, what’s good for fair use is good for authors, and vice versa.

More important, however, that paper was timed – coincidentally – to align with the emerging “Best Practices in Fair Use” project at the Center for Social Media (now Center for Media and Social Impact) at American University, and the efforts of that project’s leaders, Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi.

The key insight motivating the Best Practices project was a close cousin of my pattern-oriented argument: That the power of fair use lies not merely with individuals but, importantly, with communities – creative communities. Authorial communities.

Since 2006, CMSI has partnered with a number of not-for-profit organizations to produce “statements” of best practices for members of specific creative communities that are grounded simultaneously in deep knowledge of each community’s sense of its own fair creative practice as well as in generally accepted principles of copyright law. The full roster and text of the statements are available at the CMSI website, at http://www.cmsimpact.org/fair-use (disclosure: for several of the statements, I served on a Board of Legal Advisors that reviewed them prior to publication).

The Statements, like fair use itself, are imperfect in any number of ways. But the perfect need not be the enemy of the good. And it’s very good indeed to have a means for recognizing that creative communities’ practices inform the shape of fair use law, and allowing those communities to take active and considered part in articulating how fair use should work for them. They are an important reminder that while copyright’s exclusive rights are important to authors as creators of individual works, fair use is equally important to authors as members of communities.

Why is Fair Use Good for Authors?

Posted February 25, 2015

Authors Alliance Co-Founder Pamela Samuelson

Authors and artists rely on copyright’s doctrine of fair use far more than they may realize. February 23-28 is Fair Use Week this year, so it’s a good time to think about when and why fair uses benefit authors. (Fair uses of copyrighted works are not infringements; here’s a link to the Authors Alliance FAQ about fair use.) Authors and artists are likely to make and benefit from fair uses in every phase of the creative process and long thereafter.

The preparatory phase of creative work often involves making and being surrounded by fair use copies of materials that contain the information or inspiring words or images that the author/artist needs as raw materials. Sometimes authors search through large numbers of documents or other works to find the exact words or images that they need to prove or illustrate a point they want to make or to set context for the story they plan to tell. Often, the perfect source can only be found by scouring through reams of material, selecting from this a relatively small number of candidates for the use, and then as they create the work they have in mind, figuring out which is the right quote or image to use and where exactly to place it. Fair use copying is an integral part of this phase of the creative process.

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Fair Use and the Ecstasy of Influence

Posted February 23, 2015

Authors Alliance Co-Founder Molly Van Houweling

In honor of fair use week, we’re taking a look back The Ecstasy of Influence, by award-winning author Jonathan Lethem. (Read more about Lethem’s work in this recent review.)

Lethem, who serves on the Authors Alliance Advisory Board, does not mention fair use in his 2007 essay (which is also one of a collection in his book of the same name). Instead, The Ecstasy of Influence embodies fair use with both its text and technique.

The text is a reflection on the role of inspiration and appropriation in all acts of artistic creation. Its purpose (as Lethem later described in an essay entitled The Afterlife of Ecstasy), was to reveal “the eternal intertextuality of cultural participation—of reading, writing, making things from other things.” In so doing, Lethem implicitly defends fair use, which the U.S. Supreme Court has described in Campbell v. Acuff Rose as a “guarantee of breathing space within the confines of copyright” that often privileges the transformation of copyrighted works into new works that do not supersede the originals but rather add “something new, with a further purpose or different character, altering the first with new expression, meaning, or message.”

The Ecstasy of Influence demonstrates this type of transformation through its technique of respectful re-mix. The 8000-word essay reads as a coherent expression of a singular authorial voice. But Lethem reveals at the end why the subtitle is “A Plagiarism.” He presents a key, in which he “names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I ‘wrote’ (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way)” and clarifies that “[n]early every sentence I culled I also revised, at least slightly — for necessities of space, in order to produce a more consistent tone, or simply because I felt like it.”

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In Search of James Bond’s Essence

Posted February 8, 2015

Authors Alliance Co-Founder Pamela Samuelson

Having read several of Ian Fleming’s books as a youngster and seen virtually every James Bond movie, I have long been intrigued by the question: what is the essence of James Bond as a character? 007, yes. Shaken, not stirred, for sure. Handsome in a tuxedo or a swimsuit, yes, as well. Narrow escapes in exotic locations, that too. But surely these bits of his persona are not the essence of his (fictional) character.

The question is not just one for idle debate on a late winter evening. There has been litigation about whether those who depict James Bond-like characters without getting permission from those who claim copyrights in the books and movies are infringers.

MGM, for example, once sued Honda for copyright infringement because one of Honda’s television commercials featured a Bond-like character in a Honda del Sol automobile to show off the car’s detachable roof.

In the ad, a young, well-dressed couple was driving along a highway in one of Honda’s cars while being chased by a high-tech helicopter. A monstrous villain with metal-encased arms jumped out of the helicopter, landed on the car’s roof, and threatened the couple with imminent harm. To dispatch the villain, the male driver, with a flirtatious turn to his companion, released the Honda’s detachable roof, sending their foe into space and effecting the couple’s speedy get-away.

A well-known adage of copyright is that this law protects an author’s expression, not his or her ideas. So is Bond’s character an idea or an expression?

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Authors Alliance Submits Comment on 1201 Exemption Petition

Posted February 6, 2015

Last fall, Authors Alliance began the process of petitioning for an exemption to the law that prohibits the circumvention of DRM in order to facilitate the fair use of copyrighted content in multimedia ebooks. We are pleased to announce that the next step in the process of obtaining the exemption is complete.

Working with counsel from the University of California, Irvine Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic and the University of Colorado, Boulder Samuelson-Glushko Technology Law & Policy Clinic, and our co-petitioners, the American Association of University Professors, the University Film and Video Association, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and authors Mark Berger and Bobette Buster, the multimedia ebook authors’ comment in support of the petition was filed today.

We will continue to provide updates on this important exemption as the process moves forward.

Download Authors Alliance’s comment.

Nous sommes Charlie

Posted January 8, 2015

Authors Alliance is appalled at the recent attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, its staff, and bystanders in Paris. The right and ability to express oneself freely is at the heart of what makes authorship in the public interest both possible and powerful. Our members need to be able to express their views, even when—especially when—they are controversial, unpopular, or offensive. It is simply unacceptable for violence to be used to silence speech.

We send our deepest condolences to the families and friends of yesterday’s victims. It is all we can to do to stand in support of free expression and against those who would silence it. We can only hope that our efforts to empower authors to better disseminate their work will help ensure that their voices cannot be muzzled. Today, nous sommes tous Charlie.

Working with the Chimp

Posted January 7, 2015

By Authors Alliance Co-Founder Tom Leonard

Last year Authors Alliance turned to a cartoon monkey, MailChimp, to handle our email. The chimp had more to offer than we realized, and through them we gained an unexpected view of fame, ca 2015, and the hidden virtue of sharing stuff for free.

At year’s end MailChimp was celebrated with the breakthrough podcast it sponsored, Serial, true crime journalism from public radio. Both chimp and reporters were embedded in the online chatter of fans (more than 5 million listeners) and the Saturday Night Live parody (more than 12 million viewers).

The adage that “time, perseverance, and ten years of trying will eventually make you look like an overnight success” could have been the New Year’s toast for both the writers and the software entrepreneurs. Serial built on more than a decade of skills developed on public radio, especially This American Life. If you search your email In box for “MailChimp,” you will find that institutions you trust have quietly turned to MailChimp in recent years.

This is stimulating history for Authors Alliance because it is another reminder that good writing and inspired ways of sharing work can be, in the long run, the way to standout. Serious writers deserve all that the market will provide as they reach their first audience, readers we may all hope will be renewed for years. But when that audience yields no real commercial benefit to author or publisher, it is time to embrace the MailChimp idea of “freemium.”

This new patois of software and media companies ought to be a word we all learn in 2015. One variety of “Freemium” offers free access, after the costs of producing the product have been recouped.

Serial is in the freemium family but its business plans, though very promising, are not settled yet. MailChimp seems to have written the book on how patient work (taking as long as an author might) produces a time to share. Ben Chestnut, MailChimp’s CEO, has posted this recollection:

For eight years, our company never thought about freemium. We didn’t even know the concept existed. For eight loooong years, we were focused on nothing but growing profits. If you had brought up the concept of “freemium” with us during those eight years, we probably would’ve looked at you like you were eff’ing insane, then went back to work. In fact, when we launched MailChimp in 2001, we didn’t even have a free trial option.

Sharing what you have produced for free is not a sign of inferior work, just the reverse. MailChimp produced such excellent software and services that the company was set up to reap the reputational advantages of offering significant content and tools to the public for free.

Chimps play tricks and Chestnut has been honest about his: “We don’t think of our free users as pesky, bandwidth-hogging ‘freeloaders’ that we have to monetize in some way. We love them just as much as the people who pay us money. Because we have the data that shows they will pay us money.”

The Authors Alliance translation is: the attention and stimulation you will get from readers are coin you will never see if your works live only on our library shelves.

Our year in review

Posted December 15, 2014

As Authors Alliance HQ wraps up a very busy inaugural year, it seems like a good time to reflect on what we’ve done so far and look ahead to how we plan to keep the pace in 2015. This is our 2014 year in review!

Authors Alliance launched in May with a kickoff event at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. At the launch, we released a set of principles and proposals to guide copyright reform efforts in order to better support public-minded authors and creators.

In July, we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Authors Guild vs. Google case in support of Google’s fair use defense. At issue was Google’s scanning of in-copyright books in order to make them searchable (but not readable) by the public. Our brief points out that authors who write to be read benefit from Google’s digitization and indexing of their books because this makes our works more discoverable without threatening our commercial interests.

And this fall, we initiated a petition to the Library of Congress to allow authors to bypass technical protection measures in order to make fair uses of video content in multimedia e-books.

In keeping with our mission, we joined with allies throughout the year to stand up for our principles on questions of public policy.

Authors Alliance has also dedicated considerable effort toward making resources that will help our members manage their rights and reach more readers. Our emphasis this year has been on developing a soon-to-be-released set of guidelines for authors who want to revert or reclaim rights in their works so they can be made more widely available.

We have also posted FAQs and other resources on topics such as fair use, open access, and copyright ownership, as well as blog posts on litigation, legislation, and other developments of significance to authors who want their works to be widely available.

Events and gatherings have been an important part of our year. In October, we participated in a Columbia Law School conference on making copyright law work for authors and we organized a panel discussion of authors, publishers, and other stakeholders at Harvard University, co-sponsored by the Berkman Center and the Harvard Office of Scholarly Communication, on “Authorship in the Digital Age: How to Make it Thrive.” A video of the Harvard event is is available online. Finally, we kicked off our workshop series this November with a first one on copyright and contract issues on the Berkeley campus.

So what’s on the agenda for 2015? First and foremost, we will continue to provide resources for authors, with projects planned on attribution practices, clarifying fair use in nonfiction writing, and common pitfalls in publication agreements. And our events calendar is filling up fast, with Authors Alliance planning panels, discussions, and workshops in Ann Arbor, Toronto, New York City, and the San Francisco Bay Area. As always, we’ll be vocal on matters of public policy that effect authors who write to be read.

Do you have ideas on how Authors Alliance can help support public interest authorship? Would you be interested in hosting an Authors Alliance event in your community? Let us know!

Authors Alliance seeks DMCA exemption to enable production of multimedia ebooks

Posted December 13, 2014

Multimedia ebooks are still in their early days, but they present new opportunities for authors to express their ideas, creativity, and scholarship. As UC Press’s Alison Mudditt said at the recent Authors Alliance panel at Harvard, “there are an increasing number of faculty who are doing research that cannot be reproduced purely in print form.” And the opportunities presented by multimedia ebooks extend well beyond academia. At the same panel, creative nonfiction writer Rachel Cohen explained how multimedia possibilities are changing her work:

There is, however, a legal wrinkle that can hamper authors’ ability to create multimedia works when those works depend on the use of third-party content for purposes like criticism and commentary. While authors can easily and lawfully quote one another’s words to these ends, the law introduces difficulties when it comes to making quotation-like uses of digital content.

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