Category Archives: Blog

Moving Toward a “Moral Right” of Attribution in U.S. Copyright Law

Posted May 4, 2016

Authors Alliance Executive Director Michael Wolfe

When Authors Alliance launched two years ago with its Principles and Proposals for Copyright Reform, one of the reforms we endorsed was support for a formal “moral right” of attribution. In that document, we said:

The law should recognize the right of authors to be acknowledged as creators of our works. This is especially important for those of us who create in order to contribute to knowledge and culture. Attribution serves not only our interests as authors, but also the reading public’s interest in knowing whose works they are consuming and society’s interest in an accurate record of the intellectual heritage of humankind.

A fitting way for Authors Alliance to celebrate its second birthday was to serve as an invited speaker at Authors, Attribution, and Integrity: Examining Moral Rights in the United States, a symposium organized by the U.S. Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. on April 18.

Although you might expect otherwise, copyright law in the United States does not provide authors with the right to be acknowledged as the creator of their works. The United States has long resisted adoption of so-called “moral rights,” including the right of attribution, mostly because of objections from copyright industry firms, not from authors. However, there has been increasing momentum in particular around our adoption of a right of attribution. The Symposium reflected this renewed energy, and a building consensus toward the idea that a right of attribution could work here, to the benefit of our creative economy.

The Copyright Office announced that it will be seeking public comments on moral rights issues very soon. Authors Alliance plans to submit formal comments, but below is a summary of some of the discussion at the April 18 symposium.

On the topic of attribution, two central themes were explored. First, what would an American attribution right look like? Second, what do authors and the public stand to gain from an attribution right?

Jeffrey MacKie-Mason Joins the Authors Alliance Board of Directors

Posted April 28, 2016

We are delighted to welcome Jeffrey MacKie-Mason to our Board of Directors, where he joins Pamela Samuelson, Molly Van Houweling, Carla Hesse, and Thomas Leonard in guiding the strategic decisions and activities of the Authors Alliance. MacKie-Mason is the University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer at UC Berkeley, and has joint appointments as a professor in the School of Information and in the Department of Economics.

MacKie-Mason came to Berkeley from the University of Michigan, where he served as Dean of the School of Information for 2010-2015. He was on the Michigan faculty for 29 years as Professor of Information and Computer Science, Professor of Economics, and Professor of Public Policy.

MacKie-Mason earned his Ph.D. in economics from MIT and a master’s in public policy from the University of Michigan. He is a pioneering scholar in the economics of the Internet, online behavior, and digital information creation and distribution. His more than 85 publications appear in scholarly journals in the areas of economics, computer science, law, public policy, and information and library science. He has served on two advisory boards to the NSF, and on many editorial boards. He has testified before the US Department of Justice and the US Federal Trade Commissions, and consulted on competition and pricing for numerous clients, including AT&T, Electronic Data Systems, Compuware, Hewlett-Packard, AOL Time Warner, Telstra (Australia), Valassis Communications, GO Computer, and Sun Microsystems.

“We are fortunate to have Jeff’s deep expertise contributing to the Authors Alliance mission,” says Executive Director Mike Wolfe. “His experience and leadership at the intersection of libraries, authorship, technology, and public policy are an excellent fit for us.”

We look forward to working together with Jeff to empower authors in the digital age!

New Resource: Adventures in Self-Republishing by Jeff Hecht

Posted April 26, 2016

Authors Alliance member Jeff Hecht successfully regained the rights to a number of his books, and has subsequently re-published them himself. In his new guide, Adventures in Self-Republishing: How to Get Your Old Books Back into Print, Hecht shares his experience with everything from formatting and OCR to working with self-publishing websites and e-reading tools. An abbreviated version of the guide is available as a free download; the full-length version may be purchased here.

We thank Mr. Hecht for sharing this indispensable resource for any author looking to self-publish after a successful reversion of rights!

Europe’s Fractured Public Domain: An Update on Anne Frank’s Diary

Posted

April 26 is World Intellectual Property Day—an opportunity to highlight and learn more about IP issues around the world. This year, a group of Polish and European organizations has provided a sobering example of what can go wrong with overlong, complicated, and internationally inconsistent copyright terms.

To call attention to these issues, Centrum Cyfrowe, in Poland, has published The Diary of Anne Frank online—but most would-be readers won’t be able to actually see it. Due to a quirk of copyright law, the original manuscripts of the diary are in the public domain in Poland, but not in the much of the EU or the United States. That means that the text of the Diary will be visible to readers within Poland only, and will be geo-blocked throughout the rest of the world. CC Poland’s project website provides a succinct explanation of this strange state of affairs.

Authors Alliance wrote an analysis of the unfortunate status of this beloved book late last year, when it appeared that the Diary might come into the public domain in parts of Europe on January 1, 2016. However, even within Europe copyright terms are set by a confusing patchwork of inconsistent national laws. According to CC Poland’s analysis, the Diary will finally be released into the public domain in 2037 (in the Netherlands) and 2042 (in the US). Other countries, such as France, Spain, and the UK, all have their own term lengths.

When copyright terms are overly long and conflict with one another, as in the case of The Diary of Anne Frank, public access to culture and knowledge is unnecessarily curtailed. Europe would benefit from consistent, reasonable laws across borders. In the words of CC Poland, “if we want to fully unlock the potential of our rich cultural heritage we need clear rules that allow anyone to determine whether a work is still protected by copyright.” For public-minded authors, having their works eventually enter the public domain, where they might be shared and stewarded by communities across national borders and languages, is a safeguard for their legacies. Access to works of global importance should not be arbitrary. World Intellectual Property Day reminds us that we can do better.

Authors Alliance to Present Panel With California Lawyers for the Arts

Posted April 19, 2016

Brianna Schofield, Mike Wolfe, and Lila Bailey consider an audience question during their panel on authors’ rights at the AWP conference in Los Angeles.

Authors Alliance has been invited by California Lawyers for the Arts (CLA) to reprise our well-received panel discussion from the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference. “On Your Terms: Managing Your RIghts to Keep Your Work Available” will be presented on Wednesday, April 27 in Berkeley.

The event is open to CLA members and the general public. Registration is required on the CLA event page. (For those unable to attend, we have posted the slide deck from the presentation.)

Authors of all kinds are routinely asked to sign contracts that carve up their copyrights and determine where, how, and by whom their works can be published. This panel examines some of the ways authors can ensure that these agreements don’t stand between their work and their audience. Join Authors Alliance Executive Director Mike Wolfe and fellow copyright attorneys Lila Bailey and Brianna Schofield to work on demystifying embargoes, licenses, negotiations, rights reversions, and terminations of transfers. Be empowered to shape your own contracts!

Important Fair Use Decision Stands, Helps Keep Authors’ Works Findable

Posted April 18, 2016

Pamela Samuelson, President, Authors Alliance

There was very good news for authors in the Supreme Court’s decision not to review last year’s ruling in the Authors Guild v. Google litigation. That decision, which will now stand, found that Google’s scanning of in-copyright books from research library collections for purposes of creating an index and serving up snippets in response to user search queries was fair use, not copyright infringement. The Authors Guild’s leadership (and its lawyers) are undoubtedly disappointed in this outcome. But all authors who want their books to be found by readers who are interested in learning from those books have reason to celebrate the end of this decade-long litigation.

While we obviously can’t know for sure what the Court would have done had it decided to hear the Guild’s appeal, it is fair to infer that the Court was not so outraged by the Second Circuit’s ruling that it felt compelled to put the case on its docket. The Court’s rejection of the Guild’s petition does not, of course, mean that it approved the fair use ruling. Yet it is worth noting that the Court gave considerable deference to Judge Leval’s conception of fair use in its 1994 Campbell v. Acuff-Rose decision. It was the very same judge’s fair use analysis that the Court would have reviewed had it taken the Authors Guild v. Google case.

Authors Alliance filed a friend of the court brief in support of Google’s fair use defense, saying: “Book Search makes it possible for many who are not privileged to have physical access to research library collections to be able to discover that our works exist. Interested researchers should be able to find in an efficient way the ideas and contributions to human knowledge contained in our writings. We want our intellectual legacies to extend to a new generation of readers who nowadays search and find books almost exclusively online. Creation of a full-text searchable database of books provides these benefits.”

Judge Leval recognized the public benefit in making books more findable: “Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function is a transformative use, which augments public knowledge by making available information about Plaintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the Plaintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.”

Judge Leval could have gone on to say that authors of published books want those books to be findable and to be useful to readers who are looking for information that the books contain. So it isn’t just the public (and Google) who benefit from Book Search, but these authors as well.

Authors Alliance on the Road: Washington, D.C.

Posted April 14, 2016

photo credit: Architect of the Capitol | public domain

The cherry trees are in bloom in the nation’s capital, but our Executive Director, Michael Wolfe, won’t have much time for sightseeing—he’ll be traveling to Washington, D.C. to represent Authors Alliance at a series of events over the next ten days.

First on the agenda is DPLAFest, hosted by the Digital Public Library of America from April 14-16. The conference “brings together librarians, archivists, and museum professionals, developers and technologists, publishers and authors, teachers and students, and many others to celebrate DPLA and its community of creative professionals.” This year’s venues include the National Archives and Records Administration, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress.

On April 18, Mike will participate in a panel discussion at “Authors, Attribution, and Integrity: Examining Moral Rights in the United States,” a one-day symposium hosted by the U.S. Copyright Office at the Library of Congress. Topics will include the “historical development of moral rights, the value that authors place on moral rights generally and individual moral rights specifically, the various ways these rights are provided for under current law, and new considerations for the digital age.” He will speak about the current state of protection of moral rights in the U.S.

The American University Washington College of Law is hosting an Authors Alliance meet-and-greet with MIke Wolfe, Peter Jaszi, Mike Carroll, and Brandon Butler on April 19 at 3:30 PM. The university community is invited to bring questions and chat about topics such as rights reversion, maximizing the impact of publications, and the effects of copyright law on scholarship and teaching. The event will be held in Warren N102, Washington College of Law, 4300 Massachusetts Avenue N.W.

Finally, to wrap up a busy week of events, Mike will attend the inaugural Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI) Conference from April 20-22 at George Mason University. This invitation-only conference is being held for the first time in 2016, and launches an ambitious ten-year effort to bring together key stakeholders from around the world and chart a course in scholarly communication across disciplines.

Introducing Our Guide to Crafting a Rights Reversion Letter

Posted April 11, 2016

Books that have fallen out of print, or aren’t selling as well as they used to, can enjoy a second life thanks to rights reversion—the process by which an author may regain control of some or all of her rights in a previously published work. Thanks to reversion, works can appear online, in new editions, translations, or in other formats chosen by the author. Our Guide to Understanding Rights Reversion is a handy primer on the topic, and now, we are offering alongside it a brief Guide to Crafting a Reversion Letter with the goal of reverting rights. This all-important first step in the reversion process is not always straightforward, and our hope is that this guide (including letter templates) will help authors take the plunge in approaching their publishers to regain their rights. We’d like to thank Nicole Cabrera, Jordyn Ostroff, and Brianna Schofield of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley Law for their work in creating this guide.

Visit our Resources page to download our materials for free. While you’re there, be sure to check out our other resources and tools—and let us know about your rights reversion success stories!

Authors Alliance at the San Francisco Public Library

Posted April 6, 2016

Join Authors Alliance’s Pamela Samuelson and Michael Wolfe for a workshop at the San Francisco Public Library that will explore how authors and researchers can manage their legal rights and choose publication outlets with an eye on securing long-term impact and availability. Among the questions to be discussed:

What are terms to look for in publication contracts?
How and when does open access benefit authors?
What can be done to increase the availability of out-of-print and backlist titles?
What resources can authors who write to be read use in managing their own rights?

Audience members are encouraged to submit questions in advance to info@authorsalliance.org.

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is encouraged but not required. More information can be found here.

Our events programming, our tools and resources, and our advocacy all depend on the continued support of our members. Help us keep things going by joining, donating, and spreading the word!

Thank You, Los Angeles!

Posted April 5, 2016

The Authors Alliance team is back from Los Angeles, and we’re happy to report that our visit to UCLA and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference was a great success. We’d like to extend a warm welcome to all our new members!

An informal meet and greet event at the UCLA Library on March 31 brought together a group of faculty, staff, and others interested in issues of scholarly communication and copyright for a conversation with Mike Wolfe and UCLA librarians. To take those discussions even further, we’re planning an Authors Alliance workshop at UCLA in the near future—details to be announced soon.

From March 31 through April 2, we hosted a table at the AWP Bookfair, and were gratified by the level of interest and engagement from the writing community. Conference attendees kept us busy with questions about our resources and tools, and we were thrilled to have so many enthusiastic new members join the Authors Alliance. If you’d like to be part of our growing community of authors and creators, it’s easy to sign up online (membership is free).

In addition to staffing a robust information table, we also presented a conference panel, “On Your Terms: Managing Your Rights to Keep Your Work Available”, led by Authors Alliance executive director Michael Wolfe and copyright attorneys Brianna Schofield, and Lila Bailey. We were glad to see the session so well attended and were pleased to answer audience questions on topics ranging from Creative Commons licenses to rights reversions to publication contract language. For those attendees interested in having a reference version of the slides, and for those who were unable to attend, you are welcome to download the presentation here. Lila, Brianna, and Michael will also be reprising their presentation at a California Lawyers for the Arts event later this April—sign up while there is still room!

Thank you, Los Angeles, for such a memorable trip. We look forward to visiting again soon!