Category Archives: Resources

AUTHORS ALLIANCE SUBMITS AMICUS BRIEF IN SEDLIK v. DRACHENBERG

Posted December 23, 2024

The case Sedlik v. Drachenberg, currently pending before the 9th Circuit, presents the 9th Circuit a first opportunity to interpret the fair use right in the wake of the Warhol decision. Anticipating the far-reaching consequences for artists and authors, Authors Alliance filed an amicus brief in support of KVD. In our brief, we explained that (1) a distinct purpose is required for the first factor to tilt in favor of fair use, (2) a successful social media presence does not automatically render all postings “commercial,” and (3) concrete evidence is needed to prove the existence of a licensing market or the likelihood of it developing.

Restricting Innovation: How Publisher Contracts Undermine Scholarly AI Research

Posted December 6, 2024

This post is by Rachael Samberg, Director, Scholarly Communication & Information Policy, UC Berkeley Library and Dave Hansen, Executive Director, Authors Alliance This post is about the research and the advancement of science and knowledge made impossible when publishers use contracts to limit researchers’ ability to use AI tools with scholarly works.  Within the scholarly publishing […]

New White Paper on Open Access and U.S. Federal Information Policy

Posted November 18, 2024

Authors Alliance and SPARC have released the first of four planned white papers addressing legal issues surrounding open access to scholarly publications under the 2022 OSTP memo (the “Nelson Memo”). The white papers are part of a larger project (described here) to support legal pathways to open access.  This first paper discusses the “Federal Purpose […]

Text Data Mining Research DMCA Exemption Renewed and Expanded

Posted October 25, 2024

Earlier today, the Library of Congress, following recommendations from the U.S. Copyright Office, released its final rule adopting exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act’s prohibition on circumvention of technological protection measures (e.g.,  DRM).   As many of you know, we’ve been working closely with members of the text and data-mining community as well as our […]

Hachette v. Internet Archive Update: Second Circuit Court of Appeals Rules Against Internet Archive

Posted September 5, 2024

We got a disappointing decision yesterday from the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in the long-running Hachette v. Internet Archive (IA) copyright lawsuit about IA’s digitization and lending of books. The Court affirmed the district court’s decision that IA cannot circulate digital copies of books they have legitimately acquired in physical copies, even when only […]

Authors Alliance and SPARC Supporting Legal Pathways to Open Access for Scholarly Works

Posted August 27, 2024

Authors Alliance and SPARC are excited to announce a new collaboration to address critical legal issues surrounding open access to scholarly publications.  One of our goals with this project is to clarify legal pathways to open access in support of federal agencies working to comply with the Memorandum on “Ensuring Free, Immediate, and Equitable Access […]

Copyright Office Recommends Renewal of the Existing Text Data Mining Exemptions for Literary Works and Films

Posted October 19, 2023

Authors Alliance is delighted to announce that the Copyright Office has recommended that the Librarian of Congress renew both of the exemptions to DMCA liability for text and data mining in its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking for this year’s DMCA exemptions, released today. While the Librarian of Congress could technically disagree with the recommendation to […]

Authors Alliance and Allies Petition to Renew and Expand Text Data Mining Exemption

Posted September 6, 2023

Authors Alliance is pleased to announce that in recent weeks, we have submitted petitions to the Copyright Office requesting that it recommend renewing expanding the existing text data mining exemptions to DMCA liability to make the current legal carve-out that enables text and data mining more flexible, so that researchers can share their corpora of […]

Prosecraft, text and data mining, and the law

Posted August 14, 2023

Last week you may have read about a website called prosecraft.io, a site with an index of some 25,000 books that provided a variety of data about the texts (how long, how many adverbs, how much passive voice) along with a chart showing sentiment analysis of the works in its collection and displayed short snippets […]