Authors Alliance and SPARC have released the second 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 discussed the “Federal Purpose […]
Authors Alliance has been closely monitoring the impact of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Section 1202, and we have been watching the development in UK copyright law closely. Here are some updates.
In December 2024 we announced a new project to develop a public interest AI training corpus focused on books. Over the last few months we’ve been actively engaging a diverse set of stakeholders in the development of The Public Interest Corpus. The Public Interest Corpus is focused on developing large-scale, high-quality AI training data from […]
Audible has a history of relying on ambiguous contractual terms to reduce author payouts. Despite Audible’s track record, the courts were unsympathetic to Teri Woods’ grievances.
A little over a week ago, the National Institutes of Health issued a new guidance policy on indirect costs in Federal grant awards. Presently, NIH negotiates the indirect cost rate with individual institutions through a carefully regulated process that ensures an appropriate rate for a given institution’s unique circumstances, while also providing robust safeguards and […]
Facts of the Case On February 11, Third Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas (sitting by designation for the U.S. District Court of Delaware) issued a new summary judgment ruling in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. He overruled his previous decision from 2023 which held that a jury must decide the fair use question. The decision was […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
