Fair use, as many of our readers know, can be a tricky concept to pin down. What exactly does fair use mean? What makes it such an important part of U.S. copyright law? What are the “four factors” that courts consider when evaluating claims of fair use? And, perhaps most importantly of all, how does […]
We are pleased to announce the release of our brand-new guide to Fair Use for Nonfiction Authors! The guide is designed to empower authors to exercise their right to use source materials to further their research and writing goals by helping them to make confident fair use decisions. This new guide is the latest addition […]
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is hurting authors’ ability to make fair use. But you can help by taking 5 minutes to fill out this short survey. The problem: The DMCA makes it illegal to rip from DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and many other encrypted technologies, and this restriction is blocking authors’ ability to make […]
The island nation of Iceland—about the size of Virginia, and with a population of around 300,000—might be one of the smallest in the world, but it enjoys a robust influence on literature and culture that’s out of all proportion with its size. Thanks to a long tradition of universal literacy, a booming publishing industry, and […]
Last month, the Internet Archive announced the launch of the “Sonny Bono Memorial Collection,” a set of digitized full-text books published in the U.S. between 1923 and 1941. The collection takes advantage of an obscure section of U.S. copyright law, section 108(h), which allows libraries and archives to reproduce, distribute, and display books that are […]
Since our founding, Authors Alliance has been tracking developments around Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Every three years, the Copyright Office can adopt temporary exemptions to Section 1201’s prohibition against circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works. In 2016, we advocated for a streamlined, less burdensome rulemaking process […]
We would like to thank R. Anthony Reese, Chancellor’s Professor of Law at UC Irvine, for contributing the following post. U.S. copyright law gives an author the right, under certain conditions, to terminate a copyright transfer or license that the author granted decades earlier, as Lydia Loren’s earlier post explained. This termination right must be […]
The following guest post was written by Julia Wu and Eric Malmgren, students at the Intellectual Property, Arts, and Technology Clinic at UC Irvine Law. We’re grateful to the clinic students and to their director, Jack Lerner, for all their work in reviewing the Termination of Transfer tool. The law on termination of copyright transfers […]
Just in time for the start of the new academic year, Authors Alliance featured a series of Q&As with our members on the topic of open access and innovative academic publishing models. In celebration of Open Access Week, we’ve collected what these authors had to say about the benefits of making their works openly accessible. […]
Here at Authors Alliance, we like to keep up our copyright chops all year ’round, and we know that many of our readers do, too. In honor of Open Access Week, we’re re-posting this list, originally shared over the summer, of new books featuring Authors Alliance members. Best of all, three of the four titles […]
