News

Massive proliferation of books laid foundation for the country's industrial might. [31aug10]

Historian Eckhard Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century.

German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers. (...)

Germany ... didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.

Höffner's diligent research is the first academic work to examine the effects of the copyright over a comparatively long period of time and based on a direct comparison between two countries, and his findings have caused a stir among academics. Until now, copyright was seen as a great achievement and a guarantee for a flourishing book market. Authors are only motivated to write, runs the conventional belief, if they know their rights will be protected. (...)

Höffner explains that this "lively scholarly discourse" laid the basis for the Gründerzeit, or foundation period, the term used to describe the rapid industrial expansion in Germany in the late 19th century. The period produced later industrial magnates such as Alfred Krupp and Werner von Siemens.

The market for scientific literature didn't collapse even as copyright law gradually became established in Germany in the 1840s. German publishers did, however, react to the new situation in a restrictive way reminiscent of their British colleagues, cranking up prices and doing away with the low-price market.

Authors, now guaranteed the rights to their own works, were often annoyed by this development. Heinrich Heine, for example, wrote to his publisher Julius Campe on October 24, 1854, in a rather acerbic mood: "Due to the tremendously high prices you have established, I will hardly see a second edition of the book anytime soon. But you must set lower prices, dear Campe, for otherwise I really don't see why I was so lenient with my material interests."

Read full article on the Spiegel website

..seems a direct attack to open & alternative licensing. [27aug10]

The draft of a new copyright law in the Czech Republic seems like a direct frontal attack on alternative licensing schemes (including Creative Commons licenses.

Under the draft text, anyone who wants to use a public license must report to a copyright collective administrator. The administrator would then review the work in question and the creator would have to prove that he or she has created that work in the first place. Then, and only then, can a creator legally use a public license of their choice.

One of the key aspects of Creative Commons is the ease to obtain a license. You just browse to the Creative Commons website, select the license you want by answering a few simple questions, and then you get a block of code you can paste on any HTML website you are building to tell everyone what you can and cannot do. This is one of many reasons Creative Commons is so successful.

Now, it seems, the Czech Republic is working to end this practice altogether. According to a very disturbing report by Czech media site Piratske Noviny. A manually translated version to English is available here.

Read full story on Zeropaid.

Today quoting from music or literature has come to be seen as theft. [18aug10]

In reviewing "Common as Air", a new book by Lewis Hyde, MacArthur Fellow and professor at Kenyon and Harvard, a story on Minneapolis's Star Tribune explains that «...we've moved radically far in a long process of intellectual enclosure, privatizing and shutting down a vigorous cultural commons».

Mark Kramer adds that «The United States' Founding Fathers supported far less restrictive commons than have come to pass... Copyrights and patents originated as brief trade-offs, minimal, transient monopolies granted to stimulate and reward invention».

While highlighting such path throughout US history and questioning these recent restrictions, "Common as Air" provides a «brilliant and absorbing account of the development of restrictive and enduring private ownership of shared experience. This new book develops, in Hyde's own words, "a model and defense of our 'cultural commons,' that vast store of unowned ideas, inventions and works of art that we have inherited from the past and that we continue to create.»

Read full review here.

The practice of copyright assignment applied to free software projects. [15aug10]

The issues around copyright assignment and free software have always been a controversial topic and have played a major part in many forks and schisms in free software projects. Copyright assignment can unify a project under common ownership, or it can be misused to impose control. Richard Hillesley looks at the uses and misuses of copyright assignment as it is applied to free software projects.

Copyright denotes ownership of code, it is regarded as property and as such it can be bought, sold or assigned. This applies to all copyrighted material, and is a weakness in all free software licensing, which is why the Free Software Foundation has always recommended that the ownership of GPL code be assigned to the FSF, which itself has caused ructions among some developers in the past, notably between the developers of Xemacs and GNU Emacs.

The GPL, or any other software licence, depends upon the framework of copyright law. Copyleft is a hack on copyright law that puts the rights and responsibilities back into the hands of the user.

Read more at H-online.

...and public consultation open until August 31st. [02aug10]

The Brazilian Copyright Act (Law 9.610/98) is going to be reformed. A public consultation is open until August the 31st, after an extension of the initial period of 45 days in order to expand the opportunity for participation.

More than 1,200 contributions about the proposed changes, which have sparked intense debate in the blogosphere and on Twitter, have been submitted since June 14th.

At the end of the consultation, the text will be redrafted based on the proposals made by the public. There is no deadline for the Executive to submit the project to the Congress.

More info [in Portuguese]: http://www.cultura.gov.br/consultadireitoautoral/

Free online access to UK academic works. [27jul10]

Open Book is an independent publisher run by academics for academics and for the readers of academic work. This UK-based Social Enterprise company publishes high quality, peer-reviewed monographs in the humanities and social sciences and ensures the widest possible distribution of its publications.

The Open Book website provides free online access to read digital versions of all publications, along with download of printable digital versions of both the entire book and individual book chapters, while allowing authors to maintain copyright on their own works.

More details: Openbookpublishers.com

Survey on practices and attitudes towards Open Access publishing. [20jul10]

This anonymous survey is being conducted by the SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project, co-funded by the European Commission under the FP7 Grant Agreement Nr. 230220 (Science in Society Programme). The study is investigating publishing practices and attitudes towards Open Access publishing. More information about the SOAP project can be found on the project's public website.

This survey is primarily aimed at active researchers in public and private organisations, from all fields of the research in the sciences and humanities. It focuses on publication of research articles in peer-reviewed journals. It should take about 10-15 minutes to complete. Results will be made publicly available in the second half of 2010.

Click here to take the survey.