Daily Archives: June 20, 2008

To the librarians

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Sergio just posted a review of a new book, Teaching of Intellectual Property – Principles and Methods, that sounds great and we’ll order it post-haste.  However, since today is the first day of summer, I thought I might offer a good summer read.

I was flipping through the pages of books we have recently acquired and stopped dead in my tracks when I found a book dedicated “To the librarians.”  What’s not to love about a book dedicated to us?

And turns out it’s a terrific read.  The book in question is this one:

 
Author: Weinberger, David
Title: Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder
Imprint: New York : Times Books, 2007.

Contents: The new order of order — Alphabetization and its discontents — The geography of knowledge — Lumps and splits — The laws of the jungle — Smart leaves — Social knowing — What nothing says — Messiness as a virtue — The work of knowledge.
          Subject (LC): Knowledge management.
          Subject (LC): Information technology–Management.
          Subject (LC): Information technology–Social aspects.
          Subject (LC): Personal information management.
          Subject (LC): Information resources management.
          Subject (LC): Order.
                  ISBN: 9780805080438
                  ISBN: 0805080430

You can learn more about the book by visiting its corresponding website and you can read a review of the book on Boing Boing.   The author, David Weinberger, is affiliated with the HLS Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and his bio is here.

To give you just a little taste, on p. 133, in the Social Knowing chapter:

. . . Westlaw makes a good profit providing the standard numbering of court cases, applying proprietary metadata to material in the public domain.  But just about every industry that creates or distributes content — ideas, information, or creativity in any form — exerts control over how that content is organized. . . .

This creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital order.  If they don’t allow their users to structure information for themselves, they’ll lose their patrons.  If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.

The paradox is already resolving itself.  Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we’re doing it not just as individuals.  Knowledge — its content and its organization — is becoming a social act.

Now that’s one book I’ll take pool-side this weekend.

New International IP book: Teaching of Intellectual Property – Principles and Methods

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The World Intellectual Property Organization and Cambridge University Press have recently published a handbook for professors to help develop international intellectual property law courses. There are chapters devoted to copyright, patent and trademarks, as well as content covering distance learning and skills training. The editors are all officials of WIPO; in fact Mr. Takagi is WIPO’s executive director.

Teaching of Intellectual Property: Principles and Methods.

Authors: Yo Takagi, Larry Allman & Mpazi A. Sinjela. 

ISBN 9780521716468 

WIPO, 2008

 http://www.wipo.int/ebookshop?cart_id=795588-43657301&lang=eng&cmd=display_pub&cat_id=1257

Description from the WIPO Web site:

Intellectual property (IP) comprises not only the valuable economic assets of private firms, but also the social and cultural assets of society. The potential impact of intellectual property assets is so great that it is likely to have a considerable effect on national and international economic development in the future. Despite this, the area of IP education is relatively new to many academic institutions, and principles and methods in teaching IP are still evolving. Against this backdrop, a number of internationally renowned professors and practitioners share their teaching techniques in their particular fields of expertise, including what they consider should be taught in terms of coursework. The result is a valuable handbook for teachers and those wishing to get up to speed on international IP issues.

Table of contents available at: http://assets.cambridge.org/97805217/16468/frontmatter/9780521716468_frontmatter.pdf

http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=9780521716468

 

Tools of the Trade, Part V

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This week’s tool has international flair.  The International Legal Research Tutorial is the product of a collaboration between Marci Hoffman (University of California, Berkeley) and Katherine Topulos (Duke University) and benefits greatly from the knowledge and experience of these two Foreign & International Law librarians. 

The tutorial takes users through a brief introduction to Interational Law and then delves into meatier sections on Treaties & Agreements, Customary Law and Interanational Organizations.  The tutorial ends with a list of Essential Sources that form the backbone of international legal research.

We have assigned this tutorial to the students in our Advanced Legal Research class several times over the past three years and many students have noted is utility in the research process.

Warming Up to User-Generated Content

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Here’s a good example of why we like the Legal Scholarship Network so much.  Its LSN Property, Citizenship, & Social Entrepreneurism journal brought notice of this new working paper:

“Warming Up to User-Generated Content“


University of Illinois Law Review, Vol. 2008, No. 5, 2008

EDWARD LEE, Ohio State University – Michael E. Moritz College of Law

The most significant copyright development of the twenty first century has not arisen through any law enacted by Congress or opinion rendered by the Supreme Court. Instead, it has come from the unorganized, informal practices of various, unrelated users of copyrighted works, many of whom probably know next to nothing about copyright law. In order to comprehend this paradox, one must look at what is popularly known as “Web 2.0,” and the growth of user-generated content in blogs, wikis, podcasts, “mashup” videos, and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Although users often create new works of their own, sometimes the works are “remixed” with copyrighted content of others.

The growth of user-generated content challenges the conventional understandings of copyright law under which copyrights are understood largely as static and fixed from the top down. Under this view, copyright holders are at the center of the copyright universe and exercise considerable control over their exclusive rights. Obtaining prior authorization from the copyright holder is typically assumed to be necessary for others legally to re-use the copyrighted work, apart from a fair or other permitted use (which often is not easy to determine in advance).

This Article challenges the conventional account of copyright law, particularly as applied to Web 2.0. The formalist understanding of copyright law ignores reality. The Copyright Act is riddled with gray areas and gaps, many of which persist over time because so few copyright cases are ever filed and the majority of those filed are not resolved through a judgment. My core thesis is that informal copyright practices – i.e., practices that are not authorized by formal copyright licenses, but whose legality falls within a gray area of copyright law – effectively serve as important gap-fillers in our copyright system.

The informal practices related to user-generated content provide a compelling example of this phenomenon. These practices make manifest three significant features of our copyright system that have escaped the attention of legal scholars: (i) our copyright system could not function without informal copyright practices; (ii) collectively, users wield far more power in influencing the shape of copyright law than is commonly perceived; and (iii) uncertainty in formal copyright law can lead to the phenomenon of “warming,” in which – unlike chilling – users are emboldened to make unauthorized uses of copyrighted works based on seeing what appears to be an increasingly accepted practice. In the Web 2.0 world, warming may serve as a powerful counterforce to the chilling of speech.

 

 

 

Source:  LSN Property, Citizenship, & Social Entrepreneurism Vol. 5 No. 13, 06/20/2008

 

And, by the way, anyone is more than welcome to copy any original content from Legal Research Plus.  However, attribution is nice to see.

 

Legal Scholarship Network – “Tomorrow’s Research Today”

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We are huge fans of the Legal Scholarship Network, part of the Social Science Research Network, and not just because seemingly all of the Stanford faculty are its journal editors.  Many posts to Legal Research Plus come from the Legal Scholarship Network journals.  In our advanced legal research class we tell our students that HeinOnline covers the past of law reviews and that the Legal Scholarship Network presents the future.   Here is some interesting information from the 2008 SSRN Mid-Year President’s Letter which we received just today:

 

SSRN has reached several milestones this year and it’s only June. First, the SSRN eLibrary (http://ssrn.com/search) grew to 190,000 documents (and is growing at the rate of 40,000 documents per year), the number of SSRN authors now exceeds 95,000, and we are close to 22 million downloads to date. In December, I predicted we would reach 20 million downloads by this fall and I am delighted to be proven wrong. Downloads of full text documents have been averaging over 600,000 per month this year and we expect 25 million total downloads by the end of the year.

. . .

As SSRN’s use has increased so has its reputation as a source of scholarship. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the U.S. Supreme Court cited a SSRN working paper in its recent Boumediene v. Bush opinion (actually the second time a SSRN working paper was cited this year by the Court) and several law blogs report these to be the first ever citations to working papers in Supreme Court opinions. We are pleased to see that the Court values SSRN’s “Tomorrow’s Research Today.” Thanks to the law bloggers for keeping me informed and to all of you for contributing to SSRN’s scholarship.

Noam Cohen, from The New York Times, wrote an article (http://tinyurl.com/5qacbk) last week about SSRN, discussing the effect of SSRN’s rankings on scholarship that you may find interesting. I have received complimentary emails and a few good ideas about improving SSRN as a result of the article. Tim Kane posted his interview of SSRN Chairman Michael Jensen regarding SSRN’s history on the Growthology Blog (http://www.growthology.org/growthology/2008/06/interview-with.html).

. . .

Gregg Gordon
President
Social Science Research Network

Big News – Oregon

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From Tim Stanley’s Justia blog:

“Oregon’s Legislative Counsel Committee had a meeting this morning to discuss the copyright claim on the Oregon Revised Statutes. After taking legal counsel from Dexter Johnson, talking with Karl Olson, Carl Malamud, three Oregon citizens and myself, they unanimously voted to not to enforce any copyright claims on the Oregon Revised Statutes. This great!!!”

And, I just read this on BoingBoing:

[Posted by Cory Doctorow] 
 
“Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

“Justia and Public.Resource.Org were invited, along with Karl Olson our counsel, to testify before the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee. We were joined by a public panel of wikipedians and open source advocates.”

“The process was incredibly well organized. There was a comprehensive briefing packet prepared for the committee, the members asked lots of intelligent questions, and then Dexter Johnson the Legislative Counsel recommended to the committee that they waive assertion of copyright on their statutes. The Majority Leader placed the motion, the President of the Senate called the vote, and the vote was unanimous. This was democracy in action and was great to watch.”