In June 2023 the U.S. Copyright Office celebrated the one-year anniversary of operations of the Copyright Claims Board (“CCB”), a novel new small claims court housed within the agency. The CCB was preceded by years of debate about the benefits and risks of such a small claims court. Proponents argued that the CCB would offer rightsholders a low-cost, efficient alternative to litigation in federal courts, allowing small creators to more effectively defend their rights. Opponents feared that the CCB would foster abuse, encouraging frivolous lawsuits while creating a trap for unwary defendants. This article tests those arguments in the first detailed empirical review of the CCB’s first year of operations based on data extracted from the CCB’s online filing system for the 487 claims filed with the court between June 2022 and June 2023.

On June 16, 2024, the U.S. Copyright Office celebrated the two-year anniversary of operations of the Copyright Claims Board ("CCB"), a novel new small claims court housed within the agency. The CCB was preceded by years of debate about the benefits and risks of such a small claims court. Proponents argued that the CCB would offer rightsholders a low-cost, efficient alternative to litigation in federal courts, allowing small creators to more effectively defend their rights. Opponents feared that the CCB would foster abuse, encouraging frivolous lawsuits while creating a trap for unwary defendants. This short article tests those arguments in one of the first detailed empirical reviews of the CCB's first two years of operations based on data extracted from the CCB's online filing system for the 880 claims filed with the court between June 2022 and June 2024.

Key points Text recycling is the reuse of material from an author's own prior work in a new document. While the ethical aspects of text recycling have received considerable attention, the legal aspects have been largely ignored or inaccurately portrayed. Copyright laws and publisher contracts are difficult to interpret and highly variable, making it difficult for authors or editors to know when text recycling in research writing is legal or illegal. We argue that publishers should revise their author contracts to make text recycling explicitly legal as long as authors follow ethics‐based guidelines.

Each state has its own method for officially publishing the law. This article looks at the history of legal publishing for the fifty states before looking at how legal publishing even in moving to electronic publishing may not ensure public access to the law. The article addresses barriers to free access to the law in electronic publishing including copyright, contract law, and potentially, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The article concludes with prescriptions for how different actors, including state governments, publishers, libraries, and others can ensure robust public access to the law moving forward.

This paper is about how libraries can legally lend digital copies of books. It explains the legal and policy rationales for the process— “controlled digital lending”— as well as a variety of risk factors and practical considerations that can guide libraries seeking to implement such lending. We write this paper in support of the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending, a document endorsed by many libraries, librarians, and legal experts. Our goal is to help libraries and their lawyers become more comfortable with the concept by more fully explaining the legal rationale for controlled digital lending, as well as situations in which this rationale is the strongest.

In recent years, developing nations have pushed for international copyright and other intellectual property regimes to expand protection over the cultural heritage and collective knowledge of particular indigenous groups. These “traditional knowledge” protections have been justified by factors like economic protection, equity in intellectual property ownership, cultural protection, and economic development. These motivating factors are a far cry from the underpinnings of traditional Western intellectual property law - and in particular, U.S. copyright law - which focuses on incentivizing the creation of new content for the promotion of “the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Because of these differing justifications, traditional knowledge protections at the international level have generated some degree of friction between the developed and the developing world. So far, much of the debate focuses on the “political” and “real” costs and benefits of traditional knowledge rights, but there is little discussion of the legal consequences of current protections. Given the underlying ideological conflict, some legal dissension is likely to occur regarding enforcement and protection of traditional knowledge rights. This paper examines “positive” traditional knowledge protections, which provide copyright-like rights over content, including the right exclude, license, and profit from these works. In many cases these protections regulate works that Western eyes would view as in the public domain. Initiatives to provide international protection for traditional knowledge expressions have blithely proceeded without much regard for the potential consequences under existing international law. This paper makes the point that at least some existing traditional knowledge protections not only conflict with IP-policy norms of the United States and the European Community, but also that these protections violate the very terms of TRIPS and GATT. As work toward international protection of traditional knowledge progresses, policy makers should be aware of these legal incompatibilities and how they evidence the deep conflict between expansive traditional knowledge protections and Western IP policy.Cite as David R. Hansen, Protection of Traditional Knowledge: Trade Barriers and the Public Domain, 58 J. Copyright Soc’y U.S.A. 757 (2011)

La creation de la Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) en avril 2014 et les changements introduits dans la legislation via l'Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 (ERRA 2013) ont fourni…

This paper builds off "Copyright and the Digitization of State Government Documents: A Preliminary Analysis" presented at IPres 2015. In this paper, we present a more detailed analysis and a practical framework for local archivists and librarians to use in assessing copyright status, the application of fair use, and use of other copyright limitations to different types of government documents.

This paper was presented at Ipres in Chapel Hill, NC (http://ipres2015.org/). The full conference proceedings (https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/view/o:429524); The version of record (https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail_object/o:429537) This paper has been released under a CC BY 4.0 International (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

U.S. libraries, archives, and other memory institutions are stewards of some of the largest collections of copyrighted content in the world. These institutions hold billions of works, the vast majority of which have been created in the last century and thus subject to copyright protection. This article is about how these institutions interact with the copyright system and, in particular, how reforming § 108 of the Act — limitations on copyright for library and archive uses — can help these organizations in their efforts to preserve and make their collections more available to the world.This article examines the situations in which § 108 works, where it fails, and where libraries rely on other tools such as fair use for preserving, archiving and distributing works. Understanding § 108 in that context helps in clarifying its intended purpose and, in turn, principles for reform. Over the last several decades it has become clear that policymakers and librarians view § 108’s principal purpose as providing a useful, clear, and unambiguous exception that practicing librarians can employ to make decisions about the use of copyrighted works in frequently recurrent library situations, supplementary to decisions made under other limitations such as fair use. So far, § 108 has largely failed to fulfill that purpose. This article identifies five long-term principles that help explain why § 108 has failed in certain respects, and can help guide reform efforts to make § 108 more useful in the future.

In this case the Authors Guild has challenged the legality of Google's scanning, indexing, and display of snippets through its Book Search tool. Authors Alliance submitted this brief in support of Google because the dismantling of Book Search would be harmful to Authors Alliance's mission of helping authors reach readers. Book Search is an important tool through which Authors Alliance members can reach wider audiences. Many Authors Alliance members are authors of the sort of books Google scanned most often for Book Search, which are those typically found in research library collections.

For centuries, scholars and educators have excerpted the works of their colleagues, transforming them from individual, static monographs into dynamic pedagogical and intellectual tools for classroom learning. Such transformations reside at the heart of fair use, a core copyright law doctrine established to protect socially beneficial uses of works that increase public access and promote the progress of human understanding.

This paper presents the results of a survey of 110 ARL institutions regarding their copyright policies for providing electronic reserves. It compiles descriptive statistics on library practice as well as coding responses to reveal trends and shared practices. Finally, it presents conclusions about policy making, decision making and risk aversion in ARL institutions.