Copyright Study Group Seeks Comments

jeh0bu writes "The Section 108 Study Group, a group of copyright experts, has been meeting to discuss Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. It is focusing on preservation of websites and access to digital copies of library materials. Representatives of Internet Archive, including Brewster Kahle, went to the group's public roundtable sessions in March. Google did not register to attend the roundtable sessions even though the findings of the Section 108 Study Group may impact Google's Library Project. The Section 108 Study Group seeks written comments through April 17, 2006, according to this Federal Register notice."

Comments

For the sake of typing speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Feel free to use "IANACL" for I am not a copyright lawyer...

I sent them this essay

[argoff]

Straight Talk About Copyrights

Hope the messg gets thru.

Re:Section 108

[voice_of_all_reason]

Libraries can reproduce (copy) at most one instance of a copyrighted book

Yeah, that one-copy thing worked real well for the archivists at the Library of Alexandria.

Let's pay attention here

[NorbrookC]

It's easy to blow this off as "another bunch of lawyers bulls^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussing copyright law." Read the questions in the Federal Register!

I've seen enough "copyright=bad" or "copyright!=bad, implementation=bad", etc. posts on Slashdot over the years. Well, this is your chance to actually comment to people who are making the regulations and laws!

Here are some of the issues they're looking at:

Should non-physical or ''virtual'' libraries or archives be included within the ambit of section 108?

Access to Digital Copies Made under Subsections 108(b) and (c). Are there conditions under which electronic access to digital preservation or replacement copies should be permitted under subsections 108 (b) or (c) outside the premises of libraries or archives (e.g., via e-mail or the Internet or lending of a CD or DVD)? If so, what conditions or restrictions should apply?

They talk about archiving web pages, and this is a key question: Should ''no archive'' meta-tags, robot.txt files, or similar technologies that block sites or pages from being crawled be respected?

There are a lot more, and they touch on almost all the issues that have provoked a lot of discussion and outright flame wars around the Internet. I'm still reading through it, but the key point is that we need to pay attention to this. This is at the point where they are considering things which may end up in regulation and law, and silence or ignoring it is going to cause a lot of problems down the line.

And what site generates comments needing acronyms?

[FearTheFrail]

In the same vein, I think Slashdot editors ought to collect up the usual 10-15 of the top modded comments and send them off as a collective parcel to this group. ...they did ask for comments, after all. =D

Re:No, Copyright is Good!

[Penguinoflight]

You misunderstood; The GPL is protected by Copyright, but that doesn't make the GPL unique. The GPL is unique for the rules set down in the GPL. Since code covered by the GPL can be considered software, the GPL is a license. If you dont want to follow the license, you can't use the code. Even without a copyright we could have a GPL, but if someone took it to court people would argue about whose was the code. This is still however a problem for most GPLd works (no registered copyright on many of them), and if there was no copyright protection then coders who avoided the GPL would only be worse off than those who used it.

In essense copyrights are supposed to protect those who bring content to others. Right now, 70% of copyright law does the opposite of that.