Saturday, September 24, 2022

KnowYourCopyrights.org Helps Library Advocates Assert Rights in Digital Era

 EFF: “Today, we launch “How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Your Friends” – a narrated slideshow and essay explaining how Facebook locks in its users, how interoperability can free them, and what it would feel like to use an “interoperable Facebook” of the future, such as the one contemplated by the US ACCESS Act

You can get the presentation as a full video, or a highlight reel, or a PDF or web-page. We hope this user manual for an imaginary product will stimulate your own imagination and give you the impetus to demand – or make – something better than our current top-heavy, monopoly-dominated internet.”


KnowYourCopyrights.org Helps Library Advocates Assert Rights in Digital Era

[August 24, 2022] “the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) launched KnowYourCopyrights.org, a revamped resource to support library leaders, practitioners, and advocates in proactively asserting library rights in the digital era. Libraries, as well as the research, teaching, and learning activities that they support, enjoy special rights in US law, starting with the constitutional purpose of copyright: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.

 Core to these rights is fair use, a flexible doctrine that allows the use of copyrighted works without permission from the rightsholder under certain circumstances. In the current era of digital teaching, lending, and loaning, research libraries may rely on fair use to continue to exercise these fundamental rights.In a previous iteration, ARL created KnowYourCopyrights.org as an author-facing resource to educate scholars about the importance of retaining rights to their works in order to better enable them, along with research institutions and libraries, to provide equitable access to increasingly expensive and paywalled research.

 In its current refresh, the website invites a broader audience to consider how the rights afforded to libraries under the US Copyright Act can be asserted to advance equitable digital access to information… KnowYourCopyrights.org includes Modern Interlibrary Loan Practices: Moving beyond the CONTU Guidelines, a white paper meant to cut through outdated and inaccurate “rules of thumb,” and to inform library practice and advocacy around interlibrary lending, licensing, and journal subscriptions…”


How many book copies will you sell?

 OMG In the Penguin Random House/S&S antitrust trial it was revealed that out of 58,000 trade titles published per year, half of those titles sell fewer than one dozen books. LESS THAN ONE DOZEN.

 How many book copies will you sell?