The Rabid Librarian's Ravings in the Wind: Copyright

Showing posts with label Copyright. Show all posts

Friday, September 21, 2012

How bizarre

Art School Tells Students to Buy Pictureless $180 Art History Book

What is this, October!? According to a blog post published by a disgruntled parent of a student, the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) is forcing students to buy an art history book for $180 — which wouldn’t be unheard of, but the catch is that the publishers of this book didn’t get any of the image rights for the artwork it includes. To reiterate, that’s an art history survey without any pictures. WTF?

Instead of having pictures of artwork, the book, Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800 (so named for the course it goes with), instead just has placeholders with instructions to see a digital version for the actual image. It’s like a website with only broken image links.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

A couple of interesting articles from the New York Times on the copyright/anti-piracy front

7 Charged as F.B.I. Closes a Top File-Sharing Site

What’s the Best Way to Protect Against Online Piracy?

Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Good article on copyright

That famous space shuttle photo: When is sharing stealing?

Short on sleep and worried about the recent loss of her job, Stefanie Gordon boarded a Delta flight from New York to Palm Beach at 6:30 a.m. on May 16. Still miffed after a late-night Yankees loss to the Red Sox, she took a photo out the window of her airplane seat with an iPhone, tweeted it to friends when she landed, then headed off to spend the day with her father.

By the time she was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, her iPhone was practically buzzing out of her lap, teeming with messages of congratulation and requests for interviews. Gordon's now-famous photo of the space shuttle Endeavour soaring through the clouds got her an overwhelming amount of attention -- her 15 minutes of fame, Internet style. It also landed her smack in the middle of an ethical and legal debate that may be as important as the future of the Internet itself.

Gordon's photo has been viewed nearly 1 million times, and shown by media TV, Web and print news outlets around the world. She was paid by precisely five news organizations.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

I went into work this morning and had thirty, count them, thirty interlibrary loan requests on our system. 29 were from the same person; 28 were from the same journal, which far exceeds copyright guidelines. If you're new to the profession, or just confused about copyright (aren't we all?) there is an excellent FAQ on the Medical Library Association's website which explains the CONTU Guidelines' 'Rule of Five', which is essentially this: No more than five articles may be requested from the last five years from the same journal within a given year.

So what did I do? I asked the librarian to give me the five she wanted most, with a link to the FAQ, and when she said nevermind, I rejected the requests for copyright compliance problems. Unfortunately I accidentally marked the one that was from another library that way, too, but I sent them the article and an apology and I think they'll resend the request prefixed to me so we can get the statistics right in the system.

I normally get, oh, maybe six ILL requests at once. When I saw all the notifications of ILL requests this morning, my eyes popped out of my head, I'm sure. 'Course, if they'd been from different journals, I'd have filled them all. All of those requests were from the same patron, too. I think that person needs to get a personal subscription to that journal, and that's what I would have told a patron of mine. :)

Anyway, it's just one of those little things you deal with as a solo medical librarian. Thought I'd share.