Rights and Repositories: Licensing Content for PRIMO

· ostephens

This presentation by Katharine Ellis from the Institute of Musical Research. PRIMO is ‘Practice as Research in Music Online’ – http://primo.sas.ac.uk

The PRIMO project was to look at whether there were alternatives to asking musicians to describe their research in words if they could demonstrate it better – and how could their work be published free to the widest audience.

PRIMO now has a very small (6 items) peer-reviewed repository with full-length videos of music rehearsals, workshops and demonstrations. It is open-access with downloadable files licensed for non-commercial/research use. This allows citation using abstracts etc. – something that has traditionally been difficult – you haven’t been able to include a ‘sonic’ abstract in your commentary or criticism.

However, they found that they were pushing at the boundaries of what was seen as acceptable in the academic community.

The challenges they face were:

  • IPR – what forms it took, who owned it etc.
  • Licensing
  • Research Councils UK directive for open access

Whose rights need to be protected? Performers, participants, funders, photographers, camera crews (potentially)

Decided to have a form which asked each headline researcher to say that all participants had said that the work could be regarded as their research for the lifetime of the work – essentially non-exclusive license to publish open access for non-commercial use (under Creative Commons). In the end, all comes down to trust. To engender trust, don’t believe they can look at material created without these agreements in place – i.e. not looking at historical material.

Licensing Third-Party Rights in Music:

  • Be clear about what you as a broadcaster of online material can/must be responsible for
  • Be clear to researchers and users about where their own responsibility lies
  • In the interests of permanent access, do not accept responsibility for IP permissions that are time-limited
  • Be aware that a video of a presentation involing educational use exemptions ceases to benefit from those exemptions when it leaves the classroom
  • Use your metadata system to record the dates on which nested copyrights in a repository item will expire
  • Know your UK copyright timelines:
    • Original artisitic works (70 years after the death of the author, composer, photographer, artist)
    • Films (70 years after the death of the last of the following to die: principal director, author of screenplay, author of dialogue, or composer of music specially created for an used in the film)
    • Sound recording, remasterings and broadcasts (50 years after the date of the recording or remastering or broadcast)
    • Typographical arrangement of music (25 years from the date of the edition)
  • How many 3rd party IPR items are nested in a single video?
    • Musical text (composition and typography)
    • Film
    • Record musical performance
    • Images (e.g. CD Cover)
    • Stage music (other rights)
  • Can one license cover all these rights?

PRIMO pays for a limited online exploitation license – for a nominal annual fee, covering a certain number of downloads a year – it covers “Online broadcast to UK users (i.e. users in the UK at the time they are using the material), for limited downloading of performances involving complete musical works which are still in copyright”

This license doesn’t cover:

  • Any rights antedating the presentation/performance which is to be posted
  • Any in-copyright stage music
  • Any in-copyright music to which new images have been added
  • Any recording rights or performing rights for in-copyright recorded/broadcast music
  • International usage (UK only!)
  • Any non-musical rights (images etc.)

The license is based on radio licensing – which assumes transmission in only a limited geographical territory.

PRIMO have taken the approach of getting the user to state whether they are in the UK before they have access – the user is responsible for acting legally here, not the ‘publisher’ – i.e. PRIMO in this case.

Rights and Repositories: Overview of the legal landscape

· ostephens

Charles Oppenheim now presenting. He is going to concentrate on Copyright as he believes this is the main issue that academia is interested in (as opposed to trade marks, designs, patents etc.) (although I suspect  that these may become more important to us as I think there is a growing pressure to look at commercial opportunities growing from academic research)

Copyright protects the skill and labour expended by someone creating something new. Copyright is automatic (doesn’t require registration of any kind). The owner has the rights to authorise or prevent third parties from copying (and certain other things) the work. There are various exceptions, such as library privilege, fair dealing etc.

Database rights protects collections of data or materials. In general as long as the collection and verification of the contents of the database involved significant resources, protection is given – arguable most repositories will enjoy both database rights and copyright.

Charles goes on to mention Performers Rights and Moral Rights.

Some major questions for repositories:

  • Who owns the rights in the materials that are being added? (The employer? the academic? students?)
  • Have those rights been licensed or assigned to the repository?
  • If not, can the repository hold the materials?

Copyright is much less to do with the law but more about ‘risk management’ and perception of risk – you don’t need to be nervous, but you do need to be aware of the risks.

Also need to question whether moral rights have been infringed in any way and whether performers rights are involved?

For Orphan works, if it is low risk that anyone will anyone will complain, then why not make stuff available? If you feel it is higher risk, you need to judge the risks and make a decision.

Licenses you might use or encounter are:

  • Open Source s/w licenses
  • Creative Commons, Creative Archive, Science Commons
  • CLA or other RRO licenses

There are a number of forthcoming possible changes to the law:

Gowers Review

This was generally satisfied with current UK IP environment, although identified a number of areas where law was inappropriate or out of date.

There are expected to be a number of consultations to be carried out as a result – so far only one has been done, which is about possible changes to ‘exceptions to copyright’ and especially relevant are those relating to exceptions for educational use.

Gowers recommended an expansion to the exceptions to encompass ‘distance’ learning (even trivial distance), and that it should be media-independent – and to like exceptions to intent (i.e. for education) rather than medium.

Also recommended changes to use for research or private study – why restricted to literary, artistic, dramatic and musical works – why not all materials, and what would be the impact of doing this?

Gowers recommend extension of Library Privilege to bring more flexibility and more types of materials, and to expand to museums and galleries.

There were many more recommendations, and in theory we should see legislation to this later this year – but Charles believes we may see these bundled up with other changes coming out of EU proposals.

EU law

Changes to Sound Recording term from 50 years to 95 years. Gowers commissioned work that showed this was neither necessary or desirable. However, this has gone to EU with lobbying from major music companies, and they have drafted a directive (which may not become law) to this effect. If it is passed, it could have a significant impact on repositories collecting sound recordings (and there tends to be a high proportion of Orphan Works with sound recordings because of the number of people involved in the creation)

There is also currently a general review of copyright law by the EU, but at this stage only a discussion document, and it isn’t clear what this will mean for UK law, but Charles believes that this discussion could hold up implementation of any of the legislation coming out of the Gowers Review – so we can expect UK law to remain as is for some time.

A final thing worthy of note is that there is a draft directive on public secotr information in place which, if it becomes law, it would mean all documents created and published by a University would have to be offered at minimal costs to any private sector organisation that wishes to commercially exploit it – which would include material held in publicly accessible repositories. It should be noted that there was a previous attempt to bring this in, but lobbying by HEIs managed to stop it.

Rights and Repositories

· ostephens

Today I’m speaking at the JISC Rights and Repositories event – I’m here as part of the EThOSNet project – which is setting up a e-thesis service based at the BL (called EThOS) – see http://www.ethos.ac.uk for more details.

Starting with an introduction from John Casey from EDINA including a brief overview of OpenJorum, and then followed by Prof. Charles Oppenheim giving an overview of the legal landscape. After this, it’s me – I’m a bit worried as some of the work on which we’ve based the approach that EThOS is taking towards rights was done by Charles Oppenheim, who is on hand to contradict me if I get anything wrong!

 

OK – starting with John (slightly frustratingly, I’m sat at the front as a speaker, and so I can’t see the slides that are being shown)

John is talking from the ‘teaching and learning’ point of view, but sees the issues very much overlapping with research repositories.

John says we need to see IPR as an essential part of academic integrity and Institutional quality control. Noting that the media industry have very well established approach to IPR – even if not everyone agrees with them. We are in a the midst of change in academia in our approach to IPR. It isn’t necessarily the legal stuff that is difficult but what John calls the ‘underlying’ issues – by which I think he means the cultural issues – norms of what is acceptable practice within a community.

John saying IPR is only a problem if you let it be a problem. John often sees people either putting their heads in the sand, or feeling that IPR is detail they can’t be bothered with. John believes currently attitudes are related to the pre-digital era, and contain greatly exaggerated ideas of the value of content – John think that teaching content is often of little value cash wise, but of high utility.

By putting stuff online, ‘we’ (institutions etc.) are publishers – and this comes with rights and responsibilities. We are joining the ‘publishing’ world, which is already trying to come to terms with the challenges presented by digital production and distribution of material.

JORUM is a JISC sponsored national online repository, intended to hold learning resources for UK HE and FE. When JORUM was setup licenses for ‘open’ sharing (e.g. creative commons) were in their infancy. In the early days there was a high degree of risk aversion with regards to IPR in the sector, which resulted in a complicated license regime.

Now JORUM is moving in the direction of ‘open access’, and wants to foster the creation and re-use of learning material and ensure long term access. At the same time they want to reduce transaction costs, become a user-centred service to support sharing and reuse. JORUM wants to see more explicit acceptance and management of risks – there is a lot of nervousness around IPR, even though financially other issues in the sector cause a lot more problems (e.g. building project overruns, software project overruns etc.) – but perhaps nervousness is because the academic ‘industry’ is essentially and industry base around Intellectual Property.

JORUM will have three licenseing regimes going forward – all user-to-user:

  • JorumOpen – for free sharing under Creative Commons and similar licenses
  • Jorum Education UK – for sharing withing the UK HE and FE sectores
  • JorumPlus – more restricted content

The main obstacles around open content and IPR are philosophical, pedagogical, political and organisational – technical issues are comparatively minor. Legal matters are good for ‘surfacing’ soft cultural issues.

The current concentration on technical issues is a ‘displacement activity’ – we focus on DRM etc. to avoid the real problems – where no or lo-tech solutions are more realistic.

Playing catchup

· ostephens

Due to general busy-ness and also a week off last week I'm well behind with the Learning 2.0 Programme.

A couple of weeks ago, Social Bookmarking and Tagging were covered. I have to admit that bookmarking is something that I've always thought a really useful idea, but don't use a lot in reality – and I find social bookmarking exactly the same. I tend to bookmark a few things which I use a lot, and everything else I either search for, or remember. I've defended the approach of social bookmarking elsewhere by highlighting the 'social' aspects – following what others bookmark, but in reality I don't tend to use this aspect either – I rely on blogs and twitter to surface interesting stuff for me (occaisionally people include lists of bookmarks in their RSS feed, and so I suppose I use them indirectly in these cases). Anyway, I have a delicious account at http://delicious.com/ostephens if you want to see what I've bookmarked. I've also got a Flickr Photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23577728@N07/, but I don't use it at all, as I tend to share photos from my blog instead – of course, this lacks the social aspects, but I'm only really trying to share with my Friends and Family, so really not a big deal for me. However, I am a huge fan of Flickr, and use it extensively when putting together presentations, using CC Licensed images for illustrations (I'm meant to be doing this right now, but I'm writing this instead!)

Then while I was away Learning 2.0 covered online applications and web tools. I've used these a lot, and there is far too much to cover in a brief post (and I really need to get back to writing that presentation), however I'll just touch briefly on the areas listed:

1. Personalised homepages

I have an iGoogle page, but don't really use it. I tend to personalise my environment by using browser setup and PC settings to give me access to all my commonly used stuff. It isn't as portable, but I kind of have minimal needs, so seems to work OK for me.

2. Mobile phones

Until recently I wasn't a huge mobile phone user – then I got an iPhone… I know that I'm going to come across all Apple fanboy (and this is probably true to some extent), the iPhone is just amazing – I really don't think you can compare it to other phones (certainly not ones I've used) – I'm convinced that it (and devices like it) are going to change how we use mobile devices – it has certainly changed the way I use my mobile. If anyone from the Learning 2.0 programme wants to have a play, please come and find me, I love showing it off…

3. Web browsers

I'm a Firefox fan, and Firefox 3 is currently my browser of choice. I've toyed with Opera, but not really got on with it that well (although I do think Opera does some really interesting stuff, and the 'Quickdial' feature is great – although duplicated, not quite as well, by a Firefox plugin)

I've also played round with Flock, based on Firefox, and quite liked it, but in the end got irritated with long startup times.

Yesterday Google announced that they were entering the browser market with an Open Source browser called (at the moment at least) 'Chrome'. This should be available sometime today (2nd September 2008), and in the meantime you can read the comic (really). There are several aspects highlighted in the comic several of which are about developing a browser optimised to run web applications – such as GMail and Google Docs.

4. Google documents

I use this for personal stuff – especially as we don't currently have a copy of MS Word on our Mac at home – and generally find it good. I think the Spreadsheets are especially interesting in the integration they offer with some of Googles visulisation tools – e.g. Google Maps – this introduces a new element to spreadsheets for me…

5. Toolbars

I use the Google Toolbar and tend to avoid the others – you only really need one I think. I should mention the LibX toolbar though, which is aimed at library users – I'd like to get an Imperial version up and running, and if we did I would install that…

6. Widgets

So I guess I use these all over the place – this blog has several 'widgets' in the sidebars, I occaisionally use the Widgets on Apples 'Dashboard', and many, many, websites have widgets which I'll see when browsing. Hard to summarise really, as this is a bit like saying 'web pages', but there are some interesting questions for the library – should we develop 'widgets' to allow others to plug library services into their blogs and other web pages?

7. Mashups

Ok, I'm a bit of a geek, but Mashups are really the most exciting thing on the web at the moment for me. I love the way that more creative minds than mine take two or more disparate data sources or services and bring them together to produce something that is more than the sum of its parts. One person I follow who does a lot of 'mashup' work is Tony Hirst at OUseful – I admire the way he manages to think of these ideas, and implement them quickly.

But Mashups aren't just for techies – see the spreadsheet at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pXyvc2H7k-HDnD32LNzx9LA (inspired by Tony Hirst). I've used completely standard Google Spreadsheet functionality to bring together information from an online Olympic Medals table and the CIA Worldfactbook to show on a map the highest number of medals per capita in the recent Olympics – nothing special perhaps, but shows what you can do.

For those looking to go a bit further, I'd also recommend playing around with Yahoo Pipes – a relatively easy way of getting into manipulating data online, and bringing together data from different sources.

One of my favourite mashups is TwitterVision – Twitter is a way of sharing your current 'status' (like Facebook status, but without the rest of Facebook hanging round it), and TwitterVision shows update statuses from around the world on a map – I'm not saying it is useful, but it is fascinating and curiously addictive

OK – I'd better wrap-up here as this is quite enough for one post really. Just finally, I mentioned in my last post that I would like to see more comments happening on the Learning 2.0 blogs. Well, I was really pleased to see that in the last few weeks some of the blogs have started to pickup comments from people outside the Learning 2.0 programme. I still remember the first time I got a comment from someone I didn't know, but really respected – what a thrill to realise that you are part of that conversation… also worth noting that this is without any particular effort (as far as I am aware) to promote these blogs – it is an indication of how easy it is to reach out on the web.

Monologue or Dialogue

· ostephens

As part of the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial College, all those taking part have been asked to setup a blog, and use this to reflect on each week’s activities.

I’ve setup RSS feeds for all the blogs setup as part of Learning 2.0 to track what people think, and when I think I can usefully respond to a post, I leave a comment.

I think that one of the key features is that they not only allow anyone to easily publish to the web, but that they encourage a dialogue to take place – it isn’t just about the author, but about the readers as well.

It seems a shame that I am one of the few people leaving comments on these blogs, as it is when people leave comments that you actually realise as an author that you have an audience who are engaging with what you write.

I’d suggest that commenting on blogs becomes part of the Learning 2.0 programme in the future.

Technorati Tags:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Microsoft get Creative

· ostephens

Microsoft recently (quietly) announced a Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007 that enables you to add a Creative Commons license to your documents (Word, Excel and Powerpoint).

I installed this yesterday, but only got around to having a look at it this morning when I was prompted by a post by Paul Walk about the use of Creative Commons to license his blog posts.

The first thing I wondered is whether the plugin also worked for Liver Live Writer (Microsoft’s blog authoring tool, which I use). No such luck, although Tim Heuer has kindly written a Creative Commons plugin for Live Writer which you can use.

Anyway, back to Office 2007 – I created a new Word document, and started to apply a license. Rather than offering me all the licenses, I first had to ‘create’ a license – a wizard helped me through this step-by-step, although the wording at each stage could have been clearer and more helpful (e.g. the first step asks you to choose between ‘Creative Commons’, ‘Public Domain’ and ‘Sampling’ without any explanation as to what the differences are)

The ‘Sampling’ license intrigued me, as it seemed to relate to something Andy Powell blogged about where someone had taken an entire presentation by Andy from Slideshare (licensed under creative commons), and uploaded to a similar site called ‘Authorstream’. In his post Andy says what he really wants is a license that says “you can take this content, unbundle it, and use the parts to create a new derivative work but you can't simply copy the whole work and republish it on the Web unchanged”. It seemed to me that the ‘Sampling’ license was exactly this. However, when I applied the license to my doc, and followed the link to the license I found this text:

“This license is retired. Do not use for new works.” (at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling/1.0/)

(it seems that the Creative Commons site needs some tidying, as there is still what looks like current information on the Sampling license at http://creativecommons.org/about/sampling)

I should say, it is great to see Microsoft offering the plugin – although there is room for improvement…

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.

Focussing on Social Computing

· ostephens

The TFPL blog has an interesting post on some comments from a focus group on Social Computing (and it's use in the workplace)

To draw out some specific comments/points:

  • The Civil Service code for online participation
  • Example of the reduction of email "burden" by use of a wiki
  • A company responding (positively) to a negative 'Tweet' about them
  • "IT must learn to trust people with tools and increase its user focus"
  • How a tool is rolled out impacts on whether it increases or decreases workload
Technorati Tags:

Feed me Seymour

· ostephens

This week the Learning 2.0 at Imperial course is looking at RSS

One of the activities is to subscribe to 10 or more feeds on Bloglines or Google Reader, but as I've got loads of feeds in my reader already (I use Google Reader), I thought I could do something else instead. What I've done is create an 'OPML' (Outline Processor Markup Language) file for all the blogs created by participants in the Learning 2.0 programme.

What is an OPML file? It is essentially a format for lists, which computers can read (similar to RSS, it uses XML to give structure). Probably the most common use of OPML is to list RSS feeds for import or export to/from RSS readers like Bloglines and Google Reader.

The OPML file for all the Learning 2.0 blogs is available at http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas/learning_20/learning_20_opml.xml – if you click this link, and download the file, then you can import it into your feed reader software. For example in Google Reader, find the option 'Manage subscriptions', choose 'Import/Export', use the 'Browse' option to find the file on your computer (where you previously downloaded it) and click 'Upload' – this should get you all the RSS feeds for the Learning 2.0 blogs.

Bloglines also supports the import of OPML files – see http://www.bloglines.com/help/faq#import.

I've created a couple of other OPML files as well:

Feel free to download these and import them into your reader (although be warned that the last one has a lot of feeds in it, and following this number of feeds can be a bit intimidating)

A surfeit of usernames

· ostephens

I note that several participants in the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial have
mentioned that dealing with all the additional accounts they are
creating as they take part in the course (so far, MSN/Windows Live,
Wordpress, Wetpaint, Bloglines or Google Reader)

Where services are offered by the Imperial ICT
service one advantage is that they usually integrate with the standard Imperial
username and password – so you only have to remember one login. It may
also be worth mentioning that Wetpaint supports a login method called ‘OpenID‘
which is a way of using a single username/password (owned by the user,
not by the service they are logging in to), to access many sites. In
theory it is a great idea, although in practice it isn’t always as easy
to use as you might wish (see http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2008/07/16/openid-fail/ for a critique of OpenID)

Watching paint dry

· ostephens

I’ve been on holiday for a week, and so missed the ‘wiki’ week of the Learning 2.0 programme at Imperial. I’m playing catchup now, and have setup a page in the Wetpaint wiki that has been setup for the course – it’s members only I’m afraid.

Although many participants in the course have created a wiki page, I feel that a focus to the wiki activity would have been helpful. It seems to me that getting each person to setup a wiki page really is similar to the ‘create a blog’ exercise, and doesn’t encourage the collaborative working that wikis are ideal for.

The course organisers put together a list of all the participants, with their MSN account and blog details (these were setup in week 1) – I’d suggest that asking people to enter their own details into the wiki would have demonstrated the way a collaborative effort can work. Perhaps also a community Q and A page for the programme – where people on the course can both post questions, and answers, to get a sense of community to emerge.

We already have some great examples of using wikis in the library – the Spiral project, and the IRD team have used it to create documentation (two members of the IRM team comment on how well the wiki works for their documentation either on their wiki page or on their blogs), and I’ve used it for some brainstorming around the creation of a digital library strategy (something that I really need to get back to soon). These all use wiki software called Confluence which is supported by Imperial’s ICT service. Confluence is essentially a wiki, but also supports a few other functions, like blogs.

We have also started to try out ‘Sharepoint’ – a collaboration tool from Microsoft – this supports a wide range of different types of collaboration, including wiki-type functions – this is currently being trialled by the Learning Development team in the library.

What we haven’t done in the library at Imperial (yet) is try using wikis in a user-facing environment. The kind of thing we could look at is creating documentation which can be edited and updated by students – so that we can see some peer-to-peer support going on. I’m not sure if this would be successful – it may be that students are happy to share with their peers in other environments (in the cafe, on Facebook etc.) rather than in an ‘official’ library environment – but it would be an interesting experiment…