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["Christian Ahlert" <christian.ahlert AT internet-institute.oxford.ac.uk>]

Judge Dismisses Challenge to 4 Laws That Archivists Say Skew 
Concept of Copyright 


By ANDREA L. FOSTER (mailto:andrea.foster AT chronicle.com) 
Tuesday, November 30, 2004 


A federal judge has ruled against legal scholars and archivists 
who challenged current copyright law in hopes of making it easier 
to archive old literature and films on the Internet, where they 
would be available free to the public.  

The case, Kahle v. Ashcroft, pitted two archive groups -- the 
Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library, and the Prelinger 
Archives, which preserves films -- against the U.S. Justice 
Department. The archivists argued that four copyright laws are 
collectively keeping people from gaining access to "orphan" 
works: out-of-print books, old films, and academic articles that 
have little or no commercial value.  

The laws that the archivists fault are the Copyright Act of 1976, 
the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, the Copyright 
Renewal Act of 1992, and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension 
Act of 1998. A central part of the archivists' argument is that 
laws granting copyright protection to all works, even those for 
which the creators have not sought protection, have radically 
altered the "traditional contours of copyright."  

But Judge Maxine M. Chesney, of the U.S. District Court for the 
Northern District of California, disagreed with that claim and 
dismissed the case without hearing arguments on it. In an opinion 
based in part on the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Eldred 
v. Ashcroft (The Chronicle, January 16, 
2003)(http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/01/2003011601t.htm), Judge 
Chesney wrote that laws that abolished the requirement that works 
be registered to receive copyright protection do not "alter the 
scope of copyright protection, but merely determine the 
procedures necessary to obtain or maintain such protection."  

Lawrence Lessig, a prominent expert on law and technology, 
handled the challenge for the archivists, along with two other 
legal scholars. All three are affiliated with Stanford Law 
School's Center for Internet & Society.  

Jennifer S. Granick, executive director of the center, said on 
Monday that the judge got it wrong.  

"If you have a law that says you don't have to apply for 
copyright protection," said Ms. Granick, "that clearly is about 
scope." The plaintiffs plan to appeal the ruling.  

The full text of Judge Chesney's ruling, which was issued on 
November 19, is available here 
(http://www.joegratz.net/files/Kahle-ChesneyDismissal.pdf).  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 

Background articles from The Chronicle:  

Scholar Sues for Free Online Access to Out-of-Print Books 
(4/9/2004) (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v50/i31/31a03401.htm) 

Movie Archivists Promote Easing of Copyright Restrictions 
(7/4/2003) (http://chronicle.com/weekly/v49/i43/43a02402.htm) 

Supreme Court Upholds Law Adding 20 Years to Copyrights 
(1/16/2003) (http://chronicle.com/daily/2003/01/2003011601t.htm) 





Am 22 Nov 2004 um 15:15 hat Rob Myers geschrieben:

> The more I think about it, the more dual licensing (allowing people to
> select CC-BY-NC-*-UK and CC-SA simultaneously when licensing) seems an
> ideal solution to the "black hole" problem and the BBC's need for
> different definitions for some terms. 
> 
> Using this approach, the licenses do not need to be literally
> compatible and they do not need to refer to each other. Another
> license doesn't have to be made and maintained. And people can choose
> compatibility or not.
> 
> Dual licensing is well understood in Open Source software development.
> I think using this would be more effective than an "exception", which
> is what a clause allowing the CC-CA license to use the CC-UK ones
> would amount to.
> 
> To repeat the example I gave before, when you go through the Creative
> Commons website (or use their API) to choose a license, if you choose
> a compatible CC-UK license, you would be be given (and steered
> towards...) the checkbox option of choosing to dual license the work
> under the license you've chosen *and* the CC-CA license. 
> 
> Or if that is objectionable, the license chooser could have "Dual
> License" as one of the license options. Choosing this would license
> the work CC-UK-* and CC-CA simultaneously. CC-DL?
> 
> - Rob.
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