Copyright in the Wild

If you guys are anything like me, the past two weeks of LIS 2000 have only served to whet my appetite for discussion of copyright law!!! In addition, work done in LIS 2600 about licensing agreements has made me wary of these great *free* services provided on the intertubes.
So when Tim the Web Coordinator (thanks Tim, the site looks great!) sent me the link to start contributing to the SAA @ Pitt blog, I had to read the terms of service. Which led me to Google/Bloggers content policy. Which led me to Google/Blogger's policies regarding the DMCA that we've heard so much about.

To get to the point: While Google does act on notices of infringement as required by the DMCA, they also take this further action: Please note that in addition to being forwarded to the person who provided the allegedly infringing content, a copy of this legal notice may be sent to a third-party which may publish and/or annotate it. As such, your letter (with your personal information removed) may be forwarded to Chilling Effects (http://www.chillingeffects.org) for publication.

The website Chilling Effects is a project sponsored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics and is intended to draw attention to cease and desist notices sent by individuals and organizations under the terms of the DMCA, educate the public about their rights and restrictions when publishing material online, and create a database of these notices for the benefit of interested scholars, etc.

There are great examples of the little guy sticking it to The Man (Blue Jean Cable's response to Monster Cable's C&D is 1.readable and interesting and 2.chock full of moxie) - follow the entire saga here - and individuals fighting today's ePirates, both malicious and benign.

So if you craved real world examples of the debate over copyright and infringement, here is a place to start. If you didn't, then come to our first meeting on MONDAY, OCTOBER 27 at FIVE pm and tell me what you'd rather hear about.

Best,
Harrison

Welcome to to SAA @ the University of Pittsburgh's Blog

We are the University of Pittsburgh's Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists. We'll use this as a forum for making announcements, posting minutes of meetings, sharing images and other media after our events, and posting topics of interest to students in Pitt's Archival program.

Please feel free to use the blog as a means to contact the SAA officers.

Cheers,
Tim