Joe Merante's Blog

I haven't posted about copyright in a while, and opportunity knocked via this morning's email newsletter from the Copyright Office. The office issued a policy statement about its examination of compilations, particularly claims of authorship in selection and arrangement of uncopyrightable material . I found it interesting for a number of reasons, primarily because of its potential deterrent effect on spurious copyright registrations in compilations of non-copyrightable facts or ideas. Below is mostly a summary with a few comments tossed in. The statement begins with a textual analysis of the Copyright Act, beginning with the definition of "compilation" found in §101: A ‘‘compilation’’ is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. After a brief look at Feist , they cut right to the chase: H...

On Saturday, we hosted an event at CfA as part of Mozilla's Webmaker campaign. It originally began as a continuation of the #OAHack that PLoS hosted (see post below) but the dates aligned and we were pleased to bring together the related ideas of the open web, open science and open access into one event. The Presentation John Wilbanks' started our day with a presentation explaining that if government is a platform, science is a wiki . In its current state, it's a terribly inefficient one, however. He shared some statistics on references to traditional versus open-published papers, such as the number and variety of citations resulting.  So why is science such a terribly inefficient wiki and what can we do to improve sharing, reuse, collaboration and ultimately progress? John Wilbanks Presenting First, open content. John noted the NIH's open access policy and how that's changed the playing field for scientists and in many ways for publishers too, although no ...