Property:Has abstract
From Copyright EVIDENCE
This is a property of type Text.
K
"<b>INTRODUCTION</b> Academic authors’ confusion about copyright and publisher policy is often cited as a challenge to their effective sharing of their own published research, from having a chilling effect on self-archiving in institutional and subject repositories, to leading to the posting of versions of articles on social networking sites in contravention of publisher policy and beyond. This study seeks to determine the extent to which authors understand the terms of these policies as expressed in publishers’ copyright transfer agreements (CTAs), taking into account such factors as the authors’ disciplines and publishing experience, as well as the wording and structure of these agreements. <b>METHODS</b> We distributed an online survey experiment to corresponding authors of academic research articles indexed in the Scopus database. Participants were randomly assigned to read one of two copyright transfer agreements and were subsequently asked to answer a series of questions about these agreements to determine their level of comprehension. The survey was sent to 3,154 participants, with 122 responding, representing a 4% response rate. Basic demographic information as well as information about participants’ previous publishing experience was also collected. We analyzed the survey data using Ordinary Least Squared (OLS) regressions and probit regressions. <b>RESULTS AND DISCUSSION</b> Participants demonstrated a low rate of understanding of the terms of the CTAs they were asked to read. Participants averaged a score of 33% on the survey, indicating a low comprehension level of author rights. This figure did not vary significantly, regardless of the respondents’ discipline, time in academia, level of experience with publishing, or whether or not they had published previously with the publisher whose CTA they were administered. Results also indicated that participants did equally poorly on the survey regardless of which of the two CTAs they received. However, academic authors do appear to have a greater chance of understanding a CTA when a specific activity is explicitly outlined in the text of the agreement."
L
"A number of doctrines in modern copyright and patent law attempt to strike some balance between the rights of original developers and the rights of subsequent improvers. Both patents and copyrights are limited in duration and in scope. Each of these limitations provides some freedom of action to subsequent improvers. Improvers are free to use material that is in the public domain because the copyright or patent has expired. They are free to skirt the edges of existing intellectual property rights, for example by taking the ideas but not the expression from a copyrighted work or "designing around" the claims of a patent. However, improvers cannot always avoid the intellectual property rights of the basic work on which they wish to improve. Some improvements fall within the scope of the preexisting intellectual property right, either because of an expansive definition of that right or because economic or technical necessity requires that the improver hew closely to the work of the original creator in some basic respect. Here, the improver is at the mercy of the original intellectual property owner, unless there is some separate right that expressly allows copying for the sake of improvement." +
A
"Archival repositories are increasingly considering mass digitization as a means of meeting user expectations that materials be available online, remotely. Copyright is frequently noted as a significant obstacle to these efforts, but little empirical data exist on the copyright permissions process in archives. This article reports the findings of a study of the copyright permissions process for the Jon Cohen AIDS Research Collection at the University of Michigan. Specifically, the study sought to reveal how much effort is required to seek copyright permissions, what the results of those efforts would be, and whether or not there were traits of documents or copyright holders that were associated with accept or denial status. The study found that significant time is required to contact and negotiate with rights holders and that the biggest obstacle to getting permission is non-response. Of those requests that get a response, the vast majority are to grant permission. While few of the requests were met with denial, the data suggest that commercial copyright holders are much more likely to deny permission than other types of copyright holders. The data also show that adherence to the common policy of only displaying online those documents with explicit permission will likely result in substantially incomplete online collections." +
D
"As archives and libraries digitize and make their collections available online, they are faced with the challenge of meeting growing patron expectations in the online environment while still adhering to copyright statutes. This article reports on a case study investigating the copy right status of materials from a recent effort to make the Thomas E. Watson Papers, a manuscript collection housed at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, accessible online. The article also explores fair use as a possible approach for digital publication of archival collections containing materials protected by copyright." +
S
"Building on the Resource-Based View of the firm, we advance the idea that a firm’s customer network can be a strategic asset. We suggest that network effects are a function of network size (i.e., installed customer base) and network strength (i.e., the marginal impact of a unit increase in network size on demand). We empirically study these network effects in the 16-bit home video game industry in which the dominant competitors were Nintendo and Sega. In the spirit of the new empirical IO framework, we estimate a structural econometric model assuming the data are equilibrium outcomes of the best fitting non-cooperative game in price and advertising. After controlling for other effects, we find strong evidence that network effects are asymmetric between the competitors in the home video game industry. Specifically, we find that the firm with a smaller customer network (Nintendo) has higher network strength than the firm with the larger customer base (Sega). Thus, our results provide a possible explanation for this situation in which the firm with a smaller customer network (Nintendo) was able to overtake the sales of a firm with a larger network size (Sega)." +
H
"Calls for the creation of a "small claims" intellectual property court have arisen periodically in the U.S. since at least the late 1980s. While prior efforts to establish such a court have fizzled, a recent push to establish a small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office is gaining traction. Legislation introduced in each of the last two congressional terms, known in its present form as the CASE Act of 2017, would create a "Copyright Claims Board" to hear and decide relatively small claims of copyright infringement on an accelerated basis, with streamlined procedures and a cap on recoverable damages. In this Essay, we contribute to the debate surrounding the CASE Act by taking a comparative empirical look at existing small claims procedures that have been available to IP litigants in England and Wales since 2012. We present descriptive statistics on copyright cases litigated in the "Small Claims Track" of the U.K.'s IP Enterprise Court (IPEC-SCT), and compare case filing trends in the IPEC's SCT and pre-existing "Multi-Track." Our findings suggest that the IPEC-SCT largely operates as policymakers intended. Overwhelmingly, the SCT serves the needs of especially small plaintiffs suing to enforce rights in their own creations against defendants engaged in easy-to-prove infringing acts that would not have been worth pursuing before the SCT's creation. However, we also caution that important differences between the IPEC-SCT's procedures and those outlined in the CASE Act make it hard to predict whether the proposed Copyright Claims Board would attract similar types of cases. We recommend that U.S. policymakers amend the CASE Act to both eliminate the availability of statutory damages and lower the damages cap from $30,000 to $15,000 or less. We also encourage Congress to assess whether the proposed tribunal can realistically handle a caseload that, we estimate, could easily reach several hundred claims per year." +
B
"Co-creative relations among professional media producers and consumers indicate a profound shift in which our frameworks and categories of analysis (such as the traditional labour theory of value) that worked well in the context of an industrial media economy are perhaps less helpful than before. Can this phenomenon just be explained as the exploitative extraction of surplus value from the work of users, or is something else, potentially more profound and challenging, playing out here? Does consumer co-creation contribute to the precarious conditions of professional creative workers? This article draws from ethnographic research undertaken from 2000 to 2005 with Auran games (a game development company based in Brisbane, Australia) to engage with debates about the status of user co-creation as labour. The article argues that as a hybrid and emergent social network market these relationships introduce a form of creative destruction to labour relations in the context of the creative industries." +
"Copyright enforcement was one of the early challenges to the rule of law on the internet and has shaped its development since the early 1990s. The Notice and Takedown (N&TD) regime, enacted in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, offered online intermediaries immunity from liability in exchange for removing allegedly infringing materials upon receiving notice from rights holders. The unequivocal power of rights holders to request removal and the strong incentives for online intermediaries to remove content upon receiving a removal request have turned the N&TD regime into a robust clean-up mechanism for removing any unwarranted content. The N&TD procedure applies to private facilities, makes use of proprietary software, and is administered by private companies. This enforcement procedure is nontransparent and lacks sufficient legal or public oversight. Unlike copyright enforcement in court, where decisions are made public, we know very little about the actual implementation of the N&TD regime: Which players make use of the system? Who is targeted? What materials get removed and why? How effective is the removal of infringing materials, and does it comply with copyright law? This Article offers empirical evidence on the implementation of the N&TD regime based on the systematic coding and analysis of a large-scale data-set of removal requests sent to Google Search. The findings shed light on the major changes that have taken place in copyright enforcement following the transition to the online arena over the past decade. Analysis of the data reveals that the N&TD procedure has been extensively used to remove noninfringing materials, and most removal requests pertained to allegedly inaccurate, defamatory, or misleading content. These findings raise serious concerns that the N&TD procedure is becoming fertile ground for misuse. Moreover, online enforcement is dominated by multinational companies, which prefer to target global intermediaries rather than attempt to remove materials hosted by local platforms. This may lead to underenforcement of copyright online, as the exclusive focus on removal of links to allegedly infringing materials may limit access to these materials, yet fail to actually remove these same materials. The local hosting platforms which facilitates access to repeat infringments, are widely known within the relevant community of users. This calls into question the effectiveness of this enforcement strategy. At the same time, however, the data demonstrates instances of overenforcement, where some materials have been removed on questionable grounds. Thus, the findings raise concerns over the implications of the N&TD regime for access to knowledge and freedom of speech. Overall, the study shows that in the absence of sufficient oversight, the N&TD regime is vulnerable to misuse, carrying consequences to copyright goals, access to justice, and due process. By uncovering the invisible dynamics at work in online copyright enforcement, this Article may contribute to identifying the challenges facing policymakers in shaping online enforcement procedures and developing the appropriate measures to address them."
A
"Copyright holders of major manga and anime in Japan have been ignoring copyright infringement by dojinshi (or doujinshi), a Japanese word referring to self-published works created predominately by amateurs. Many of dojinshi are derivative works of popular anime or manga but are sold without official permissions from the copyright holders. Thus, it is highly possible that the activity of dojinshi creators violates Article 28 of the Copyright Law of Japan, which states the rights of original authors in the situation of exploitation by derivative works. We demonstrate that ignoring copyright infringement by a derivative creator can be optimal for the copyright holder based on an economic model that incorporates both positive and negative externalities of derivative work. We also demonstrate that when unauthorized use of the copyrighted work is optimal for the copyright holder, it is also optimal for social welfare although the opposite is not necessarily true." +
"Copyright incentives and rewards to producers of works have been able to exist alongside other values, such as freedom of expression. However, changes in the way information products are being disseminated raises questions as to whether those values remain compatible with the new modes of dissemination. So far, studies devoted to digital rights management (DRM) and copyright exceptions have noted, theoretically, its legal implications. This research filled an existing gap by unveiling, through empirical lines of enquiry, (1) whether certain acts which are permitted by law are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and (2) whether technology can accommodate conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM - linking, thus, policy conclusions to empirical findings.
The survey concluded that some beneficiaries of privileged exceptions are being adversely affected by the use of DRM and practical solutions are required. Thus, it is proposed that, in the short term, with the help of the empirical findings and recommendations of this study, the EC Commission submits a proposal for two amendment of Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive, as follows:
(1) A definition of the expression ‘appropriate measures’ should be inserted in Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive, stating that for the purposes of that Directive such measures require the establishment of a procedure to enable expeditious access to works by beneficiaries of privileged exceptions, leading to the creation of standardized access to works portals across EC Member States.
The existence of access to works portals would be made possible by a DRM deposit system, according to which the means to enable beneficiaries of privileged exceptions to benefit from them would be deposited and made available through access to works portals, in specified circumstances.
(2) It should be added to Article 6(4) of the Information Society Directive that where access to works by beneficiaries of privileged exceptions is not facilitated, the protection of privileged exceptions (given their connection to core freedoms) prevails over the protection of DRM, even where works are supplied online on agreed contractual terms."
V
"Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The “private investment” model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The “collective action” model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper, we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound “private-collective” model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models and can offer society the “best of both worlds” under many conditions. We describe a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and also offer some advice on conducting empirical studies on open source software development processes." +
B
"Despite digital piracy's well-documented impact on firm revenue, the relationship between piracy and firm innovation, including the creation of new intellectual property (IP) rights, is not well-understood. To fill this gap, this paper estimates the impact of piracy on innovation through a quasi-experimental design and explores the mechanisms driving this relationship using data on software firms. Leveraging a 2001 technological shock that suddenly enabled rising software piracy, we find increases in subsequent R&D spending, copyrights, trademarks, and patents for large, incumbent software firms. Furthermore, firms with large patent portfolios appear to disproportionately increase copyrights and trademarks following the piracy shock. After considering alternatives, our analysis suggests that impacted firms perceive piracy as a form of product-market competition that causes them to increase innovation and balance their IP portfolios.
Keywords: Piracy; Software; Innovation; Intellectual property" +
T
"Digital piracy is a worldwide concern. Both very high and very low rates of intellectual property infringement threaten innovation, thus implying that some level of effective copyright regulation is required to incentivize the creation of original works. However, although Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights advocates for social access to culture as well as the protection of copyright, many countries do not yet have an economic and legal balance between authors and consumers.
This article aims to identify which copyright law measures are more related to low/high digital piracy rates. To address that question, the author presents a picture of how the world of copyright is today. The empirical law and economics methodology used in this paper thus consists of a content analysis of significantly selected copyright law measures that have been more or less broadly implemented, or that have been dismissed by 108 countries in their current national copyright statutes. After processing the resultant database (or coding scheme) with econometric and descriptive statistical tools, the findings suggest that: (1) the legal measures correlated to high digital piracy rates include the sweat of the brow doctrine and secondary liability rules for Internet Service Providers (“ISPs”); (2) the measures most connected to low piracy rates are private copying and fair use provisions; (3) statutes that favor copyright holders are associated with greater rates of digital piracy; and (4) richer countries show lower levels of copyright infringement, which validates the development economics theory. Because there is no extant literature on this topic, these results constitute the first step toward a comprehensive cross-national quantitative study on comparative copyright law and digital piracy, both in descriptive and explanatory terms.
Without doubt, this project will excite scholars in economics and intellectual property but will also intrigue international policymakers as the outcomes of this study provide core policy guidelines on copyright that legislatures and governments around the world can implement. These interdisciplinary recommendations are in line with designing a new and economically viable regulatory copyright model which aims to reduce piracy rates and to solve the global tension between authors and consumers in the digital era."
E
"Digitization and the internet have posed an acute economic challenge to rights holders in the cultural industries. Faced with a threat to their form of capital accumulation from copyright infringement, rights holders have used discourse strategically in order to try and legitimate and strengthen their position in the digital copyright debate with governments and media users. In so doing, they have appealed to general justificatory principles – about what is good, right, and just – that provide some scope for opposition and critique, as other groups contest their interpretation of these principles and the evidence used to support them. In this article, we address the relative lack of academic attention paid to the role of discourse in copyright debates by analysing user-directed marketing campaigns and submissions to UK government policy consultations. We show how legitimacy claims are justified and critiqued, and conclude that amid these debates rests some hope of achieving a more legitimate policy resolution to the copyright wars – or at least the possibility of beginning a more constructive dialogue." +
M
"Digitization in public libraries in Kenya has elicited a lot of interests in the recent past culminating to the creation of several initiatives with the objective of promoting it. Despite the zeal through which these initiatives are being crafted the progress made this far remains significantly slow and strained compared to similar developments in academic, corporate, special and other private libraries. Most public libraries in Kenya still rely heavily on the conventional paper based systems despite the fact that most users presently are more inclined to ICT based systems in their pursuit of knowledge. This study focused on copyright laws to establish how they affect the implementation of these projects in Kenyan public libraries. It also seeks to analyze the instances under which aspects of copyright law define digitization practices and looks to establish whether there are existing structures the libraries navigate through the existing copyright challenges. The objective of this study therefore was to investigate how copyright laws influence the successful implementation of digitization projects in Kenyan public libraries. A descriptive research design was used with a target population comprising employees from Kenyan public libraries and Kenya National Library Services (KNLS) which is the parent institution. The scope of the study was on Kenya National Library Services management and library staff from five public libraries. A descriptive survey method was used to conduct the study. Questionnaires were used as the principal instruments of data collection while structured interviews were also conducted to capture additional primary data. A total of eighty six (86) questionnaires were administered to the respondents from which a total of 78 were sufficiently completed and returned giving a response rate of 90.7%. The study used Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software version 23
to analyze the data and generate results for interpretations. It was indicated from the study that copyright laws present serious challenges to digitization projects in the libraries in a variety of ways described in the findings. For one it was explicitly indicated from the findings that certain issues on copyright law significantly determine
what resources are digitized, not only that, they also influence how they are made accessible. It was recommended that systems of copyright exceptions and limitations need to be reviewed and made more flexible for libraries. The current copyright legislations
need to be revised in line with the technological advancements through amendments to encourage adoption of ICT in information dissemination."
I
"EY were commissioned by the UK Intellectual Property Office to conduct a feasibility study
to determine whether it would be possible to estimate the scale of parallel trade across
the economy, and to suggest potential research methodologies for the future. This was
commissioned to inform the Government’s assessment and analysis of the options for the
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) exhaustion regime when the UK leaves the EU.
The study builds understanding of the existing data to estimate parallel trade, what could be
collected, its quality, and whether the data could be used to infer quantities of parallel trade.
It also establishes the views of a sample of stakeholders on different potential regimes and
their assessment of the consequences of a change of the IPR exhaustion regime.
In terms of scope, this feasibility study does not suggest or recommend a future
exhaustion regime but establishes the current data on parallel trade and what, if any, future
work could improve from this baseline." +
L
"Economists and legal scholars have debated the reasons people adopt open source software, and accordingly whether and to what extent the open source model can scale, replacing proprietary rights as a primary means of production. In this study, we use the release by a biotechnology company of similar software under both proprietary and open source licenses to investigate who uses open source software and why. We find that academic users are somewhat more likely to adopt open source software than private firms. We find only modest differences in the willingness of open source users to modify or improve existing programs. And we find that users of open source software often make business decisions that seem indifferent to the norms of open source distribution. Our findings cast some doubt on the penetration of the open source ethos beyond traditional software markets." +
F
"Every IP right has its own definition of infringement. In this paper, we suggest that this diversity of legal rules is largely traceable to differences in the audience in IP cases. Patent, trademark, copyright, and design patent each focus on a different person as the fulcrum for evaluating IP infringement. The fact that patent law focuses on an expert audience while trademark looks to a consumer audience explains many of the differences in how patent and trademark cases are decided. Expert audiences are likely to evaluate infringement based on the technical similarity between the plaintiff’s and defendant’s works. Consumers, by contrast, are likely to pay more attention to market substitution and less attention to how things work under the hood. Understanding the different audiences in IP infringement is critical to understanding how the IP regimes define infringement." +
D
"Freedom of panorama, an exception to copyright law, is the legal right, in some countries, to publish pictures of artworks which are in public space. A controversy emerged at the time of the discussions towards the revision of the 2001 European Copyright Directive, opposing free knowledge communities as advocates of the public domain, and authors’ collecting societies aiming at preserving their constituents’ income. The article decrypts the legal framework and political implications of a topic which has been polarising copyright reform lobbyists, and analyses its development within the public debate since the XIXth century. Articulating legal analysis with text mining, this article aims at contributing to the policy debate." +
F
"From amateur creativity to social media status updates, nearly every Internet user is also a content creator—but who owns that content? Policy, including intellectual property rights, is a necessary but often invisible part of online content sharing and social computing environments. We analyzed the copyright licenses contained in the Terms of Service of 30 different websites where users contribute content, then conducted a survey to match perceptions of copyright terms to the reality. We found that licensing terms vary in unpredictable ways, and that user expectations and opinions differ by license and by type of website. Moreover, the most undesirable terms, such as right to modify, appear more frequently than users expect. We argue that users care about how their content can be used yet lack critical information. Site designers should take user needs and community norms into account in creating and explaining copyright policies." +
