Copyright, Open Science, and Challenges for Research Libraries

Dr Andres GuadamuzUniversity of Sussex

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A story

and apologies

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The openness revolution

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Openness

• Use, redistribution, modification, access to sources

• Sharing information

• Access to common resources

• Communicating improvements to the community

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Open science?

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European Commission on Open Access

• “The Commission objective is to optimise the impact of publicly-funded scientific research, both at European level (FP7, Horizon 2020) and at Member State level. This is essential for Europe's ability to enhance its economic performance and improve the capacity to compete through knowledge. One way to get there is open access. Results of publicly-funded research can therefore be disseminated more broadly and faster, to the benefit of researchers, innovative industry and citizens. Open access can also boost the visibility of European research, and in particular offer small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) access to the latest research for utilisation.”

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White House on Open Data

• “Access to digital data sets resulting from federally funded research allows companies to focus resources and efforts on understanding and exploiting discoveries. For example, open weather data underpins the forecasting industry, and making genome sequences publicly available has spawned many biotechnology innovations. In addition, wider availability of peer-reviewed publications and scientific data in digital formats will create innovative economic markets for services related to curation, preservation, analysis, and visualization.”

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And…

• “As a work of the United States Government, this document is in the public domain within the United States. Additionally, the United States Government waives copyright and related rights in this work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.” 8

Some legal developments

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Orphan Works

• Directive 2012/28/EU on certain permitted uses of orphan works.

• Applies to works held in memory institutions.

• Orphan works are defined as those where an author cannot be identified after a diligent search.

• Diligent search is identified as done in good faith by using “appropriate sources” identified by consultation.

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Must-read

• Comparative study by CREATe on the regulation of orphan works in 7 jurisdictions.

• Countries currently implementing directive, different approaches, expect a lot of experimenting until we get it right.

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CC 4.0 is out

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Enforcement

• We are beyond the point of court recognising open licences

• German GPL cases

• Jacobsen v Katzer (USA)

• CC Cases in Belgium, Spain, Germany and Israel.

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CC IGO licence

Version 3.0 Inter-governmental Organisation Port (it’s complicated)

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CC0Relatively new licence that works both as a dedication to the public domain, and as a full licence where it’s not permitted to relinquish copyright. 15

Data mining

• If database is original, then it is (probably) protected by copyright.

• Question is whether operation of data mining is allowed under current copyright. My take is that it is probably not.

• Therefore, researchers will need licences for data mining.

• Move to have exceptions and limitations to allow certain non-commercial research data mining.

• UK has just modified its copyright law to allow for data mining for non-commercial purposes. 16

Preempt the legal debate

• Self-archive!

• HEI repositories with adequate re-use policies

• Use open licences!

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Repository policiesThe more open the policies, the more data mining can occur.

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Recorded metadata re-use policies UK Recorded full-text data re-use policies UK

Guadamuz and Cabell, “Data mining in UK higher education institutions: law and policy”

API law

• Most API protection is contractual (ToS, EULAs).

• Oracle v Google (US): Google created its own API interface to avoid paying licence fees to Oracle. The ruling found that the structure for which Oracle was claiming ownership was not subject to copyright protection.

• SAS v World Programming Ltd (UK and ECJ): While not related to APIs, it is a case which demonstrates that it is very difficult to claim copyright over API-like functional elements. 19

Svensson and Others v Retriever Sverige AB Case C‑466/12

• A group of journalists writing for the the Göteborgs-Posten newspaper’s website sued Retriever Sverige, a commercial indexing service which provides its clients with links to articles published by other websites.

• The claimants argued that this practice amounts to infringement as it is not clear to the clients that they are being directed to a site hosting content in another website, while the defendants claimed that their clients knew that the content was hosted elsewhere.

• “…the provision on a website of clickable links to works freely available on another website does not constitute an act of communication to the public…” 20

Public Relations Consultants Association Ltd v NLA (C‑360/13)

• “…the on-screen copies and the cached copies made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website satisfy the conditions that those copies must be temporary, that they must be transient or incidental in nature and that they must constitute an integral and essential part of a technological process.”

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22http://bit.ly/1pZ7gaL

http://www.openlaws.eu/

Concluding

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ThanksA.guadamuz@sussex.ac.uk@technollama on Twitterhttp://www.slideshare.net/technollama

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