The September CopyNight will be Tuesday, September 27 at the Cambridge Common, a bar and restaurant at 1667 Mass Ave., Cambridge. This month CopyNight will start a bit later than usual at 8:15 pm so please note the time change. Look forward to seeing you then.

If you have any news items you're interested in talking about you can foward them to cambridge [at] copynight.org for posting here on the new Cambridge/Boston CopyNight blog.

If you're planning to attend, please send an email so we can make sure we have a seat for you.

Please forward this message to any friends or colleagues you think might be interested.

Google becomes the subject of a copyright suit by an authors' organization because of the Google library digitization project. Will having a large wealthy corporation taking the more expansive position on a copyright issue change the dynamics of this conflict?

Peter Olson posting as Copynight says ...

Not everyone made it to the July Copynight meeting, so I thought I'd post some comments on things we discussed:

I found a post on the Australian site Weatherall's Law ( http://weatherall.blogspot.com/ ) which talked about the cost of copyright clearance in movies. I had heard about this while watching the director's commentary of the Indie movie "Groove", but this case Jonathan Couette's 2004 movie Tarnation, mentioned in Weatherall ( http://weatherall.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_weatherall_archive.html#112139694736582220 ) was truly sobering: a movie edited at home using Apple's iMovie ($218 + cost of personal time and a Macintosh) cost $400,000 (not sure if that US or Aus), much of it due to copyright clearance for references to popular culture.

Here's some more about the subject: http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/rock/index.htm
"Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers
By Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi"

We also talked about the Tamberlin decision (it's discussed on the same page as the Couette movie at Weatherall). This is about whether a site which links to other sites is liable for copyright infringement based on the idea that its links were used to transmit infringing material. ( http://weatherall.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_weatherall_archive.html#112139444214088679 ) and other discussions subsequently.

The British Broadcasting Corporation was getting flack from music companies because it had made available to the public free of charge concert recordings of Beethoven's symphonies as performed by its own orchestra. Here's a report (one of many): http://techdirt.com/articles/20050711/2013234_F.shtml

We talked about "orphan works" (a subject revisited during our meeting in August). Here are some links:

http://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/001744.html

"Orphan Works Comments ... Information about the Copyright Office's "roundtable" hearings (several links)"

http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i47/47a03301.htm

"Like many other scholars across the country, Joseph Siry might have broken the law to illustrate an article he wrote for an academic journal -- by including an illustration without obtaining permission to do so from its copyright holder."

There was more stuff, but not all of it directly pertinent to copyrights and I didn't actually take notes ;-)

Kazaa recently lost its court case in Australia. Interesting and extensive exploration of the judgment here.