In the most recent New Yorker magazine (October 20, 2014; also available online), staff writer Louis Menand deciphers not only the basics of American copyright law, but also some of the fundamental debates about it in “Crooner in Rights Spat.” This article is not only informative, it stands as a great potential access point to bring students and faculty up to speed on the issues.  My biggest critique of the piece is that Menand has pulled the wool from my eyes and I now feel guilty providing links.  I will, however, suppress my guilt and tell you that the article is available here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/20/crooner-rights-spat

On the heels of this, the newyorker.com (online) yesterday published “Taking Pictures: A Way for Photographers to Protect Their Work,” by Betsy Morais. This brief profile of photographer and photojournalist Yunghi Kim illlustrates the many ways that photographers in particular (and, one might assume, visual artists more generally) must protect their rights to their work in the age of easy digital reproduction. An excellent article to share with students who are both content producers and content consumers. See http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/photographers-can-protect-work

Thanks to Curtis Kendrick for this link from Harvard. Their Office of Scholarly Communication has a team of Copyright First Responders, which got me thinking. While I would very much like to wear a cape, and run around the library with a (c) emblazoned on my chest, Harvard’s Copyright First Responders are not individual superheros fighting the good copyright fight. They are purposefully developing a community of like-minded experts who are equally interested in copyright and in creative scholarship.

With the CUNY Copyright Committee, we have the rudiments of that community, but I puzzle over how we can take it to the next level — or if we should. Do we match Harvard’s call to “create a collaborative network of support among their peers involved with copyright issues, both locally and across the library, and serve as a resource for the Harvard [CUNY] community by answering copyright questions and sharing critical knowledge?”

How do we describe our mission as (c) at CUNY? Should we likewise be focused on collaboration and support?

Coursera is offering a Copyright for Educators and Librarians MOOC from July 21-August 18.  The course will be taught by Kevin Smith, Lisa A. Macklin and Anne Gilliland, all of whom are librarians and lawyers. Two of us at Hunter will be taking it — if you’re around and would like to form a study group, let us know!

– Stephanie Margolin & Malin Abrahamsson
mab0007@hunter.cuny.edu or smargo@hunter.cuny.edu

Whose work better to be freely available than Marx?  And yet on May 1 2014 (yes, May Day) the Marxist Internet Archive received a cease and desist from a small, leftist publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, who owns the copyright to a 50-volume English language edition of Marx & Engels’ writing.  Read the first installment of this David vs. David battle in the New York Times.  More is surely soon to come.

And for our own intellectual property rights, this recent New York Times dispatch on Terms of Service agreements among various popular social platforms.  Do you know what rights you have given away?