The House of Commons

Thrilling Goings-on in the Wonderful World of Copyright Law

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:38:00 +0000

The ACTA saga continues, with the Australian Digital Alliance's press release zeroing in on the impenetrable veil of secrecy surrounding negotiations of the proposed Agreement. This follows media coverage, articles, and blog posts - including those on The Patry Copyright Blog, LawFont and House of Commons - debating just how sketchy the few available details about the Agreement are, and wide appeals to allow some level of public consultation on the Agreement in Australia.

In other copyright news, the Attorney-General's Department has tabled its Review of Sections 47J and 110AA: Copyright Exceptions for Private Copying of Photographs and Films. The Review recommends that no amendments be made to the provisions for the time being, gesturing to the relatively short period of operation of the provisions as one reason for this.

In the UK, 'Mr Modchips' has survived a copyright stoush, with judgement in his favour handed down by the Court of Appeal (Criminal Div). It was found that any alleged copyright infringement would have taken place prior to use of the modchips. It will be interesting to see whether the judgement prompts legislative action, as occured following the decision of the somewhat similar case of Stevens v Sony in the High Court of Australia.

Creating an Australasian Commons, Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:03:00 +0000

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to get up to Brisbane for the day for the 'Building an Australasian Commons' conference, held at the State Library of Queensland and run by the unstoppable Creative Commons Australia team. This is only one post that I will be doing about the events of the day, but I wanted to share some videos that Dr. Tama Leaver, a lecturer at the University of Western Australia, was kind enough to share with us. These two videos were created by students as part of one of Dr. Leaver's communications courses. I think both videos are fantastic and I encourage readers to take a look!

uwacomm2203, 'Citizen Journalism v Traditional Journalism', licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike licence.

citizenjournal, 'Something Old, Something New', licensed under a Creative Commons Attribition-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike licence.

I don't think I've laughed so hard since Justice Kirby mentioned Paris Hilton in the High Court.

Creative Commons Australia version 3 Licences - Open for Comment

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 00:54:00 +0000

I realise that the majority of readers aren't licensing nerds like myself (or perhaps you are, it would make sense to be on this blog if you are), but in recent news Creative Commons Australia has just released drafts of the forthcoming v3.0 licences. Two drafts are available for comment, the Attribition and Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licences.

On the CCau website it is stated that:

Getting everyone's feedback on the v3.0 licences is particularly important
because we've decided to depart slightly from our traditional drafting approach.
Rather than writing the licences as a straight translation from the Unported (ie non-country specific) licences provided by Creative Commons International, we've instead decided to base them on the excellent licences produced last year by our friends in New Zealand, which they in turn based on the England and Wales licences. The great thing about these licences is that they're written in plain English rather than legalese - which means they're much easier for non-lawyers to understand.

Comments are requested by 1 August 2008, to either info@creativecommons.org.au or the CCau mailing list. I imagine that myself and my colleagues on the 'Unlocking IP' project will submit comments on the new licences, and we'll cross post any comments here at the House of Commons too.

Gettin' Medieval On Yo' iPod

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:28:00 +0000

The prospect of wanton destruction or confiscation of iPods, laptops and other devices suspected of containing copyright-infringeing content has become increasingly real, with news of a proposed international agreement on copyright policing surfacing recently.

A leaked 'discussion paper' on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) on Wikileaks, since taken up by other bloggers and mainstream news outlets, has inspired exasperation and outrage in many quarters. It is expected that a draft Agreement will be tabled at the upcoming G8 summit in Tokyo, and it reads like a copyright law wish-list drafted by large record companies and movie studios.

Under the proposed Agreement, border security and other such officials in member States would have powers of search and siezure, where they have a suspicion - and mere suspicion would likely be enough - that an electronic device holds content that might infringe copyright. As Graeme Philipson (The Age) points out, because the discretionary power would be in the hands of security guards and acted upon immediately, there would be no involvement of courts or lawyers, and little chance for appeal. The copyright owner would be removed from the process of suing for infringement upon some evidence that it has actually occured.

In effect, a bunch of security guards at an airport could decide they 'suspect' you of being an infringinger and annihilate your iPod or laptop. (The fact that this could herald a whole new genre of 'profiling', a la 'terrorist suspect of middle-eastern appearance', is another matter. How do you spot a copyright infringer?)

Of more concern is that, because the security officials would also be able to determine what is or is not 'infringing', already-weak fair use/fair dealing type provisions that still offer at least some protection would arguably go out the window completely. Just picture trying to argue with humourless airport security staff that you're carrying a disk full of burned content to use for the purpose of parody. After a long-haul flight. With the prospect of all your other devices being searched as well. And then confiscated because they don't like your attitude.

Obviously, the only people who think this sounds like a great idea have been some US-based record and movie companies. Apparently, they have been throwing 'contributions' at US Congress members to 'encourage' sponsorship of the proposed Agreement.

This all has the vague stench of cultural oppression about it - it's a piece of paper being promoted by culturally and economically dominant groups. It empowers state servants to act outside the law and any kind of due process, make judgements about those crossing a border, and perform random search/seize/destroy activities without room for argument. The US will undoubtedly be urging other nations to sign up (or else). Finally, the fact that the Agreement has been drafted with little public discussion and largely kept secret does nothing to allay the sense that there are some serious problems with the way that copyright 'patrolling' is heading.

iTunes U: Enemy of Open Content?

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 02:45:00 +0000

[This is a guest post, written by Roger Clarke - - Sophia]

Some months ago, I participated in a public panel session run by a
university department. It was video-recorded. The university
requested from all participants a copyright release for
"non-commercial educational purposes - for example, a teaching
resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, and public
access to short excerpts via our web site". All participants signed
that release. So far so good.

Today, I was approached by the university in question to sign a much
more substantial 'Presenter's Deed of Consent'. It included "a
non-exclusive, royalty free, worldwide, irrevocable, and perpetual
licence to Exploit", including right to sub-licence. There was no
mention of constraint to non-commercial uses only, i.e. it authorises
commercial uses. (Added to that, "The Presenter is not entitled to
claim a fee or royalty for the use of the Recording by the University
or its sub-licensees").

The reason for this dreadful, old-fashioned proprietorial form of
consent transpired to be that the University is participating in the
about-to-be-launched iTunes U Oz version.

iTunes is an Apple product and service to provide paid access to
music, etc. iTunes U is an extension that enables universities to
put material up on that site:

http://www.apple.com/education/itunesu_mobilelearning/itunesu.html

Again, so far so good, because multiple channels for discovery of and
access to content is a good thing.

Here comes the rub.

The iTunes conditions appear to preclude the University from making
material placed on iTunes U subject to an open content licence. It
appears that the conditions apply not only to the version available
through iTunes, but also to versions available through other channels.

(Note: I briefly looked on the iTunes site for information on the
conditions and licences, but had little success).

That would mean that anything that a university makes available
through iTunes is locked-down and proprietised. And the new breed of
profit-oriented universities will find that just too tempting, and
will seek to 'extract rents' as economists are wont to say, or
'charge serious money' as the rest of us do.

Unless and until the iTunes U conditions are found to be different
from what I fear (or they are changed), content-producers who want
their materials to be openly available need to refuse permission for
them to be made available through that channel.

Dr Roger Clarke

Pirates on the high ©s

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:09:00 +0000

News from the treacherous waters of online piracy:

The Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft will reportedly be launching a new campaign aimed at school-aged children and teens this month. In an effort to sell the idea that downloading copyright films and television shows is a no-no, children and young people will be encouraged to produce their own films, thereby convincing them that shelling out for a movie ticket and overpriced popcorn is a sign of moral fortitude (and isn’t that the goal of every teenager?).

On the one hand, educating young people about the intricacies of copyright law, and how this affects a fairly normalised behaviour among their peer-groups, is a positive step. Ever-increasing attempts by industry bodies to crack down on online 'piracy', including leaning on ISPs to start dispensing ‘justice’ on industry’s behalf, means that knowing about the potential risks is the best way to enable young people to make informed choices about their online activities.

AFACT also points out that it wants to convey how damaging to local film-making and industry investment illegal downloads can be. This blogger has some sympathy with that point – life in the film and TV industry, particularly in Australia, involves constant scratching for cash and other resources, for all but the biggest players. Continuing investment in the local industry (at all levels) depends on the commercial success of what are usually very expensive, highly speculative undertakings. While arguably it is foreign product that is usually downloaded, the overall profitablity of the sector (here and in the US) impacts how local studios and projects are funded. For example, dwindling attendance numbers at cinemas (which are never the most profitable businesses to start with) leads to rising ticket and concession prices, which leads to fewer screens showing a narrower range of product, leading to greater difficulty in getting local content out to the audience, equalling low regard and even lower funding for Australian film and tv.

On the other hand, however, allowing the message to be watered down to the equivalent of a patronising ‘Stealing is Bad’ is unlikely to move the target audience. Following the laughable In Tune campaign featuring successful musicians discussing life as a struggling artiste, it can only be hoped that the AFACT campaign demonstrates a more sophisticated understanding of its target audience and their concerns. The more emphasis on fact and an understanding of copyright law (and potential risks involved in its contravention), the better.

Still on the subject of incurring the wrath of copyright owners – in May, a US jury handed down a guilty verdict against a man charged with conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. 25 year-old Barry Gitarts was allegedly a member of Apocalypse Production Crew, a group specialising in making pre-release copyright recordings available online as MP3 files for download. Typically, the RIAA could barely contain its glee at the verdict. The potential sentence for the unfortunate Barry includes up to 5 years imprisonment, a fine of $250,000, and making full restitution.

In this blogger's opinion, Gitarts would make a far more compelling poster-boy for any anti-piracy campaign than the Veronicas.

The very few domains with the very many licensed pages

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:58:00 +0000

'nuff said

Technical problems at The House of Commons

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:16:00 +0000

We're having one slight technical problem at the moment. Individual post pages for the current month are giving 403 forbidden errors. We're looking into it. The effected pages are http://www.cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/blog/2008/06/cctv-eye.html and http://www.cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/blog/2008/06/conferences-in-brisbane.html, and I guess the one for this post, too (click the post title, above, to see if it works).

Of course, you can still read everything on the main page.

C.C.T.V. Eye

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:28:00 +0000

Manchester band The Get Out Clause has been grabbing news space in recent weeks for their creative approach to living in the modern surveillance state that is the UK.

Being poor musicians with nary a cent to fund a flashy music clip, the band simply set up their gear around the city streets of Manchester and performed for the omnipresent CCTV cameras. Cunning use of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (UK) delivered the requested footage into their hands, which they edited into a clip now doing the rounds of Youtube and various news outlets.

Aside from putting a new spin on the notion of creativity and the 'commons', this raises a few interesting copyright questions. Housemate Abi and I, via our friend Google, did some cursory investigation: according to info on the Office of Public Sector Information site,
'The supply of documents under FOI does not give the person who receives the information an automatic right to re-use the documents without obtaining the consent of the copyright holder.'
This, however, applies to information listed in a publication scheme, and a quick look over the FOI Act itself suggests that it doesn't contain express provisions about copyright in material acquired under the Act.

So does the UK government (or whoever it outsources the CCTV collection to) own the original footage - does that footage even fall under the Copyright Act in the UK?? Does any licence to 'use' the acquired material also include rebroadcasting - and where would fair dealing fit in here? Might a similar film-making method work in Australia (although use of street CCTV is somewhat less prevalent, at least for now)??

All food for thought, especially for those more au fait with UK law than this blogger...

It remains to be seen whether CCTV DIY will take off as something of a trend - if it does, brace yourselves for an onslaught of arty types 'performing' in front of a public wall or train ceiling near you.

CCTV may have more to answer for than we first thought...

Conferences in Brisbane

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:06:00 +0000

Two upcoming conferences taking place in Brisbane this month (particularly good news for those wanting to escape the winter further south):

'Building an Australasian Commons', Creative Commons Australia
Tuesday 24 June 2008
8.30am-5pm @ State Library of Queensland, South Brisbane - and free!

'Creating Value: Between Commerce and Commons', ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
25-27 June 2008
Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre

Friday... gardening tips?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:23:00 +0000

It's Friday, so I don't have to keep it technical. But what the heck, I've got a little bit of tech. http://www.skymind.com/~ocrow/python_string/ was exactly what I needed yesterday when I realised I had an n-squared problem with accumulating strings into one long string. It's a complete newbie mistake, but I found it at least. Anyhoo, it was so good I decided it needed another vote.

Okay, so gardening. I'll make it quick. I read in my bonsai book that if you have problems propagating from cuttings, you can grow roots on the original plant in a process called air-layering:

I tried that with my dwarf schefflera (at least I think that's what it is). Here's the parent plant (it's in a pot with 2 chillies and a mint):

But the air layer failed. No roots grew. And as you probably guessed I failed with cuttings, too. But I don't like giving up, so I stuck the cutting in some water:

It has done well. It's in a tall thin jar half full of water, in a pot that's backfilled with pebbles. This keeps the rooting part warm, which I understand is important. It is now finally growing roots:

By the way, there was no sign of those roots when it was being air layered - they've all popped out since it has been in the water. I had it outside, but a couple of the roots died and I decided it was too cold out there so I bought it inside. And today I noticed there are lost more roots starting to stick out through the bark (from cracks that run in the direction of the stem, not from those popcorn-looking bits).

So here's my conclusion about air layering schefflera (umbrella trees). There's nothing to be gained from cutting a ring of bark off. The roots don't grow out of the cut bark - they just grow out of normal bark. In fact, they grow out of the brown ~2mm long cracks you can see on every part of every branch.

In summary:

If you're going to air layer a schefflera, the important points are making sure it's very wet and not cutting through the bark (though it may turn out that cutting through the bark encourages root production)
To strike a cutting, focus on keeping the rooting area (which is the bark) wet
But at the same time, remember that the cutting will drink through the bottom of the cutting, so make sure it is a clean cut. It easily rots. Mine did, and I just cut an extra 5mm of bark off to keep it healthy.

Enjoy your weekend. I'm taking a week off and spending it on vacation on Long Island in the Whitsundays, to celebrate my partner and my 10 year anniversary.

Mechanisms

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Wed, 21 May 2008 01:39:00 +0000

Here are the ways I can think of that an automated system could know that a web page is licensed:

has a link to a known licence URL
has a link that has rel="license" attribute in the tag, and a legal expert confirms that the link target is a licence URL
has a meta tag with name="dc:rights" content="URL", and an expert confirms that the URL is a licence
has embedded or external RDF+XML with license rdf:resource="URL"
natural language, such as "This web page is licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 1.0 Australia License"
system is told by someone it trusts

Here are the ways I can think of that an automated system could find new, previously undiscovered, types of licences (or at least URLs thereof):

URL is in rel="license" link tag, expert confirms
URL is in meta name="dc:rights" tag, expert confirms
URL is in RDF license tag
page contains an exact copy of a known licence
system is told by someone it trusts

If you can think of any other items for either of these lists, please let me know.

A night of analysing data

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Tue, 20 May 2008 21:59:00 +0000

Running for 8 hours, without crashing but with a little complaining about bad web pages, my analysis analysed 191,093 web pages (not other file types like images) and found 179 pages that have rel="license" links (a semantic statement that the page is licensed) with a total of 288 rel="license" links (about 1.5 per page). This equates to 1 in 1067 pages using rel="license"

The pages were drawn randomly from the dataset, though I'm not sure that my randomisation is great - I'll look into that. As I said in a previous post, the data aims to be a broad crawl of Australian sites, but it's neither 100% complete nor 100% accurate about sites being Australian.

By my calculations, if I were to run my analysis on the whole dataset, I'd expect to find approximately 1.3 million pages using rel="licence". But keep in mind that I'm not only running the analysis over three years of data, but that data also sometimes includes the same page more than once for a given year/crawl, though much more rarely than, say, the Wayback Machine does.

And of course, this statistic says nothing about open content licensing. I'm sure, as in I know, there are lots more pages out there that don't use rel="license".

(Tech note: when doing this kind of analysis, there's a race between I/O and processor time, and ideally they're both maxed out. Over last night's analysis, the CPU load - for the last 15 minutes at least, but I think that's representative - was 58%, suggesting that I/O is so far the limiting factor.)

What's an Australian web page?

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:34:00 +0000

I said recently that defining the Australian web is an issue in itself. I thought I'd say a little more about how the National Library's crawls handled the issue.

First, the National Library's crawls were outsourced to the Internet Archive, which is a good thing - it's been done well, the data is in a well defined format (a few sharp edges, but pretty good), and there's a decent knowledge-base out there already for accessing this data.

Now, there are two ways that IA chooses to include a page as Australian:

domain name ends in '.au' (e.g. all web pages on the unsw.edu.au domain)
IP address is registered as Australian in a geolocation database

Number 1 is simple, and number 2 complicated. Basically, IA is using another company's geolocation database, which uses things such as the path through the Internet to the server, who the Internet service provider is, and possibly who the domain name is registered to.

Actually, there is a third kind of page in the crawls. The crawls were done with a setting that included some pages linked directly from Australian pages (example: slashdot.org), though not sub-pages of these. I'll have to address this, and I can think of a few ways:

Do a bit of geolocation myself
Exclude pages where sibling pages aren't in the crawl
Don't make national-oriented conclusions, or when I do, restrict to the .au domains
Argue that it's a small portion so don't worry about it

(Thanks to Alex Osborne and Paul Koerbin from the National Library for detailing the specifics for me)

National Library of Australia's web data

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:04:00 +0000

The National Library of Australia has been crawling the Australian web (defining the Australian web is of course an issue in itself). I'm going to be running some quantification analysis over at least some of this crawl (actually plural, crawls - there is a 2005 crawl, a 2006 crawl and a 2007 crawl), probably starting with a small part of the crawl and then scaling up.

Possible outcomes from this include:

Some meaningful consideration of how many web pages, on average, come about from a single decision to use a licence. For example, if you licence your blog and put a licence statement into your blog template, that would be one decision to use the licence, arguably one licensed work (your blog), but actually 192 web pages (with permalinks and all). I've got a few ideas about how to measure this, which I can go in to more depth about.
How much of the Australian web is licensed, both proportionally (one page in X, one web site in X, or one 'document' in X), and in absolute terms (Y web pages, Y web sites, Y 'documents').
Comparison of my results to proprietary search-engine based answers to the same question, to put my results in context.
Comparison of various licensing mechanisms, including but not limited to: hyperlinks, natural language statements, dc rights in tags, rdf+xml.
Comparison of use of various licences, and licensing elements.
Changes in the answers to these questions over time.

They're all interesting. I'll blog a bit about the technology, but in a separate post.

Cheque’s finally in the mail for (some) artists

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Thu, 15 May 2008 04:50:00 +0000

The recently released Federal Budget held at least one item of interest for the nation’s starving artists: a planned $1.5 million to be spent on establishing a resale royalty scheme. Such a scheme has long been advocated for (by Matthew Rimmer and the Arts Law Centre, amongst many others), in order to bring Australia into line with other jurisdictions including those in Europe, and North and Latin America.

The move to ensure that visual artists benefit from appreciation in the value of their works has been seen as particularly significant for Indigenous artists. Considering the current market for Australian Indigenous artists’ works, a right to resale royalties would translate to a not-insubstantial extra income for some better-known, sought-after artists.

The interesting part will be watching how the scheme develops – at the moment, tenders to administer the scheme should be sought in the later part of this year. For example, nothing appears to have been decided about the term that the right will operate for – that is, whether it will operate on the basis of life + 70 years, or how payments to estates of deceased artists might be managed.

At the same time as K-Rudd gives, however, he also taketh away.

Funding for some other arts sectors has, of course, been slashed – for example, the regional arts fund. So, if you’re an incredibly talented, established (and probably, quite old) artist, whose work has had the benefits of time and hype to appreciate (and which actually sells)– lucky you. That royalty cheque may be in the mail sooner than you thought.

For all those struggling unknowns out there, well, there’s every chance that the program you were relying on for a kick start may be pulled.

Looks like that starving artist cliché will be around (and pulling you a beer) for a while yet.

Tune out, Rock on

noreply@blogger.com (Sophia Christou) — Tue, 13 May 2008 04:28:00 +0000

The music industry is once again raising its shrill voice against ‘piracy’, running a campaign featuring a video starring well-known Australian musos. Artists including members of Silverchair, the Veronicas, and Jimmy Barnes discuss the ins and outs of being a musician, under the tag line: “just paying the rent", "not living like a rock star".

Musos who might actually be having difficulty paying their rent were notably absent from the credits – presumably they couldn’t get someone else to fill in for them down at the café that day, or were too busy uploading their latest single onto Trig.

Unsurprisingly, the campaign has become controversial, inciting much media commentary (check some out here, and here) and raising the ire of Frenzal Rhomb guitarist Lindsay McDougall. McDougall originally appeared in the video, and now says it was on false pretences. According to Crikey, he was

“furious at being ‘lumped in with this witch hunt’ and that he had been ‘completely taken out of context and defamed’ by the Australian music industry, which funded the video. He said he was told the 10-minute film, which is being distributed for free to all high schools in Australia, was about trying to survive as an Australian musician and no one mentioned the video would be used as part of an anti-piracy campaign.” (Crikey)

The original clip including his input has been removed, but is archived.

And what would a debate involving artists’ rights be without a manifesto? ‘Tune out’ has obligingly penned one in response to the In Tune campaign.

Perhaps in an effort to appear marginally down-with-the-kids, the industry campaign page has this pseudo-licence, below, in its footer. It is in some ways similar to a ‘Free for Education’- style licence, and/or may invite the false expectation that they support a sort of personal "fair use" model in some circumstances:

“In Tune was produced with the support of the Australian music industry.
In Tune can be used for personal use and as a free non-commercial
educational resource. For more info, email: intunedoco@gmail.com"

So, there you have it – the kid drummer from Operator Please thinks MySpace is pretty cool, Lindsay McDougall continues to stick it to the Man, and the Veronicas look flawless even when they’re concerned and slightly annoyed.

Thank goodness for free (for educational purposes only) online videos.

Get a list of all (indexable) URLs on a site from the Wayback Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:13:00 +0000

Earlier this year I complained about the problem with search engines. Today, Alexander Osborne (from the National Library of Australia) corrected me, at least a little bit.

I said I'd like to see an interface that (among other nice-to-haves) answers questions like "give me everything you've got from cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip", and it turns out that that's actually possible with The Wayback Machine. Not in a single request, that I know of, but with this (simple old HTTP) request: http://web.archive.org/web/*xm_/www.cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip/*, you can get a list of all URLs under cyberlawcentre.org/unlocking-ip, and then if were to want to you could do a n o t h e r H T T P r e q u e s t f o r e a c h U R L.

Pretty cool actually, thanks Alex.

Now I wonder how big you can scale those requests up to... I wonder what happens if you ask for www.*? Or (what the heck, someone has to say it) just '*'. I guess you'd probably break the Internet...

Quantifying open software using Google Code Search

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 02:00:00 +0000

Google Code Search lets you search for source code files by licence type, so of course I was interested in whether this could be used for quantifying indexable source code on the web. And luckily GCS lets you search for all works with a given licence. (If you don't understand why that's a big deal, try doing a search for all Creative Commons licensed work using Google Search.) Even better, using the regex facility you can search for all works! You sure as heck can't do that with a regular Google web search.

Okay, so here's the latest results, including hyperlinks to searches for you to try them yourself:

all (by regex: .*) : 36,700,000
gpl : 8,960,000
lgpl : 4,640,000
bsd : 3,110,000
mit : 903,000
cpl : 136,000
artistic : 192
apache : 156
disclaimer : 130
python : 108
zope : 103
mozilla : 94
qpl : 86
ibm : 67
sleepycat : 51
apple : 47
lucent : 19
nasa : 15
alladin : 9

And here's a spreadsheet with graph included: However, note the discontinuity (in absolute and trend terms) between approximate and specific results in that (logarithmic) graph, which suggests Google's approximations are not very good.

CAL Wants YOU!....To distribute any funds that it owes you

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 22:24:00 +0000

Trawling the web in search of copyright knowledge, as one does from time to time, I came across an interesting post on the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) site. CAL collects funds under the statutory licence scheme that is provided in the Australian Copyright Act and, according to its website, there are a number of corporations and individuals who are missing out on their moolah. Could you be one of them? Head here to find out.

Sadly this blogger is not in the money, but there are some interesting names on the lists. Some make perfect sense - for example, Australian artist Pro Hart. Then there are the numerous estates who are owed money, including the estate of Ernest Hemingway, AA Milne, and Australian architect Harry Seidler. Then there are the more unusual 'publishers' -for example, eBay Australia & New Zealand and Air Caledonie International. I'm not sure what Air Caledonie has published or who's reproduced it, but I want to go to New Caledonia after visiting that website.

CAL v NSW in the High Court

noreply@blogger.com (Catherine Bond) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 22:21:00 +0000

Regular readers will know of my interest in all-things-Crown-copyright, so I have come out of my blogging hiatus* to let you all know that last week argument in the appeal of Copyright Agency Limited v State of New South Wales was heard before five members of the High Court (Gleeson CJ, Gummow, Heydon, Crennan, and Kiefel JJ). As you may recall, this case considers whether the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) can collect money from the NSW Government for the use of certain copyright-protected surveyor plans. The Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia found that CAL could not collect on these plans on the basis an implied licence exists, permitting the NSW Government to do everything it needs to in relation to the plans, as dictated by statute.

A transcript for the hearing can be found on AustLII here. I will get some comments up within the next week.

* Self-imposed in a desperate attempt to actually write my thesis, and I am pleased to report that it's going well, in case my supervisors are reading this.

Table comparing Yahoo and Google's commons-based advanced search options

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 04:15:00 +0000

Hi commons researchers,

I just did this analysis of Google's and Yahoo's capacities for search for commons (mostly Creative Commons because that's in their advanced search interfaces), and thought I'd share. Basically it's an update of my research from Finding and Quantifying Australia's Online Commons. I hope it's all pretty self-explanatory. Please ask questions. And of course point out flaws in my methods or examples.

Also, I just have to emphasise the "No" in Yahoo's column in row 1: yes, I am in fact saying that the only jurisdiction of licences that Yahoo recognises is the US/unported licences, and that they are in fact ignoring the vast majority of Creative Commons licences. (That leads on to a whole other conversation about quantification, but I'll leave that for now.)

(I've formatted this table in Courier New so it should come out well-aligned, but who knows).

Feature                       | Google | Yahoo |
------------------------------+--------+-------+
1. Multiple CC jurisdictions  | Yes    | No    | (e.g.)
2. 'link:' query element      | No     | Yes   | (e.g. G, Y)
3. RDF-based CC search        | Yes    | No    | (e.g.)
4. meta name="dc:rights" *    | Yes    | ? **  | (e.g.)
5. link-based CC search       | No     | Yes   | (e.g.)
6. Media-specific search      | No     | No    | (G, Y)
7. Shows licence elements     | No     | No    | ****
8. CC public domain stamp *** | Yes    | Yes   | (e.g.)
9. CC-(L)GPL stamp            | No     | No    | (e.g.)

* I can't rule out Google's result here actually being from <a rel="license"> in the links to the license (as described here: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license).
** I don't know of any pages that have <meta name="dc:rights"> metadata (or <a rel="licence"> metadata?) but don't have links to licences.
*** Insofar as the appropriate metadata is present.
**** (i.e. doesn't show which result uses which licence)

Notes about example pages (from rows 1, 3-5, 8-9):

To determine whether a search engine can find a given page, first look at the page and find enough snippets of content that you can create a query that definitely returns that page, and test that query to make sure the search engine can find it (e.g. '"clinton lies again" digg' for row 8). Then do the same search as an advanced search with Creative Commons search turned on and see if the result is still found.
The example pages should all be specific with respect to the feature they exemplify. E.g. the Phylocom example from row 9 has all the right links, logos and metadata for the CC-GPL, and particularly does not have any other Creative Commons licence present, and does not show up in search results.

I think I found a trump card (update: no, I didn't)

noreply@blogger.com (Ben Bildstein) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 05:46:00 +0000

(following on from this post)

http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/intended_users.php

I'll certainly be looking into this further.

(update: On further investigation, it doesn't look so good. http://www.archive.org/web/researcher/researcher.php says:

We are in the process of redesigning our researcher web interface. During this time we regret that we will not be able to process any new researcher requests. Please see if existing tools such as the Wayback Machine can accommodate your needs. Otherwise, check back with us in 3 months for an update.

This seems understandable except for this, on the same page:

This material has been retained for reference and was current information as of late 2002.

That's over 5 years. And in Internet time, that seems like a lifetime. I'll keep investigating.)

Reminder: Review of Private Copying Exceptions

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 04:28:00 +0000

The Government is conducting a review of the recently introduced format shifting exceptions in the Copyright Act (47J and 110AA). The review is required by the Copyright Amendment Act 2006. The Attorney-General's Department has released an issues paper inviting submissions on the operation of these provisions. More information is available here.

Submissions are due just around the corner (29 February) - so get submitting!

Copyright Enforcement, UK Style

noreply@blogger.com (Abi Paramaguru) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:38:00 +0000

Earlier in the week SMH reported that the Government is considering forcing ISPs to disconnect users who access pirated material (three strikes and you're out, UK style).

Kim Weatherall has done an excellent overview of the problems with this approach.