eNetworking 101: The Blog

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Wikis, Tweets, and Blogs, Oh My!

Yesterday I participated in the session entitled "Wikis, Tweets, and Blogs, Oh My!" at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.. The other people on the panel were:
  • Michael Moynihan, Senior Editor, Reason Magazine (title corrected 6/21/2009)
  • Keith Kupferschmid, Senior Vice President, Intellectual Property Policy, SIIA
  • Laura Malone, Associate General Counsel, The Associated Press
The session was moderated by Christopher Kenneally, Director, Business Development, Copyright Clearance Center. The session was video recorded and I expect that excerpts will be available on the Beyond the Book podcast and perhaps the entire session will be available elsewhere.

The session focused on the copyright concerns that are occurring with social media. We talked about illegal use of copyrighted materials as well as "tolerated use". For example, it is illegal to copy an entire Associated Press (AP) news article and place it in your blog without explicit permission from the AP. It is legal to quote snippets from a news article with a link back to the original article, along with additional content from you (e.g., criticism or commentary).

"Tolerated use" is an interested gray area. The example I gave is that I will republish entire conference announcements in my Digitization 101 blog because I know that those announcements are meant to be widely disseminated even though they are technically copyrighted. The organization that created the announcement sees that as "tolerated use". Yes, I have infringed on the organization's copyright, but they tolerate it because of the benefit that they are receiving. Tolerated use is not law. In this specific case, I could argue that my use complies with the four factors of Fair Use under U.S. law:
    1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes (A commercial benefit is received by the original organization and not by Hurst Associates, Ltd.)
    2. The nature of the copyrighted work (An announcement meant from broad distribution)
    3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole (The entire announcement)
    4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work (The use does not effect the value of the copyrighted work, since the copyright work is an announcement and not something that is for sale.)
We also touched on the idea of attribution and I wish we could have explored this topic more. I stated that in some cases, if someone uses my words, I may be okay with it if I receive proper attribution. For example, if I say something on Twitter that is repeated by others (retweeted), then I would hope that I would received credit (attribution). This is a very, very hard concept to articulate, especially since what is tolerated is defined on a case-by-case basis. I think this is something I need spend more time thinking about so I can articulate my tolerance and concerns better.

All in all, this was a very interesting session and I'm glad that I was invited to be one of the panelists. Once any podcast and video from this session goes online, I'll post a note letting you know where you can find it.

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posted by Jill Hurst-Wahl at 9:02 AM

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4 Comments:

  • Hi, Jill.

    Great post and fascinating session - sorry I missed it (was getting career advice!).

    Tolerated use is a great example of what a few copyright scholars call copyright norms, versus copyright law. Copyright touches so much of our lives, especially digitally, that having norms not codified by law is not only good but natural. But as norms change radically (or have the potential to do so, that's when the impulse to codify grows in attraction.

    Attribution is interesting. Technically, it's not a part of American copyright law, but plagiarism is an important part of the content world, too. Was Creative Commons licensing brought up at all? An important licensing provision among the choices is the BY-clause: whether reproduced and derivative works must give attribution to the creator(s) of the source(s).

    By Anonymous Eli Edwards, At June 16, 2009 11:15 AM  

  • This is actually a pretty interesting discussion point, the one on tolerated use. I wonder if your conference talked about the issue the NY Times online site ran into when they quoted and attributed a story to another online news organization, who then threatened to sue them for a violation of their copyright. It seems that even with attribution, which this small news site should have enjoyed, that it wasn't sufficient enough for the original owners of the content.

    Great post; thanks.

    By Blogger Mitch, At June 17, 2009 10:17 PM  

  • Eli,

    Thanks for the note and for the conversation we were able to have at SLA.

    I like the idea of "copyright norms" versus "copyright law". I do think the "copyright norms" require a good base of societal understanding (or contextual understanding). In other words, when is it a "norm" and not a violation?

    We did not talk about the Creative Commons at all. I think that is due to the questions asked by the interviewer (who interviewed the panel).

    By Blogger Jill Hurst-Wahl, At June 19, 2009 6:17 PM  

  • Mitch,

    We did not touch on the NY Times case. It would be interesting to know more of the details of the case. Could the use have been seen as Fair Use? (Did it pass the four factors of Fair Use?) Did the NYT seek permission for the use?

    Attribution does not relieve someone from adherence to the law. The idea was raised during the session in terms of Twitter specifically. It was noted after the session that tweets are relatively short and an individual tweet is likely not copyrightable by law. It would be interesting to know if a series of tweets (for example all of the tweets I sent related to SLA2009), when displayed together, could be copyrighted? We didn't tackle that question!

    By Blogger Jill Hurst-Wahl, At June 19, 2009 6:24 PM  

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