En cette semaine de l’accès libre, Carl Malamud propose un billet sur ses plans pour rendre accessible les sources premières du droit aux USA, principalement les lois et les arrêts des cours.
Son projet Law.gov, sous l’égide de Public.Resource.org, Vise à créer un groupe de travail pour réfléchir sur l’avenir d’un tel système.
Au Canada, l’Institut Canadian d’informaiton juridique (CanLII) opère déjà une telle archive ouverte.
Le Center for Social Media annonce la publication d’un guide à l’attention des professeurs afin de les informer quant aux pratiques en lien avec le «fair use» – l’exception générale du droit d’auteur aux États-Unis – dans le cadre de production de contenu libre.
Intitulé Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare, ce document PDF
is a code of best practices designed to help those preparing OpenCourseWare (OCW) to interpret and apply fair use under United States copyright law. The OCW movement, which is part of the larger Open Educational Resources (OER) movement, was pioneered in 2002, when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched its OpenCourseWare initiative, making course materials available in digital form on a free and open basis to all. In 2005, MIT helped to organize with the support of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation a group of not-for-profit organizations interested in following the OpenCourseWare model and standardizing the delivery of OCW material. This group of institutions, known as the OCW Consortium (OCWC), has grown into a concern of more than 200 universities worldwide promoting universal access to knowledge on a nonprofit basis. The mission of OCWC is “to advance formal and informal learning through the worldwide sharing and use of free, open, high-quality educational materials organized as courses.”
Selon The Economist, les États-Unis considèrent relâcher leur emprise sur la gestion technologique d’Internet. En effet, l’agence ICANN, sous l’emprise du département du commerce américain, serait réformée pour inclure d’autres instances dans son cadre de gouvernance. L’hebdomadaire britannique précise:
For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—an arrangement other countries have complained about, both because they have little say in it and because ICANN’s management has occasionally proved erratic. ICANN’s latest mandate is due to expire on September 30th. The day before, a new accord is planned to come into effect, whereby America will pass some of its authority over ICANN to the “internet community” of businesses, individual users and other governments.
Previous agreements had maintained close American oversight over ICANN and imposed detailed reforms, but the latest document, called an “affirmation of commitments”, is only four pages long. It gives ICANN the autonomy to manage its own affairs. Whereas prior agreements had to be renewed every few years, the new one has no fixed term.
The agreement sets up oversight panels that include representatives of foreign governments to conduct regular reviews of ICANN’s work in four areas: competition among generic domains (such as .com and .net), the handling of data on registrants, the security of the network and transparency, accountability and the public interest—the only panel on which America will retain a permanent seat. But there are no penalties if ICANN fails to heed its new overseers short of a termination of the accord. [Lire la suite de l'article dans The Economist, «ICANN be independent» 24 Septembre 2009]
Par ailleurs, l’organisation suisse IP-Watch offre quelques autres détails.
La Society of American Archivists (SAA) dévoile un nouveau rapport concernant les œuvres orphelines, ces œuvres encore protégées par le droit d’auteur mais dont le titulaire est introuvable ou difficile à déterminer avec précision. Selon la SAA:
Eight archivists and a recognized legal expert in intellectual property and copyright law developed the statement, based upon their experiences researching copyright status.
“We created this statement to provide archivists with a framework to discover what materials they hold are truly orphaned works, and in the hopes of empowering them to provide wider access and use of those materials as a result,” said Heather Briston, chair of SAA’s Intellectual Property Working Group.
The primary authors of the statement include Briston (University of Oregon), Mark Allen Greene (University of Wyoming), Cathy Henderson (University of Texas, Austin), Peter Hirtle (Cornell University), Peter Jaszi (American University) , William Maher (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Aprille Cooke McKay (University of Michigan), Richard Pearce-Moses (Arizona State Library), and Merrilee Proffitt (OCLC). Financial and administrative support was provided for this project by OCLC Research and the RLG Partnership.
More information on SAA’s Intellectual Property Working Group can be found at: http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/ipwg/.
Il s’agit d’un code volontaire proposé par ces professionnels de la documentation, et est disponible dans la section «Standards» du site de l’association américaine : http://www.archivists.org/standards/.
Encore dans l’édition du 12 septembre du New York Times, Anand Giridharadas relève l’appropriation des technologies du Web 2.0 par le gouvernement des USA :
President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.
Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at news conferences; the new portal Data.gov is allowing citizens to create their own applications to analyze government data. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing”: in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.
During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters.
They received 44,000 proposals and 1.4 million votes for those proposals. The results were quietly published, but they were embarrassing — not so much to the administration as to us, the ones we’ve been waiting for.
À la fois critique et intéressée, cet article propose une vision sobre quant à la réalité du Web 2.0 par rapport aux impératifs que doivent gérer un gouvernement.
Dans l’édition du 12 septembre du New York Times, John Schwartz nous offre un article sur l’appropriation des technologies du Web 2.0 et des avocats aux USA :
Stephen Gillers, an expert on legal ethics at New York University Law School, sees many more missteps in the future, as young people who grew up with Facebook and other social media enter a profession governed by centuries of legal tradition.
“Twenty-somethings have a much-reduced sense of personal privacy,” Professor Gillers said. Younger lawyers are, predictably, more comfortable with the media than their older colleagues, according to a recent survey for LexisNexis, the legal database company: 86 percent of lawyers ages 25 to 35 are members of social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace, as opposed to 66 percent of those over 46. For those just out of law school, “this stuff is like air to them,” said Michael Mintz, who manages an online community for lawyers, Martindale-Hubbell Connected.
Au sujet de cette étude en question, LexisNexis, dans un communiqué de presse du 9 septembre 2009, précise sur son site Internet :
New survey data reveals that more than 70 percent of lawyers are members of an online social network – up nearly 25 percent over the past year – with 30 percent growth reported among lawyers aged 46 and over. The second annual Networks for Counsel Survey of almost 1,500 lawyers was commissioned by LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell®, the industry leader in networking and law firm marketing. It shows that more than 50 percent of respondents think online networks have the potential to change the business and practice of law, while 65 percent expressed interest in joining an online professional network designed specifically for their profession.
L’étude, intitulée 2009 Networks for Counsel study, est disponible à partir du site de Leader Networks.
Imaginez le scénario : vous êtes employé du Software & Information Industry Association et on vous demande de créer une initiative d’information publique pour faire respecter le droit d’auteur. Une seule solution s’impose, produire une vidéo de musique rap, avec des policiers qui appréhandent votre mêre et des Klingons dansants.
Si le ridicule ne tue pas, il permet certainement de faire circuler une vidéo dans Internet. Et ainsi donc, le message que violer les droits d’auteur est un crime. Nous sommes solidaire avec cette perspective, bien sûr, mais il faut quand même reconnaître que cette vidéo pousse un peu la donne.
Professeur James Grimmelmann, de la New York Law School, lance le Public Index qui offre des outils pour comprendre le volumineux accord pour mettre un terme au recours collectif contre Google et son projet de numérisation de livres.
Ce projet est affilié au Institute for Information Law and Policy de la New York Law School.
CultureLibre.ca et Olivier CharbonneauVous visionnez les archives pour la catégorie " États-Unis "