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/.

Selon le New York Times, un juge a retardé sa décision sur le cas Google Books.

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.

Wired News nous propose un survol d’un nouveau module d’extension pour Firefox qui vise à transformer la diffusion de l’information juridique aux États-Unis:

Access to the nation’s federal law proceedings just got a public interest hack, thanks to programmers from Princeton, Harvard and the Internet Archive, who released a Firefox plug-in designed to make millions of pages of legal documents free.

Il s’agit du module RECAP, qui archive des documents juridiques et vérifie s’ils sont disponibles gratuitement en-ligne au lieu de les commander par le système archaique du gouvernement américain.

Au Canada, nous pouvons compter sur l’Institut canadien d’information juridique qui diffuse gratuitement dans Internet les lois et jugements du fédéral et de toutes les provinces depuis près d’une décénie.

Le New York Times publie un texte très intéressant de Temar Lewin le 9 août concernant quelques initiatives aux États-Unis de créer des manuels scolaires en mode collaboratif par les états et autres intervenants du secteur public:

Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.

“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

“They don’t engage with textbooks that are finite, linear and rote,” Dr. Abshire continued. “Teachers need digital resources to find those documents, those blogs, those wikis that get them beyond the plain vanilla curriculum in the textbooks.”

À ne pas manquer également, le débat en-ligne sur le site EduTechDebate.org, qui se base sur une initiative qui traite de l’accès libre à l’information en Afrique.

Le groupe en charge du Open Library Environment (OLE) annonce la publication d’un rapport d’étape concernant le développement d’un logiciel intégré de gestion de bibliothèque en code source libre :

With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a multinational group of libraries is developing the design for an Open Library Environment (OLE), an alternative to the current model of an Integrated Library System. The goal is to produce a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products.

L’American Library Association offre un « super sommaire pour ceux qui n’ont pas le temps de lire » de l’accord proposé de Google Books (PDF, en, 2p).

À lire aussi le dossier déposé à la cour par l’American Library Association, l’Association of Research Libraries et l’Association of College & Research Libraries (22p. PDF, en).