Legal action against the digitization and limited distribution of orphan works unexpectedly hit the news again this week. This week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads starts with an overview of the lawsuit filed by authors organizations and authors against Hathi Trust over plans to make digital versions of orphan works available to university users. And while we’re wondering of libraries’ role in providing access to digitized works, we should also take note of an article in American Libraries Magazine on what we could learn from Blockbuster’s fall. And lastly, I point to a story of one author’s experience when her own self publishing with Amazon ran afoul of a publisher’s desires.

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Hathi Trust Taken to Court

The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. … “This is an upsetting and outrageous attempt to dismiss authors’ rights,” said Angelo Loukakis, executive director of the Australian Society of Authors. “Maybe it doesn’t seem like it to some, but writing books is an author’s real-life work and livelihood. This group of American universities has no authority to decide whether, when or how authors forfeit their copyright protection. These aren’t orphaned books, they’re abducted books.”

- Authors Guild, Australian Society of Authors, Quebec Writers Union Sue Five U.S. Universities, Authors Guild blog

Just days before what could be the final status hearing before the judge in the Google versus Authors Guild et al. case, the Authors Guild in conjunction with two other authors organizations and eight individual authors filed suit in federal court against Hathi Trust and five of its member universities. And with that suit it would seem that the Authors Guild has begun a full-throated assault on libraries. In a subsequent post on the Authors Guild blog, they announce that they have found the author of one of the orphan candidates identified at the University of Michigan. The tone to me isn’t so much that they are pleased for the author that they accomplished this (they don’t say whether the author was a member of the Guild or not), but that they took great pleasure in rubbing librarians’ noses in it:

Just before we filed our lawsuit, we did some cursory research into some of the names on the list of “orphan works” candidates at the HathiTrust website to see if we could find contact information for a copyright holder. …

We weren’t hopeful, because we knew that research librarians were behind the project, and they were likely to be especially careful to avoid any embarrassing slip-ups in this first go-round. We thought, at best, we might find the representative of some obscure literary estate. We were wrong.

A bit nasty, eh guys? I imagine they are trying to fire up their membership for this fight against arguably one of the great institutions of America — the library. At the very least, you’d think that if they were trying to help their members that they would prominently post the link to the list of orphan work candidates in their postings, but it took a reader deep in the comments to offer a link.

In any case, this is being set up as a fight as dramatic as the original Google vs. Authors/Publishers lawsuit. Here are some things you should read, in ascending order of length and comprehensiveness:

1. Wards of the Court, Inside Higher Ed
2. The Orphan Wars, James Grimmelmann’s The Laboratorium
3. ARL’s Resource Packet on Orphan Works: Legal and Policy Issues for Research Libraries, with extensive commentary by Jonathan Brand of Policy Bandwidth

Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence

Blockbuster was much in the news last fall, though not in the favorable light it once enjoyed. The cultural phenomenon and former stock market darling that once prospered through aggressive marketing, savvy exploitation of technology, and keen insights into customer preferences filed for bankruptcy in September 2010. Though some analysts thought the filing could give the franchise time to reinvent itself, others predicted that the onetime video-rental colossus is steps from the graveyard of retail obsolescence.

There is a lesson or two for libraries in this riches-to-rags story.

- Avoiding the Path to Obsolescence, by Steven Smith and Carmelita Pickett, American Libraries Magazine

This is a great article. Although they don’t say it specifically, the authors point to Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. Specifically, how an organization’s Resources-Processes-Values framework prevents it from reacting to innovations that are disrupting its products/services. Even if you aren’t familiar with Christensen’s work, I highly recommend reading this article.

On Self Publishing and Amazon versus Traditional Publishers

In January, 2010, I signed a contract with one of the Big 6 publishers in New York for my next novel. I understood then that I, like every writer in the business, was being coerced into giving up more than 75% of the profits from electronic sales of that novel, for the life of the novel. But I was debt-ridden and needed upfront money that an advance would provide. The book was scheduled for hardback publication in August, 2012, and paperback publication a year later. Recently that publisher discovered I had self-published two of my story collections as electronic books. To coin the Fanboys, they went ballistic. The editor shouted at me repeatedly on the phone. I was accused of breaching my contract (which I did not) but worse, of ‘blatantly betraying them with Amazon,’ their biggest and most intimidating competitor. I was not trustworthy. I was sleeping with the enemy.

- Sleeping With The Enemy: A Cautionary Tale, Davenport Dialogues

On the heels of last week’s DLTJ Thursday Threads entry on Amazon’s tactics for end-to-end control of book publishing comes this view from the author’s perspective. Publishers are getting squeezed from all ends by new models of getting content in the hands of readers. If we could, do you think we can throw into the air all of the pieces of the author-agent-publisher-printer-library-reader chain and sort them into nice neat lines of responsibility and value-add without all of this name calling and lawsuit-filing?

At the 2010 Annual RLG Partnership Meeting, David Lewis (Dean of the IUPUI University Library) gave a talk entitled “Collections Futures”. I’ve followed David’s ideas since we crossed paths a few years ago; his ideas on applying Clayton Christensen’s disruptive innovation theories to libraries ring true to me. This presentation is in part an update on his earlier work on this theme and an expansion to include new ideas from Clay Shirky and John Seely Brown.

With David Lewis’ permission and in keeping with the Creative Commons license he used to publish the work, I have synchronized his slides and the audio recording using Slideshare.net. That effort is embedded below and is available on the Slideshare site.

A couple of notes on the conversion.

• Slides 17-24 are out-of-sync with the audio recording. The speaker flipped through the slides quickly and SlideShare.net enforces a minimum of 10 seconds per slide. The slides catch up to the audio at slide #25.
• SlideShare.net did not convert the graphs on slides 67, 68 and 69. Snapshots of those slides are included below:
  67. 
  68. 
  69. 

The sources listed on the second to last slide are:

Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, and Jason Hwang, The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009.

Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, New York : McGraw-Hill, 2008.

Clayton M. Christensen, “The Innovator’s Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care” (video), May 13, 2008, MIT World, Available at: http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/594

John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, “Measuring the forces of long-term change: The 2009 Shift Index,” Deloitte Center for the Edge, 2009. Available at: http://www.johnhagel.com/shiftindex.pdf

John Hegal III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves Smartly Made Can Set Big Things in Motion, New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Lewis, David W. “A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century.” College & Research Libraries 68(5):418-434 September 2007. Available at: http://www.acrl.org/ala/mgrps/divs/acrl/publications/crljournal/2007/sep/Lewis07.pdf and http://idea.iupui.edu/dspace/handle/1805/1592 [Note: Links changed to point to updated locations]

If you are interested in more sources about applying Clayton Christensen’s theories to higher education in general and libraries in particular, see the Christensen in Higher Education Zotero group library.

My gratitude to David Lewis for sharing his thoughts and for allowing me to make them more accessible.

I’m starting something new on DLTJ: Thursday Threads — summaries and pointers of stories, services, and other stuff that I found interesting in the previous seven days. This is culled from entries that I post to my FriendFeed lifestream through various channels (Google Reader shared items, citations shared in Zotero, Twitter posts, etc.), but since I know not everyone is using those services, it might be useful to post the best-of-the-selected here once a week. Why Thursday? Somewhere long ago I read that Thursday at 11am is the best time to put a post on a blog because Thursday lunch through Friday are the most active time for readers. I have no idea whether that is true or not, but lacking any evidence to the contrary, Thursday morning will do fine. (Obviously I’m a little late on this first one, but I’ll try to do better next time. Or not — maybe this will be a one-off weekly thing.)

MagCloud — On-demand printing of magazines

MagCloud, the revolutionary new self-publishing web service from HP, is changing the way ideas, stories, and images find their way into peoples’ hands in a printed magazine format. Whether you are a novice or experienced publisher, MagCloud offers you a way to create commercial quality magazines, printed on demand with no upfront costs or minimum print runs. MagCloud is creating new ways to bring consumers and publishers together in a web-based marketplace where choice, flexibility and print on demand are the cornerstones of the community.

Could be useful for short-run, professional printing. I learned about this via a conference call with the editorial board of the NISO International Standards Quarterly.

Chris Anderson: How web video powers global innovation (TED Talk)

TED’s Chris Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation — a self-fueling cycle of learning that could be as significant as the invention of print. But to tap into its power, organizations will need to embrace radical openness. And for TED, it means the dawn of a whole new chapter …

TED curator Chris Anderson takes the stage to talk about what he has seen as the impact of putting TED talks on the net specifically as well as the general case for the impact of services like YouTube on worldwide culture. This is definitely gets one thinking about the power of the visual medium. Closer to home, it also should get one thinking about assisting library patrons in creating and curating this content, no?

Plain English

Every field has its own jargon that’s meaningless to everyone else. Sometimes you want to translate a given -ese into lay terms while preserving the original text. Plain English is designed to facilitate this. The premise is straightforward: The original text is highlighted in yellow. When you click on a phrase, it toggles to the re-written simpler version, in gray. Buttons at the top allow you to toggle the whole thing at once. The words are stored in a simple JSON file.

From the laboratory of Slate Magazine comes this technique for toggling between one set of words and its translated form. I first found this on the NPR Planet Money blog in a post titled The Fed, Translated Into English. They used it to “translate” Fed-speak (e.g. the very dense statements released by the U.S. Federal Reserve) into more common language.

Google New

The one place to find everything new from Google.

Found via Jason Griffey’s post on his American Libraries Perpetual Beta blog. I noted there my frustration that Google New didn’t have an RSS feed to make this list of new things more machine-actionable. I still think that this missing feed functionality is strange, and if I get a chance at some point I’ll try to feed the page through Yahoo! Pipes to make one.

Rising Into the Public Domain: The Copyright Review Management System (CRMS) at the University of Michigan

Interview with John Wilkin, Associate University Librarian for Library Information Technology and Executive Director, HathiTrust and Principal Investigator for CRMS

Interesting insight into how the University of Michigan is tackling the 1923-1963 orphan works problem. (Found via James Grimmelmann)

$1000 bounty offered for JPEG2000 support in Firefox

We’ve waited long enough. Apparently Firefox needs to be dragged kicking and screaming into the early 2000′s. I have a financial interest in seeing this implemented, so I’m going to step up.

I’m going to offer a $1000 bounty for native JPEG2000 support in Firefox, on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Comment #155 on this feature request has someone putting up real money to have a developer integrate JPEG2000 into the Firefox browser. The ensuing discussion gives a glimpse into how hard and how easy it could be.

White House Issues IPv6 Directive

Network World reports: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has issued a directive requiring all U.S. government agencies to upgrade their public-facing Web sites and services by Sept. 30, 2012 to support IPv6, the long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet’s main communications protocol. Kundra’s memo mandates that agencies use native IPv6 instead of transition mechanisms that translate between IPv6 and the current standard, which is known as IPv4.

You may not have heard this, but we’re running out of IP addresses. An IP address is the thing computers use to find each other on the net (and not to be confused with domain name system (DNS) addresses — the human friendly things that we put on our business cards and advertisements). In the current version of the Internet Protocol (IPv4), we only have about 4 billion addresses and we’ve used up 95% of them. There has been a big press this year to move to the next generation Internet Protocol (IPv6) that will give us 340 billion billion billion billion addresses (or roughly 50 billion billion billion addresses for each person alive in 2012 when the 4 billion addresses of the existing Internet Protocol run out). The entry of the federal government into the push for IPv6 is expected to accelerate adoption of the new standard.

I think it is a statistical anomaly that many of the meetings I attended during ALA Midwinter were somehow related to OCLC. That statistical anomaly has certainly played out in postings here on DLTJ of my impressions of Midwinter meetings. Continuing with this thread of OCLC events, I attended the OCLC Update Breakfast Sunday morning for a membership-dues-paid croissant and orange juice, and to listen to Jay Jordon’s biannual update on the past, present and future of OCLC. What follows are highlights that I found interesting in the course of his remarks, but certainly not a comprehensive report of what was said. Video of Jay’s remarks where recorded and are to be posted at some point on the OCLC website (roughly six to eight weeks from now, if my memory of past events can be any guide).

WorldCat Growth since 1998

New “Search Engines”

OCLC Services in the Cloud

OCLC is also looking to help with collection management as a cloud-available tool. Working with the New York University Libraries, OCLC is bringing analytics to bear on collection management and space allocation decisions by helping with data about the location of items in the campus library, in the library’s “ReCAP” remote storage, and what is available digitally in HathiTrust. And speaking of HathiTrust, the public interface to 7.5 million volumes digitized largely through the Google Book Search partnership, OCLC is working with project participants to aid the metadata description of items in HathiTrust, to ensure that items in HathiTrust have records in WorldCat, and to add WorldCat Local as an interface to the HathiTrust collection.

Recent problems for Cataloging Partners