opencontentlawyer.com

New US case law resource launched, already using CCZero beta.

Lessig announced this week on his blog that the public US caselaw resources that Public Resource has been working towards has now gone live:

As announced at public.resource.org, CC and public.resource.org have announced the first release of material to support our free law project. After raising a large chunk of change from great and generous sorts like David Boies, John Gilmore, the Omidyar Network and the Elbaz Foundation, we’ve purchased a database of a substantial part of all federal cases. Carl’s team has now made all the data available in a beautiful, xml format for developers to take and use however they want. The however they want part is what’s assured by the CCØ mark on all cases — no rights, including attribution rights, are asserted over these data at all. Free law available for anyone to build search engines, or collections, or whatever else they want.

They’ve released the material under the beta version of CCZero, but note that CCZero has still not been officially launched or its use encouraged. At the public.resource.org site you can find the case law and materials and the developer file.

New Creative Commons and commons (more broadly defined) research discuss list. The list is run by Giorgos Cheliotis, who has done some really interesting research on measuring use of CC [PDF abstract link] [blog post].

And in related news…

NESTA report “Beyond the creative industries: mapping the creative economy in the United Kingdom” [PDF Link]. This looks like it could be part of the evidence base for the upcoming Gowers Copyright Exceptions consultation.

Google’s Canada Policy Counsel answers the question, “What is a balanced approach to copyright reform?“.

The European Commission is looking to push the term in copyright sound recordings up to 95 years. [EC press release] [IPKat commentary].

43(B)log has lots of coverage to the recent Columbia Fair Use conference.

New academic paper on servitudes that includes comparison to free and open source software licences and Creative Commons / open content licensing:

In this article I develop a comprehensive account of the evolving jurisprudence of servitudes as applied to both land and personal property, identifying the sources of traditional servitude skepticism in order better to evaluate the new generation of running restrictions on intangible informational goods. I apply the lessons I draw from the old servitudes to paradigmatic examples of contemporary licensing practices – including Microsoft end-user license agreements, the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License, and Creative Commons licenses.

Van Houweling, Molly Shaffer, “The New Servitudes” . Georgetown Law Journal, Forthcoming Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1028947

Discussion from University of Chicago, and hat tip to Madisonian.

OCLN is a regular feature here at opencontentlawyer.

Anything I missed that you think should be here? Let me know!