Legal Issues

community college’s policy limiting library computer use to educational and employment purposes did not violate state law guaranteeing undergraduates’ free speech rights on campus, the Fourth District Court of Appeal has ruled.

Div. Three Friday ordered publication of an opinion in which it rejected 58-year-old Saddleback College student Patrick Crosby’s appeal from an Orange Superior Court ruling denying his bid to eliminate all restrictions on Internet use.

NEW YORK, NY March 23, 2009 —The Brooklyn (NY) Public library has apologized in writing to a woman who was harassed while attempting to breastfeed her daughter. Danielle Glanvill contacted the New York Civil Liberties Union about two incidents at the library's Flatlands Branch. In each case, a security guard is accused of telling her to stop nursing.

New York law provides that a mother has a right to breastfeed her baby in any location, public or private. WNYC.org and NYCLU coverage.

The following announcement on the copyright situation in New Zealand was released today on NZ-Libs and is reprinted below with permission:

LIANZA welcomes the announcement by the Prime Minister that Section 92A of the Copyright Act is going to be repealed and that the Government proposes to introduce a much fairer copyright provision to prevent unlawful downloads from the Internet. LIANZA reiterates its support for clear copyright law that strives to achieve a fair and equitable balance, for the ultimate benefit of authors and copyright owners, users of in-copyright works, and society as a whole. LIANZA wishes to be involved in the formulation of any future law and is looking forward to working with other relevant parties in the sector to develop a fair and workable model. We would be interested in hearing from other LIANZA members who would like to be involved in this process. Glen Walker President LIANZA

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed formal comments opposing a proposed rule by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) that would illegally empower prison officials to ban vital religious works from prison chapel libraries, despite a law passed last year prohibiting them from doing so. The proposed rule, which would allow material to be banned based on a mere determination that it "could…suggest" violence or criminal behavior, directly contradicts the Second Chance Act which places strict limits on what material BOP officials may outlaw.

The ACLU’s comments, which have been signed by a diverse coalition of religious organizations including the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the American Jewish Congress and Muslim Advocates, were submitted for consideration to BOP’s Office of General Counsel.

Additional coverage from the NYTimes.

The Legal Times blog reports that arguments before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals over the Copyright Royalties Board have taken on a new angle. Challengers of the royalties decision that severely increased rates payable by webcasters raised the challenge of whether or not it was constitutional for Copyright Royalties Board judges to be appointed in the manner they presently are. Also raised during the hearing was the notion that since the Librarian of Congress could be fired at will by the President, the Library of Congress is more properly an institution of the executive branch than the legislative.

Reuters reports: Media company Discovery Communications Inc has sued Amazon.com, accusing the online retailer's Kindle of infringing its patent on electronic book technology.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Delaware, marks another blow for a closely watched gadget that has drawn fire from publishers that say Amazon is trying to avoid paying royalties.

The lawsuit claims that Amazon, in two versions of its Kindle, has infringed one or more of the claims on a patent that Discovery founder John Hendricks received in November 2007.

The patent deals with encryption technology for the distribution of digital books.

Lawrence Lessig and [Michael Eisen] have been writing about the link between publisher contributions to members of the House Judiciary Committee and their support for H.R. 801 -- a bill that would end the newly implemented NIH public access policy that makes all works published as part of NIH-funded research freely available online. On Friday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) -- lead sponsor of the bill -- responded in a letter on Huffington Post.

Full story here.

As European lawmakers debate how to keep access to the Internet free and equal — so-called network neutrality — they are inundated, not unsurprisingly, by lobbyists.

But the corporate envoys roaming the halls of Brussels trying to make their case, more often than not, do not represent the Continent’s myriad telecommunications and Internet companies, but rather those from the United States. Europe has become the world’s technology regulator. So the AT&Ts and Verizons are pitted against the Googles and Yahoos to shape European law in the hopes that American regulators will follow suit.

Coshocton Tribune - Coshocton,OH: Coshocton Public Library Children's Librarian Diane Jones is watching and waiting. Over the next year it will be determined if all of the library's children's books will need to be tested for lead, if children 12 and under will have to be banned or, best case scenario, neither has to happen.

The executive director of the 9,000-member guild isn't taking all or even most of the credit for Amazon's abrupt about-face on Friday. The retailer announced that it would allow publishers to disable the Kindle 2's text-to-speech feature on any titles of their choosing.

He says while Authors Guild managers were "vocal" with their objections to the Kindle's speech technology, including publishing an op-ed piece in The New York Times, much more powerful entities were leaning on Amazon to make changes: large book publishers.
There was one more reason Amazon was prompted to make changes, according to Aiken.
"Amazon realized the magnitude of the contractual problem," Aiken said Monday morning. "Many of the author's publishing contracts give publishers the right to publish e-books, but only without enhancing audio. A reasonable reading of those contracts shows that publishers didn't have the authority to sell e-books for use in a Kindle device with audio enhancement."

Full story here.

Report from the NYTimes: Two years ago, an effort to fix No Child Left Behind, the main federal law on public schools provoked a grueling slugfest in Congress, leading Representative George Miller, Democrat of California, to say the law had become “the most negative brand in America.”

Education Secretary Arne Duncan agrees. “Let’s rebrand it,” he said in an interview. “Give it a new name.” And before Mr. Duncan has had time to float a single name, scores of educators, policy wonks and assorted rabble-rousers have rushed in with an outpouring of proposals.

A blog contest to rename the No Child Left Behind law has received entries like the Rearranging the Deck Chairs Act and the Teach to the Test Act. Here's the website sponsoring the contest. So far, 216 suggestions have been made.

Over 1,000 books with 1985 or older on the copyright page have already been quarantined behind an orange curtain.

Library Director Barbara Hegr said librarians will try to determine if the edition is a printing after the copyright date, so the book may be preserved.

Full story here.

Americans have grown accustomed to finding just about anything they want online fast, and free. But for those searching for federal court decisions, briefs and other legal papers, there is no Google.

Instead, there is Pacer, the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system designed in the bygone days of screechy telephone modems. Cumbersome, arcane and not free, it is everything that Google is not.

Recently, however, a small group of dedicated open-government activists teamed up to push the court records system into the 21st century — by simply grabbing enormous chunks of the database and giving the documents away, to the great annoyance of the government.

Full article here.

The Kindle 2 has a feature which allows the book to be read out loud. And wow, does this have the Author's Guild up in a tizzy.

"They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Amazon is moving forward with the rather logical opinion that there's no way a person would confuse the computerized text to speech voice with an audiobook.

So all of you youth librarian types doing story time? STOP IT. You're violating copyright and you're probably doing it more ways than one since you're not only reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom out loud, but you're putting on a public performance.

More on this story from the Wall Street Journal.

San Jose Mercury News reports that libraries are the latest organizations to win relief from a tough new federal law taking effect today that all but bans lead in children's products.

On Friday, the Consumer Product Safety Commission exempted children's books printed after 1985 from the new law's enforcement provisions, which allow fines of as much as $100,000 per violation for selling or distributing products that contain more than 600 parts per million of lead intended for use by children 12 and younger.

"We're jubilant," said Barbara Roberts, president of the California Library Association on Monday. Before the exemption, Roberts said libraries across the nation faced the prospect of closing their children's sections and discarding thousands of books from their collections. Roberts added that she was bewildered that lawmakers would pass a law with such broad reach "without thinking of the ramifications in the field."

There's a big exception though. Jennifer Baker, library director with the St. Helena Public Library in Napa Valley, said the law still puts off limits to children rare, older books. She said one library at which she worked kept a collection of Mother Goose books from the early 1900s, while others retain original copies of old classics, like those from the Nancy Drew or Tom Swift series, she said. I guess they'll have to wait til they're adults to enjoy the books.

UCLA law professor and freedom of speech scholar Eugene Volokh recently posted at his legal group blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, a post about a school libraries matter. The post, What May a School Board Do When It Concludes an Elementary School Library Book Omits Important Information?, takes a look at a recent case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. An opinion has been released in the matter.

Steve Lawson has an Interesting Post based on This One about someone who has been exchanging emails with curators at the Huntington Library about their use policies for digital images. Lawson: "In addition to charging a reproduction fee, the Huntington asked about Ross’s intended use and quoted further fees based on what the use might be. When Ross pointed out they can’t do that with a public domain image, the library said, in effect, “all libraries do this,” to which Ross replied something along the lines of “so what?” It is, he says, a crime called copyfraud."

Toys with dangerous levels of lead, toxic chemicals in clothing, hazardous baby cribs — the soon-to-be-enforced Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act aims to protect children from all of them.

But library books? Unless the Consumer Product Safety Commission exempts them from the sweeping legislation, libraries nationwide could be forced to pull children’s books from their shelves or, alternately, ban children. The law is scheduled to take effect on February 10.

“You’re talking about separating children from books, which has got to be the most ridiculous thing this commission has ever attempted,” said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington office. “Books are safe. They are not a dangerous product.”

Paper cuts maybe...but lead? Kansas City Star reports.

Despite being utterly, and embarrassingly, full of crap, Kevin Trudeau's books are still popular. I've got patrons asking for them every week and I have to put them on hold because they're usually checked out. Never mind that the man's a fraud and a con-artist spreading false information about everything from cures to cancer to ways out of debt, people want to read his stuff.

So while I applaud the recent actions of a federal judge who ordered Trudeau to pay US$37 million for violating a 2004 order regarding false claims in his weight loss "cures" book, I doubt it'll have an effect on those wanting to read it. However, we can at least take solace in the fact that he's also been barred from publishing anything or creating infomercials for the next three years.

More from, where else?, the Federal Trade Commission.