Author Archives: mattvoigts

Reports from the Eurasian Academic Libraries Conference 2022 (Astana, Kazakhstan)

Recently, I was honored to deliver one of three keynote addresses at Nazarbayev University’s 11th Eurasian Academic Libraries Conference (EALC) in Astana, Kazakhstan.

The conference theme was Open Access to Knowledge and Libraries: Achievements and Trends. Often in my work with IFLA I’m engaged with developing copyright policy, focusing on where things are going wrong and how they could be improved. Hearing speakers from around Central Asia enthusiastically and the world discuss OA, repository development, and other related ongoing projects, it felt like I had entered a space where OA and related policies were the norm and traditional publishing modes were the alternative. It clearly showed the vitality and utility of OA.

Many Central Asian universities represented at the conference were founded or expanded relatively recently – including conference host Nazarbyaev University, which was established 2010.  Open policies enable students and researchers to tap directly into the global, scholarly conversation in places that haven’t necessarily had decades to develop print collections, and journal subscriptions can be expensive and otherwise challenging to obtain. Access to current, up-to-date material enables everyone join and contribute to the global scholarly conversation.

There was a carefully chosen flow to the speakers, who were drawn from throughout the region and world. The conference featured simultaneous translation between Kazakh, Russian, and English – the three languages of Kazakhstan. The keynote addresses moved from my general discussion of the history of copyright. Broadly speaking, copyright law has always had a public interest goal in the diffusion of knowledge, and in the 20th and 21st centuries a lot of countries adopted or expanded rightsholder interests without paying adequate attention to the vital ‘limitations and exceptions’ that enable user access. In addition to my policy and advocacy role (email me at matt.voigts@ifla.org!), IFLA offers a variety of resources, including our recently-published, 576-page guide to copyright for libraries and statement in support of Open Access.

After my talk, the second keynote Paola Corti (SPARC Europe) discussed Open Access Policy and the third, Ray Uzwyshyn (Mississippi State University), discussed technical aspects of repository implementation. Ray is a standing committee member of IFLA’s Information Technology (IT) Section and editor of its Trends and Issues in Library Technology (TILT) bulletin (see recent issues from June and January 2022). Without meaning to leave out other conference speakers’ many contributions, I was particularly interested in hearing Zhyldyz Bekbalaeva (American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan) speak on the specifics of development of ‘open’ initiatives at her university library, and Celia Emmelhainz (the Smithsonian’s US National Anthropological Archives, and formerly of Nazarbayev University Library) talk on critical considerations in deciding which of their collections they should make widely available.

The conference marked my first visit to central Asia. Reading the city through my own anthropological background, I saw the (often material) construction of ideas about 21st-century nationhood in development, reaching back to a vision of the past. While the southern city of Almaty is Kazakhstan’s ‘old capitol’, Astana (which changed its name from Nur-Sultan in September) as it is today largely developed since the country’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, moved the capitol there in 1997. Around 750,000 people were expected to call it home, while today 1.3 million people live there. Astana seems like a capitol city like many others, where people move for opportunity amid the attendant pressures of urban life. It is also the world’s second-coldest capital (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), and marked by a sense of seeming full of people, vibrant and somewhat empty all at once.

The globally-recognized architects who designed Astana built a city in part futuristic, in part steeped in global art and culture signifiers – including an Italian-inspired opera house, where I was lucky enough to see a production of La Traviata with production design featuring a giant mirror that reflected the entirety of otherwise-obscured parts of the stage. Housing and business developments have names of global cities such as Budapest and sprawl over the ever-expanding edges of the city. Some buildings are all sleek glass. One displayed Blade Runner-style projections on the side. Distinct landmarks incorporate central Asian motifs and include the tent-like Khan Shatyr shopping center and Bayterek Tower, with a gold ball on top designed to evoke the nest of the mythic samruk bird.

This mix of the futuristic and historically-evocative elements extended to conferences. My hotel was coincidentally hosting a med-tech conference, complete with an astronaut-suited industry rep walking as if in zero gravity and a 9-am chamber quartet. I was likewise very excited to try regionally-characteristic foods, including besbarmaq and smoky horse yogurt.

Thanks for a wonderful conference – and I (and IFLA) plan to continue work with Central Asia’s libraries.

Celebrating Open Access week and the publication of ‘Navigating Copyright for Libraries’

by Sara Benson, Copyright Librarian and Associate Professor, University Library, University of Illinois

Chair, IFLA Copyright & Other Legal Matters (CLM) Committee

One of the many exciting events to happen at this year’s World Library Congress in Dublin was the launch of a new volume in the IFLA Publication Series – Navigating Copyright for Libraries: Purpose and Scope. This volume, conceived and produced by members (current and past) of the IFLA Copyright and other Legal Matters (CLM) Advisory Committee, brings together 20 chapters written by some of the top global experts on copyright law for the libraries sector.

As a primer on the relationship between copyright law and libraries, this book sets out to provide librarians and information professionals with the grounding necessary to understand and articulate copyright in their institutions, consider approaches to supporting copyright literacy, and engage more fully with copyright policy and advocacy at local and international levels. It provides both basic and advanced information, with chapters covering some of the hottest issues facing libraries today, from the impact of artificial intelligence to the call for global support for library exceptions.

But even with this outstanding content, arguably the most exciting thing about this publication, and what we seek to celebrate this Open Access Week 2022, is the fact that it is one of the first two IFLA  Publications Series to be available immediately to download as an open access resource. It will also be available in a fully accessible format, among the first for an IFLA  Publication Series.

With both the editors and the authors including experts on and advocates for open access, from the outset it was clear that the book should be a test case for IFLA to put these ideas into practice. As the work to write and prepare the book progressed over three years from the first planning meeting in August 2019, the importance of the decision only became more apparent. The global pandemic has highlighted inequities in access to information more clearly than ever before and emphasised the imperative to facilitate timely access to knowledge on a global scale.

With the support of CLM and the IFLA Professional Committee, and the assistance of the staff at De Gruyter, the book has been published under the broadest of the Creative Commons licences, Attribution Only. This will ensure it can operate as open education resource (OER), available for all to reuse, remix, translate, update and integrate into local or more targeted resources. Versions using best practice accessibility standards are already on their way, and discussions have started about the first translations into languages other than English.

In its Preface, Navigating Copyright is dedicated to every librarian who has taken the time to read and interpret their national copyright statutes in the hope of finding a solution to an access challenge, and to those who have spoken up and continue to highlight inequalities in access to information and call for change. In this Open Access Week, we celebrate the contribution that open licensing choices can make to achieving this essential goal of knowledge for all.

Banned Books Week: Amnesty International calls attention to those arrested for what they write, publish, or create

Guest post by Ed McKennon
Library Faculty, Glendale Community College
Amnesty International USA Working Group for Banned Books

Each year in late summer, in preparation for the American Library Association (ALA) Banned Books Week campaign, I take the opportunity to review the Amnesty International Banned Books Week materials which offer a fascinating glimpse into global aspects of censorship and world politics. Typically, the ALA draws attention to currently challenged and banned books in the United States whereas Amnesty International (AI) focuses on global creators who have been sanctioned for their publications. Sanctions often include arbitrary detention or long prison sentences but may also include exile, social and state sponsored harassment, and even the death penalty. Included below is a discussion of this year’s Amnesty International Banned Books Week cases followed by ways that libraries can support the effort.

This year Amnesty International is highlighting two widely distributed English language publications. You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, authored by 2022 featured case Alaa Abdel Fattah, compiles a collection of essays and tweets, including some smuggled out of prison. The book offers insight into 10 years of struggle for democratic reform in Egypt as well as an assessment of how social media technology isn’t living up to  its early promise to advance social justice. Fattah is a veteran of the 2011 Egyptian Tahrir Square protest, and has spent 8 of the last 10 years in prison. According to AI, he is “currently serving a five year sentence after being convicted of spurious charges of spreading ‘false news’ over his social media posts.” 

Amnesty International is also highlighting a children’s picture book about Loujain al-Hathloul, a 2019 Banned Books Week case. Al-Hathloul is a Saudi woman previously imprisoned because of her advocacy for women’s rights on social media.  Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers renders for children a story of hope and dreams amid a culture where the dreams of girls are limited by societal norms and the law. AI has also added coloring pages and other youth materials including bookmarks and information sheets.  A 16-year-old journalist from the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who faces ongoing harassment for her reporting, is featured.

The case of Zahra Sedighi-Hamadani, an Iranian LGBTI activist who was arrested while trying to reach Turkey to seek asylum, is indicative of many human rights concerns affecting people across the globe. As a result of her social media posts and an appearance on a BBC program defending LGBTI rights, she was accused of “spreading corruption on earth” including through “promoting homosexuality” and “communication with anti-Islamic Republic media channels.” She has been arbitrarily detained since October 2021 and may face the death penalty if charged. The issues in her case are echoed across the globe. In the United States and elsewhere, asylum seekers continue to face injustice and heightened risk while materials representing LGBTQ persepectives are some of the most controversial materials facing schools and public libraries in the United States. Organized efforts to remove these materials sometimes result in threats, intimidation, public records requests, and criminal accusations. 

Those who post on social media continue to put their liberty at risk. In Madagascar, a teacher known for posting about the poor state of school infrastructure, was charged with “defamation and humiliation of members of Parliament and public servants and identity fraud” after he denounced on Facebook the alleged mismanagement and embezzlement of humanitarian aid by several authority figures” after a cyclone.

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, a Cuban visual artist, and Maykel Castillo Pérez, a Cuban rapper, have been sentenced to five and nine years in prison respectively for challenging Decree 349, a “dystopian law” that limits the expression of artists. According to Amnesty International, “under the decree, all artists, including collectives, musicians and performers, are prohibited from operating in public or private spaces without prior approval by the Ministry of Culture” and the decree “contains vague and overly broad restrictions on artistic expression. For example, it prohibits audiovisual materials that contain, among other things: ‘use of patriotic symbols that contravene current legislation’ (Article 3a), ‘sexist, vulgar or obscene language’ (Article 3d), and ‘any other (content) that violates the legal provisions that regulate the normal development of our society in cultural matters’ (Article 3g). Furthermore, it makes it an offence to ‘commercialize books with content harmful to ethical and cultural values’ (Article 4f).”  These vague and expansive restrictions stifle expression and have resulted in the arrest, detention, and sentencing of many artists and at least six prisoners of conscience named by Amnesty International.

Finally, freelance journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko working for a Crimean branch of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Ukraine was sentenced to six years in prison after being arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) while he was driving on assignment in Crimea.

Each of these individuals continue to risk liberty, expressing themselves with the hope of bettering the communities in which they live. Information professionals around the world can draw inspiration from the words of Zahra Sedighi-Hamadani, LGBTI rights defender and Amnesty International 2022 Banned Books Week focus case. Her quote reminds those of us who live in relatively open countries of the challenges of those who live in unsafe places and the urgency of defending LGBTI expression and human rights in our own communities.

“I want you to know how much pressure we LGBT people endure. We risk our lives for our emotions, but we will find our true selves… I hope the day will come when we can all live in freedom in our country… I am journeying toward freedom now. I hope I’ll arrive safely. If I make it, I will continue to look after LGBT people. I will be standing behind them and raising my voice. If I don’t make it, I will have given my life for this cause.” 

Learn more about these cases and take action on their behalf via the Amnesty International Banned Books Week website.

 

 HOW CAN LIBRARIES PARTICIPATE? 

Libraries can make a difference by organizing community programs and providing information.

By supporting the Banned Books Week initiatives of both the American Library Association and Amnesty International, libraries can reach out to their communities while further advancing the principles of free expression as articulated in the IFLA Statement on Libraries and Intellectual Freedom and elsewhere.  

Libraries and bookstores can get in on the action in an organized fashion by reviewing the “More Actions for Library and Bookstore” section of the online toolkit and exploring ways they can support the effort, connect with the community, and promote freedom of expression.  

 

Augment Book Displays

Ideas in the toolkit include creating a simple “banned books” display that includes info sheets for the Amnesty International cases and links to the ‘take action’ webpages amid a display of books that have a history of censorship. 

This year the toolkits on the Banned Books Week website feature QR code enabled printable case sheets that provide basic information about each case and facilitate taking action.  

Flyers, bookmarks, and the Buying Books, Amplifying Voices book list (with added titles in 2022) are also available.

 

Reach out to Local Amnesty International Groups

Libraries and bookstores can reach out to local Amnesty International community and college groups to explore ways to partner. Information about how to find a nearby U.S. based Amnesty International group is in the toolkit. International partners may view Amnesty International country contact information via the Amnesty.org website in order to get in touch with their national section. 

 

Add Case Stories, Words, and Images to Virtual or In-Person Readouts 

Organizing a virtual read-out with links to online actions would be an exciting local event if a live in-person read-out is not possible. Local authors, librarians, and booksellers could speak about censorship while Amnesty International members or others from the community share stories of the people featured this year, including the words and images of those censored in the event where possible. 

 

Add and Feature Books Written by Authors Imprisoned or Killed for their Writing

While there are many book lists related to censorship available on the web, libraries and bookstores may be particularly interested in the AIUSA Banned Books Week book list, Buying Books, Amplifying Voices which features more than two dozen books written by or about authors who have been harassed, imprisoned, killed, or exiled because of their writing. 

Making these books available to your community takes a stand against censorship. By raising awareness of these creators and their ideas, the intent of censorship is thwarted while our communities gain a greater understanding of the world around us. In the words of  Russian LGBTI activist/artist and 2020 Banned Books Week case Yulia Tsvetkova, “the government, ironically, did not silence us, but made it possible to loudly declare injustice.” 

 

Integrate the new Kid-Friendly Resources into Programming and Displays

This year child-friendly resources have been added to the website and include coloring pages related to censorship as well as youth oriented bookmarks and information sheets about current and prior Banned Books Week cases.  Loujain Dreams of Sunflowers is the featured children’s book as it tells the story of Loujain al-Hathloul, a 2019 Banned Books Week feature case.

 

Register for the Live-Online Kick-Off Event

 

Under the theme Jailed for Words and Art: Uplifting Critical Voices and Fighting Censorship, this event features the voices those challenging censorship, sometimes at significant personal risk.  Registration & more details are available (September 15 at 8pm Eastern Time).

 

Take action throughout October on these Important Cases.

The American Library Association (ALA) has been leading Banned Books Week in the United States since the early 1980s to celebrate the freedom to read and call attention to book censorship efforts. During the 1990s Amnesty International USA began to call attention, during Banned Books Week, to “the plight of individuals who are persecuted because of the writings that they produce, circulate or read.” In 2013, ALA honored Amnesty International USA with an Office of Intellectual Freedom award recognizing AIUSA’s approach to Banned Books Week that focuses on the “logical consequences … that follow when governments are allowed to censor” noting that “beyond the removal or burning of books comes the removal and physical harm to authors, journalists and others.” 

Support for copyright limitations & exceptions strong at the WIPO General Assembly

On July 15 & 18, the Standing Committee on Copyright & Related Rights (SCCR) presented the outcomes of its 42nd meeting (SCCR/42) to the WIPO General Assembly. IFLA was there to reiterate support for strong limitations & exceptions (L&E) for libraries. We were joined on-site by other organizations – including EIFL – and national delegates – including those from South Africa, Iran, Malawi, Brazil, and Uganda – who spoke of their support for strong L&E’s and the WIPO African Group’s proposal that was adopted into a workplan at SCCR/42 two months earlier.

At SCCR/42, members agreed to move ahead with the African Group’s plans for presenting a toolkit for countries to develop preservation exceptions & limitations to copyright for libraries, archives and museums; a report on cross-border factors in copyright law; and a scoping study on research exceptions for such uses as data mining.

Speaking to the interests of the Assembly, IFLA representatives noted that strong L&E’s underlie other rights to culture, education, and research and in turn support IP innovation in multiple sectors, including for the benefit of society, as well as the preservation of records that tell the story of how we got to where we are now.

At the same time, IFLA expressed fear of limited urgency from the group as a whole to support limitations & exceptions and facilitate international collaboration. As the pandemic and climate change have demonstrated, overly-restrictive IP policies create confusion around whether libraries can offer digital access to material when crises force temporary physical closures of facilities, and natural disasters risk regrettably destroying facilities permanently – and with them, potentially, the only copies of materials if clear exceptions do not allow backups to be made and made accessible.

Crucially, cross border factors cannot be addressed by any nation alone, and WIPO as an agency is equipped to address them.

Crises will happen. Innovations happens because people can work with and reuse materials protected by intellectual property. We need to mitigate challenges and seize opportunities with a flexible copyright system that ensures that researchers and the public are not stalled by overly-restrictive licenses and laws such that when buildings temporarily close, we cannot access digital content, or when a flood or fire destroys an archive, that material is lost forever because there is no backup. If these happen, the lost IP can benefit no one.

IFLA looks forward to continuing to speak to the interests of libraries at WIPO at next year’s SCCR/43 and future General Assemblies!

[this blog post was adapted from the statement IFLA delivered at WIPO GA 63)

WIPO SCCR/42: Why broadcast matters

This 9 – 13 May, I attended the 42nd meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related rights (WIPO SCCR/42 for short). For a week, national delegates, expert panels, and observing civil society organisations (CSOs) like IFLA and rightholder groups discussed the impact of COVID-19; the WIPO African regional group’s proposal for a workplan on limitations and exceptions; broadcast rights; and other odds and ends for some 40+ hours’ worth of meetings, coffee breaks, and side discussions. Conversations advanced and  some commitments were made – including items on studies and toolkits on copyright limitations and exceptions.

It was my first trip to Geneva, so it was the first time I experienced the process. WIPO is the World Intellectual Property Organization, and indeed ‘IP’ is the general framing of Why We’re All Here. Creative outputs and patents are primarily considered valuable because they’re monetizable. The affective dimension (whether you ‘like’ a book) or the work’s value for humanity as a whole occasionally peaks through when civil society organisations (CSOs) or expert panels re-frame the issues, or (as happened twice, by my count) one of the invited artists on a panel delivers an a Capella performance.

By contrast, imagine a framework that began with ‘art and information are good, and people should have better access to those things’. It would be a very different conversation, for example, than that presented by WIPO’s expert report on how COVID-19 affected rightsholders and cultural institutions. There, the ‘Cultural Heritage Institutions, Education and Research’ section contained language about balancing access with rightholders’ interests that were largely absent the other way around from the rightholder sections.

In the observer section of the main room, CSOs sit alongside industry organisations. We’re there to represent our constituents’ interests and have our views heard, but it’s up to the delegates to make the votes.  The ‘rightholder’ side tends to represent publishers, record labels, and other aggregators and content distributors moreso than creators directly. The tension could be felt, for example, during Thursday’s presentations on streaming music in which expert presenters underlined that compensation was scarce for non-featured artists.  This tracks with online discussions I’d followed, along with standard-issue rock-n-roll lore about bands’ conflicts with their labels.

This is all also to say that delegates are engaged in a delicate push and pull between interests, and from the rightholders (and to some extent, us CSOs), like shoulder angels and devils, there can be an adversarial tendency to avoid wanting to lose any ground. So, with regard to limitations and exceptions to copyright – which enable libraries and individuals to lend, share, and make use of all kinds of material – the ‘opposite side’ can sound a bit like Groucho Marx laying out his platform on ascending to the university presidency in Horse Feathers – ‘whatever it is, I’m against it.’

(Side note: while I was unable on a quick search to locate the copyright status of Horse Feathers, the Marx Brothers were once themselves fined $1,000 for copyright violations; Groucho also responded to Warner Brothers’ fears that the then-forthcoming A Night in Casablanca [1946] would infringe on their film Casablanca [1942] by jokingly threatening a counter-suit over the word ‘Brothers’. Copyright has never been easy to sort out, or straightforward.)

Back to the Statute of Anne (1710), the first copyright law, copyright was intended to be a broad ecosystem that protects rightsholders’ right to compensation, and the public interest in having access to and working with materials. This includes the right to quote (on an obligatory basis), as well as possibilities to make a copy of a chapter, to use in the classroom, to offer commentary, to remix in ways not in competition with the original work. A robust copyright system enables different interests to be represented.

In respect to these positions, there are many good reasons for strong limitations and exceptions – including with respect to the broadcast rights, which came to the fore on the Tuesday and Wednesday in discussion of the Broadcast Treaty, which aims to protect broadcast signals (the medium, not the content). It has been under discussion since the late 90s.

Going forward, IFLA plans to highlight the importance of limitations and exceptions to preserve the right to archive and preserve broadcasts. Preservation shouldn’t have to be the sole responsibility of increasingly conglomerating commercial entities most immediately concerned with short-term profits. Cultural institutions are well equipped to collect, curate, and make available – if they don’t face dissuasive economic and administrative barriers to doing so. Here, archives and rightsholders have slightly different, but complementary & related interests. A key question, if you’re making content is: do you want your work to be accessible a few decades down the road?

One need only look to how much things have changed SINCE the broadcast treaty entered onto the agenda in the late 90s. For consumers,staring at screens in their homes, this period saw changes from standard definition to high definition, and from VHS to DVD (with detours into VCD in Asia) to Blu-Ray to streaming. Once-ubiquitous CRT monitors are currently a fad for retro gaming, as graphic designed for their slightly blurry displays and can look disconcertingly jagged on a modern 4K OLED, where every single one of the 8,294,400 pixels can show a different colour from its neighbour. Radio stations consolidated or went out of business. Long-running shows end, inevitably – and have to find archival homes for their collections or junk them. You’re lucky today to find equipment today that plays old consumer, professional and semi-professional storage formats, or to access files on the editing hardware and software from eras past.

This is all living memory, and underscores how difficult it is for people to  ‘watch’ TV like they did 25 years ago. To preserve that content and experience, archives play a key role – and need broad flexibility to capture, store, back up, and engage with content amid these changes. Sometimes, cool discoveries are made – like the recent find of a Minnesota TV station in their archives of a video of the musician Prince, at age 11. We can share that this discovery happened, beyond a local TV station, in part due to broad access rights.

As these discussions continue, support libraries! Please don’t create new barriers to preservation through new rights and impositions, but rather support proper exceptions and limitations to help libraries, archives and other institutions do their jobs preserving content and making it accessible.

Matt Voigts, Copyright & Open Access Policy Officer