The National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established by Congress, and operated between 1975 and 1978 to determine how the Copyright Act of 1976 should address computers and copy machines. On July 31, 1978, it issued its Final Report, which is frequently cited, but not readily available.
Transcribed Proceedings of CONTU
CONTU, or the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works, was established in 1974 by United States Congress to study issues associated with copyrighted works in computers and compute…
CONTU Revisited: The Case against Copyright Protection for Computer Programs in Machine-Readable Form
Professor Samuelson casts a critical eye on the Final Report of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) which recommended that copyright protection be extended to machine-readable versions of computer programs. CONTU appears to have misunderstood computer technology and misinterpreted copyright tradition in two significant respects. The Commission failed to take into account the historical importance of disclosure of the contents of protected works as a fundamental goal of both the copyright and patent laws. It also erroneously opined that the utilitarian character of a work was no bar to its copyrightability when both the statute and the case law make clear that utilitarian works are not copyrightable. Since computer programs in machine-readable form do not disclose their contents and are inherently utilitarian, copyright protection for them is inappropriate. Congress acted on CONTU's recommendation without understanding the significance of these conceptual flaws. Professor Samuelson recommends the creation of a new form of intellectual property law specifically designed for machine-readable programs.
CONTU Revisited: The Case Against Copyright Protection for Computer Programs in Machine-Readable Form
Professor Samuelson casts a critical eye on the Final Report of the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) which recommended that copyright protection be extended to machine-readable versions of computer programs. CONTU appears to have misunderstood computer technology and misinterpreted copyright tradition in two significant respects. The Commission failed to take into account the historical importance of disclosure of the contents of protected works as a fundamental goal of both the copyright and patent laws. It also erroneously opined that the utilitarian character of a work was no bar to its copyrightability when both the statute and the case law make clear that utilitarian works are not copyrightable. Since computer programs in machine-readable forms do not disclose their contents and are inherently utilitarian, copyright protection for them is inappropriate. Congress acted on CONTU's recommendation without understanding the significance of these conceptual flaws. Professor Samuelson recommends the creation of a new form of intellectual property law specifically designed for machine-readable programs.
Border Wars : The Science and Politics of Artificial Intelligence
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Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property
Andrew Ross, Technology and Below-the-Line Labor in the Copyfight over Intellectual Property, American Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 3, Rewiring the "Nation": The Place of Technology in American Studies (Sep., 2006), pp. 743-766
The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World – Question Copyright
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History of free and open-source software
The history of free and open-source software begins at the advent of computer software in the early half of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code—the human-readable form of software—was generally distributed with the software, providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing.
katelynsills/copyright-history
Every amendment to US copyright law (1790-present) as a git commit. Browse 236 years of legislation with git log, git diff, and git checkout.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983), was the first time an appellate level court in the United States held that a computer's BIOS could be protected by copyright. As second impact, this ruling clarified that binary code, the machine-readable form of software and firmware, was copyrightable too and not only the human-readable source code form of software.[1][2]
Court Filings in A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports
Filings made Friday in The New York Times’s closely watched lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft included a range of copyright law and cultural references.
Mx. Aria Stewart (@aredridel@kolektiva.social)
I knew it was this way but it's really hitting me today how much the Open Source movement and copyright maximalism supplanted the idea of free software, and again how much the Free Software movement turned from a close ideological cousin of the remix and open culture movement into a culture of legalism. At the same time, copyright law itself has been extended to be near-immortal copyrights rather than brief monopolies to spur creation by enabling profit from creating works.
Toward Copyleft Equality for All
I would not have imagined even two years ago that expansion of copyleft would become such an issue of interest in software freedom licensing. Historically and for good reason, addition of new forms of copyleft clauses has moved at a steady pace. The early 2000s brought network services clauses (such as that in the Affero GPL), which hinged primarily on requiring provision of source to network-remote users. Affero GPL implemented this via copyright-controlled permission of modification. These licenses began as experiments, and were not approved by some license certification authorities until many years later.
The Community Corrosive Effects of CLAs | James Bottomley's random Pages
As one of the kernel DCO advocates, I’ve written many times about using the DCO instead of a CLA for copyright and patent contributions under open source licences. In spite of my obvious biases, I’ll try to give a factual overview of the cases for the DCO and CLA system. First, it should be noted that both the DCO and any CLA are types of Contribution Agreements (a set of terms by which contributors are agreeing to be bound). It should also be acknowledged that the DCO is a far more recent invention than CLAs. The DCO was first pioneered by the Linux kernel in 2004 (having been designed by Diane Peters, then of OSDL) and was subsequently adopted by a broad range of open source projects. However, in legal terms, the DCO is much less well understood than a standard CLA type agreement between the contributor and some entity, which is largely the reason you find a number of lawyers still advocating for the use of CLAs in various open source projects: because they’d like to stick with something that has more miles on it, or because they’re invested in the older model of community, largely pioneered by Apache. The biggest problem today is that the operation of most CLAs is asymmetrical: they take from the contributor more rights than the open source code actually needs, so lets begin with a summary of each type of Contribution Agreement.
Book publishers sue Google for copyright infringement over Gemini AI training
Group of major publishers accuses the tech giant of ‘one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history’
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft
Last week, Dan Blanchard, the maintainer of chardet—a Python library for detecting text encodings used by roughly 130 million projects a month— released a new…
The Early History Of Smalltalk
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