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 computer-related works.1. The Report examined issues of computers and copyright, as well as other related issues like photocopying, and issued its final report in 1978, which asserted inter alia that copyright could protect a computer program.2 Although the final report of CONTU has been available online for some time, transcripts of the proceedings of CONTU were prepared but have only been available in a haphazard manner, on or off-line. With this post I’ve endeavored to compile and make available all the transcripts of CONTU.
CONTU Final Report
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.
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.
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.
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
Technate of America
Digitized content from the collections of Cornell University Library
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’
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.
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]
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…
Steal the Internet - Archiving Everything and Sharing It With Others
2014: 70% of the links within legal journals and 50% of the URLs from Supreme Court decisions did not contain the originally cited material.
OpenAI may have made a fatal misstep in copyright fight with news orgs
OpenAI may be sanctioned for hiding, deleting ChatGPT logs in NYT copyright fight.
Major Canadian News Outlets Sue OpenAI in New Copyright Case (Published 2024)
A coalition of some of Canada’s biggest media companies is seeking billions of dollars in compensation for what they say is copyright infringement on their work through ChatGPT.
The Early History Of Smalltalk
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. HOPL-II/4/93/MA, USA © 1993 ACM 0-89791-571-2/93/0004/0069...$1.50
2024-09-23-TPAC-Integrity-for-the-Web.pdf