Copyright, Privacy, and the modern Pagan

[Jenett]

So, I'm on the schedule to do two things at Paganicon (besides run around making sure things go smoothly), and I'd love brains-that-aren't-mine giving me ideas on what else to include.

One is a panel discussion on Copyright and Pagans - I suggested it after Elysia Gallo's excellent posts earlier this spring about pirated books (She is a senior acquisitions editor at Llewellyn: she's an awesome human being.) First post here, and second post, responding to an email from the person who'd posted (complete, book-length works) is here.

The panel is me (librarian!), Elysia, and two authors (one of whom writes in the Pagan community, one of whom mostly writes in the SF community.) I promised that a) I'd prep some general material in advance and b) moderate it, so it's more than ranting about copyright. (There are lots of places to do that: this panel can do something different.)

I know that I want to talk about how we, as a community, share and use other people's work (chants, invocation bits, all sorts of things) while a) understanding the legal issues and b) creating a culture where people *want* to share at least some of their awesome stuff with the community. But I'm looking for other topics that might be worth addressing.

(I plan on a handout thing which will cover core concepts in copyright - what's covered, what isn't, where to read more, though I expect we'll do a brief review in the panel, too.)

In particular, I'd love a range of situations to talk about ("If I copy X into my BOS, is that ok?" "If I want to share Y with a group of students, is that okay?" "If I want to use a chant I learned at a ritual where it wasn't cited, how do I do that?") But I know there's tons more. So - suggestions? Stuff you're confused about?  

Pagans and Online Privacy:
The workshop I'm doing is me, talking about that, for 80 minutes. I've got plenty of stuff I *could* talk about - what I'm trying to figure out is which things might do best with the most time. (Also, which things do best without a projector, etc.)

I am contemplating turning this one into some kind of (very inexpensive - $5-10 range) online class/ebook thing, as well, where I could actually do screen shots and examples and so on.

Topics I know I want to touch on include:
- Facebook, and why centralising Pagan presence there is problematic for a variety of reasons.
- Locational privacy
- Gmail, Google, and other centralised tracking things that match up history on your computer.
- Craft names, persistent pseudonyms, and other identity notes.
- Digital footprint issues (you may be okay with something now, but ten years from now, that info will still be out there.)
- Photo matching software, etc.
- And basically the whole issue of ad-driven sites and whether they're a sustainable model.
- Also, the question of long-term archiving, etc. (both good and bad.)
- How all of these things should inform things like group policies (around photos, public information, etc.) There are lots of ways to solve it, but it ought to be on your list of stuff to talk about on an ongoing basis.

[sailor]

I know that I want to talk about how we, as a community, share and use other people's work (chants, invocation bits, all sorts of things) while a) understanding the legal issues and b) creating a culture where people *want* to share at least some of their awesome stuff with the community. But I'm looking for other topics that might be worth addressing.

(I plan on a handout thing which will cover core concepts in copyright - what's covered, what isn't, where to read more, though I expect we'll do a brief review in the panel, too.)

In particular, I'd love a range of situations to talk about ("If I copy X into my BOS, is that ok?" "If I want to share Y with a group of students, is that okay?" "If I want to use a chant I learned at a ritual where it wasn't cited, how do I do that?") But I know there's tons more. So - suggestions? Stuff you're confused about?  

 
How about:

If a complete ritual is published in a book, can I use that ritual in a public venue? For example can I use a compete ritual from Buckland's book at my local open to public CUUPS event?

[Jenett]

How about:

If a complete ritual is published in a book, can I use that ritual in a public venue? For example can I use a compete ritual from Buckland's book at my local open to public CUUPS event?

 
That's an excellent one, thanks!

[Kylara]

So - suggestions? Stuff you're confused about?  

 
If I want to talk about something I read recently in a published book with people on a forum I belong to, what are the guidelines for posting content (with credit of course)?  To clarify, sometimes there will be a passage that sparks an idea for a conversation.  In order to include people who haven't got access to the book, I want to post several paragraphs so everyone knows what I am talking about...is this kind of thing okay, or how much is reasonable to quote?

If I read a ritual, practice or idea that I like in a book but change some or most of it to better fit my needs and then share it with a friend, do I need to reference the original author?  What if I re-write the entire ritual but the basic concept was something they had written about?

If I have a lot of information from a book or author copied into my BOS (with sources), and I want to let someone else look through my book is that okay?  If they want to copy some of the information and will also copy the source information is that okay?

[Jenett]

Also excellent questions, thanks! (I am deliberately trying not to answer them yet, because I want to line up some background material first.

[sailor]

More of a Llwellyn specific question.

What had the company done before the internet with regards to chants, prayers and ritual pieces that people had copied (by hand or typed and then photocopied) and passed around the community for public events? and for various traditions?

For example if a couple of chants had originally been in one of their books, but were then found to be being passed hand to hand one, especially without attribution?

[sailor]

Pagans and Online Privacy:
The workshop I'm doing is me, talking about that, for 80 minutes. I've got plenty of stuff I *could* talk about - what I'm trying to figure out is which things might do best with the most time. (Also, which things do best without a projector, etc.)

I am contemplating turning this one into some kind of (very inexpensive - $5-10 range) online class/ebook thing, as well, where I could actually do screen shots and examples and so on.

Topics I know I want to touch on include:
- Facebook, and why centralising Pagan presence there is problematic for a variety of reasons.
- Locational privacy
- Gmail, Google, and other centralised tracking things that match up history on your computer.
- Craft names, persistent pseudonyms, and other identity notes.
- Digital footprint issues (you may be okay with something now, but ten years from now, that info will still be out there.)
- Photo matching software, etc.
- And basically the whole issue of ad-driven sites and whether they're a sustainable model.
- Also, the question of long-term archiving, etc. (both good and bad.)
- How all of these things should inform things like group policies (around photos, public information, etc.) There are lots of ways to solve it, but it ought to be on your list of stuff to talk about on an ongoing basis.

 
Years ago cameras were very much forbidden at open to the public events. Has this changed?

Ad driven sites as a means to pay for pagan information sites? or ad driven sites as a way to pay for the internet? My question is how are you tyng this specifically to pagan issues rather than general tech business models.

[Jenett]

More of a Llwellyn specific question.

What had the company done before the internet with regards to chants, prayers and ritual pieces that people had copied (by hand or typed and then photocopied) and passed around the community for public events? and for various traditions?

For example if a couple of chants had originally been in one of their books, but were then found to be being passed hand to hand one, especially without attribution?

 
There's a quote of their permissions policy in the second post I linked above (essentially: up to 250 words from a given work, for up to six titles at a time, not including spells or material from almanacs, for which specific permission is required. [1]

This is much more conservative than what fair use suggests to me as a librarian. On the other hand, it's actually less restrictive than some actual court cases and precedent about fair use. So, complicated. Which is part of what I want to discuss, eventually, and what I need to dig up notes for.

On the other: I'd have to ask (and it's definitely a question I can ask). She does mention in those posts that copying something specific for personal use is a very different case than what she's discussing in those two posts (posting of 32 full books.)

[1] Having written both of those on contract for Llewellyn now, I'm guessing that's partly because there's a specific copyright revision clause in those contracts - they have rights for 3 years from publication, then it reverts to the author.

Largely, I assume, because the almanacs and spell-a-day books are produced once, not kept in print over a longer period of time.  Thus, they'd need to check who could give permission, etc. I believe the book contracts have a fairly standard industry clause about reversion a certain amount of time after something goes out of print. (Which is a complicated clause these days, but that's a whole other topic...)

[Jenett]

Years ago cameras were very much forbidden at open to the public events. Has this changed?

Yes and no. A number of events have some kind of photo policy, but it's often not as clear as it might be. And there's a lot more casual-social events (Pagan's Night Out kinds of things) that don't have clear policies.

And if those photos show up on Facebook....

Ad driven sites as a means to pay for pagan information sites? or ad driven sites as a way to pay for the internet? My question is how are you tyng this specifically to pagan issues rather than general tech business models.

 
Ad driven in the sense of 'way to pay for the site', and that what the ad buyers are buying is generally access to collected data about interests that a) may or may not accurately reflect your interests and b) may show up in weird places. (For example, if you have a bunch of Pagan topics in your Google mail, it will start showing you some related text ads - and I suspect the same would be true of Facebook, though I'm not going to test that directly. Less so, on Facebook, because of the way their ad system currently works.)

But it makes it more trivial for someone to look over your shoulder casually, and notice things you might not have wanted them to share.

Which reminds me to talk about social graphing, too.

(I should note here: I'm mostly not arguing that people shouldn't use these tools. But that they should be really aware of what they're doing and how long it might stick around, and that we're in cutting edge territory with a lot of privacy issues.)

[Jabberwocky]

So, I'm on the schedule to do two things at Paganicon (besides run around making sure things go smoothly), and I'd love brains-that-aren't-mine giving me ideas on what else to include.

 It also might be worth going a bit into creative commons and what the various licenses mean.

[sailor]

There's a quote of their permissions policy in the second post I linked above (essentially: up to 250 words from a given work, for up to six titles at a time, not including spells or material from almanacs, for which specific permission is required. [1]

 
I saw her blog post about the 250 word limit, I read it as applying to websites quoting material. I was wondering more about the policy from say 25 years ago before computers, or at least the internet being generally and publicly available, for things like handouts of rituals.

[sailor]

But it makes it more trivial for someone to look over your shoulder casually, and notice things you might not have wanted them to share.

Which reminds me to talk about social graphing, too.

(I should note here: I'm mostly not arguing that people shouldn't use these tools. But that they should be really aware of what they're doing and how long it might stick around, and that we're in cutting edge territory with a lot of privacy issues.)

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all

Target knew a teen girl was pregnant before her parents knew.

[Allaya]

So, I'm on the schedule to do two things at Paganicon (besides run around making sure things go smoothly), and I'd love brains-that-aren't-mine giving me ideas on what else to include.

One is a panel discussion on Copyright and Pagans - I suggested it after Elysia Gallo's excellent posts earlier this spring about pirated books (She is a senior acquisitions editor at Llewellyn: she's an awesome human being.) First post here, and second post, responding to an email from the person who'd posted (complete, book-length works) is here.

The panel is me (librarian!), Elysia, and two authors (one of whom writes in the Pagan community, one of whom mostly writes in the SF community.) I promised that a) I'd prep some general material in advance and b) moderate it, so it's more than ranting about copyright. (There are lots of places to do that: this panel can do something different.)

I know that I want to talk about how we, as a community, share and use other people's work (chants, invocation bits, all sorts of things) while a) understanding the legal issues and b) creating a culture where people *want* to share at least some of their awesome stuff with the community. But I'm looking for other topics that might be worth addressing.

(I plan on a handout thing which will cover core concepts in copyright - what's covered, what isn't, where to read more, though I expect we'll do a brief review in the panel, too.)

In particular, I'd love a range of situations to talk about ("If I copy X into my BOS, is that ok?" "If I want to share Y with a group of students, is that okay?" "If I want to use a chant I learned at a ritual where it wasn't cited, how do I do that?") But I know there's tons more. So - suggestions? Stuff you're confused about?

I'm going to do a naughty and necro this thread because after searching the site it seems this is the one mention of what I'm hoping to find an answer for...but no answer actually appears.

Jenett, I'd like to know more about copyright along the lines of "If I copy X into my BOS, is that ok?" if you have the time to educate me.

Now that I am finally starting to accumulate things that should go in my BOS (cripes, I dislike that term!) I am faced with this problem. For the time being, I am plopping the raw material into Scrivener with a "Sourced from [website or book]" at the top. However, I intend to go back over these things to reword and expand and supplement. Now what?

My hope is to eventually have a nicely footnoted, page numbered, subtitled, and attractive document at the end since that's what is easiest for me to read, digest, and internalize. It makes sense to me to future-proof it with having good attributions where they are needed.

[Jabberwocky]

- Digital footprint issues (you may be okay with something now, but ten years from now, that info will still be out there.)

It's worth mentioning that, while that issue is extremely important and needs taking into account, we're also seeing the opposite problem.  Stuff is disappearing from the net every day.

The early 90's anti-capitalist movement (which I was heavily involved in) is now seeing increasing academic interest.  I even got interviewed at the start of the year by an earnest undergrad doing a final year case study.

Thing is, a lot of the websites of the time have just disappeared entirely.  Stuff like the Reclaim the Streets website, which was crucial to the British side of the movement.  I don't think we'd even considered that might happen at the time, nor did we think about how future generations might want access to it.

People like the British Library have started trying to archive important websites, but the net is obviously too big for them to do anything but scratch the surface.

So, yes, you should always assume that stuff can stay online forever when talking about privacy concerns etc.  However, you should never assume that you will always have access to something that only exists online.

[Jabberwocky]

I'm going to do a naughty and necro this thread because after searching the site it seems this is the one mention of what I'm hoping to find an answer for...but no answer actually appears.

Jenett, I'd like to know more about copyright along the lines of "If I copy X into my BOS, is that ok?" if you have the time to educate me.

I'm not Jenett, but I can probably answer this.  In general terms anyway, I'm afraid I know very little about Norwegian copyright law.  (I'm not even sure if you've signed up to any of the EU copyright treaties!)  In fact, the only thing I do know that the 2013 amendments to the copyright act make it a lot easier for rightsholders to track down the identity of infringers, which obviously means you need to err on the side of caution.

There's two possibilities at the extremes that I assume don't apply to you, but I'll cover them just in case.

If you're planning to sell your BOS or commercially exploit it in any way, just don't.  I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

If it's going to be entirely private, then you're fine.  Technically, it could run counter to laws on format shifting, but nobody is going to care about that.

However, what I'm guessing is most likely, is that you're going to either be using it in public rituals or putting it up on the net.  (The latter is more of an issue than the former, because of how much bigger the potential audience is).

That could be problematic, although it's a complex area.  The more material you're using from a single source, the more likely it is to cause an issue.  

Essentially, I think you'd be relying on US fair use law or its (generally more restrictive) European equivalents.  It's worth noting that those are affirmative defenses. So the burden of proof would lie with you, not the plantiff; in other words it would be up to you to prove that your usage was allowable, not for the plantiff to prove that it wasn't.

How would it go?  Not sure.  IANAL and you should avoid court cases anyway.  US Fair Use law would be touch and go I think.  European laws would be a high risk strategy.

If you want to avoid all this, there's a simply alternative.  You could simply email anybody whose work you want to use.  Instinct tells me that most pagan and occultist authors would be flattered you wanted to use them in your BOS and would be happy to grant permission for non-commercial use.