12.0440 CYBERART99; copyright issues

Humanist Discussion Group (humanist@kcl.ac.uk)
Wed, 17 Feb 1999 21:28:37 +0000 (BST)

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 12, No. 440.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

[1] From: David Green <david@ninch.org> (103)
Subject: CYBERART99 Symposium in New York City... May 9th, 1999

[2] From: David Green <david@ninch.org> (119)
Subject: COPYRIGHT: Update on DataBase Protection Legislation

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 21:29:50 +0000
From: David Green <david@ninch.org>
Subject: CYBERART99 Symposium in New York City... May 9th, 1999

**************************************************************************
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
February 17, 1999

CYBERART99: seeking solutions
May 9: New York City
<http://www.asci.org/cyberart99/>

An impressive array of participants have been gathered for this symposium,
designed not only to analyse the current state-of-the-art of online digital
arts but to propose different models for financial support of this work in
the future.

David Green
===========

>Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 12:36:31 -0500
>To: asci@asci.org
>From: "Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)" <asci@asci.org>
>

CYBERART99: seeking solutions

Sunday, May 9, 1999; 10am - 5pm
Doors Open at 9am
The Great Hall @ Cooper Union
7 E. 7th Street, NYC (at 3rd Avenue)

It's been four years since ASCI produced what was perhaps the world's first
CyberFair at Cooper Union, NYC. Michael Govan, Director of the DIA Center
in New York and internationally renowned performance artist, Laurie
Anderson were keynotes. The field of cyberart has evolved and changed
dramatically since those early days. The issues at the end of the twentieth
century are no longer how to get access, how to create your own homepage,
or how to use the Internet to make art. Artists have pushed this globally
interactive medium in all kinds of creative ways: hypertext poetry,
multimedia works, and even live performances. Categories have been created
at prestigious international competitions to recognize and reward the best
and most innovative work in this newest of digital art media. However,
there are pressing questions that need resolution if this young artform is
to survive and flourish.

At CYBERART'99, you will see and hear how artists and museums are dealing
with the unique challenges of this rapidly developing "virtual" art. As a
medium that cannot be sustained by the traditional commercial gallery
model, webart requires new solutions regarding its production,
presentation, and maintenance. This all-day event brings together some of
the world's most creative digital minds in a unified effort to invent
concrete and viable *new models* of support.

The event format is designed to first provide an important historical
context--history being a relative term in this field. Highly recognized
webart projects that exemplify many innovative U.S. and European support
models will be presented in the first half of the program. Then, proposals
for four *new models* of support will be shared for public critique and
feedback. These proposals will have been created during a month-long online
discussion of the panelists prior to the event.

We invite our audience members to learn about this vital new artform
spawned from recent tele-communications technologies, and to join us in
building a viable, formal structure for supporting it.

PARTICIPANTS:
* Maxwell Anderson - Director of the Whitney Museum of Art
* Robert Atkins - art writer, editor/producer
* Steve Bradley - web artist, professor at the University of Baltimore
* Steve Dietz - Director, New Media Initiatives; Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis;
* John Maxwell Hobbs - Creative Director, Ericsson CyberLab, NYC
* Jon Ippolito - Internet designer/curator, Guggenheim Museum SoHo
* Bill Jones - Editor of ArtByte Magazine
* Laura McGough - independent curator and co-Director of NOMADS
* Mark Napier - web artist and technologist
* Randall Packer - media artist, lecturer in digital media, independent
curator.
* Manuel Schilcher - web artist/engineer, set-up Ars Electronica's Lab
* Doree Seligmann - Lucent Technologies, New Jersey
* Wolfgang Staehle - Founder & Director of The Thing
* Helen Thorington - turbulence website, Founder/Director
* Martha Wilson - Founding Director of the Franklin Furnace, NYC
* Adrianne Wortzel - web artist, professor at NYCTC-CUNY and Cooper Union

REGISTRATION:
$15 Pre-Registration (until April 15th)
$20 At the Door
Print-out the Registration Form and send with your check to ASCI, P.O. Box
358, Staten Island, NY 10301. ASCI phone#: 718 816-9796.

For event schedule, panel topics, hyperlinks to panelists URL's:
http://www.asci.org/cyberart99

CYBERART99 is a co-production of The Cooper Union and ASCI.
(Sponsorship opportunities are available. Contact Cynthia Pannucci by return
email or call 718 816-9796.)

ASCI is a 10 yr.old, NYC-based, non-profit arts organization devoted to
raising public awareness about artists and scientists using science and
technology to explore new forms of creative expression, and to increase
communication and collaborations between these fields.
Cynthia Pannucci
Founder/Director
Art & Science Collaborations, Inc. (ASCI)
****Celebrating its 11th Year****

718 816-9796; pannucci@asci.org
PO Box 358, Staten Island, NY 10301
URL: http://www.asci.org
===============================================================

David L. Green
Executive Director
NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR A NETWORKED CULTURAL HERITAGE
21 Dupont Circle, NW
Washington DC 20036
http://www.ninch.org
david@ninch.org
202/296-5346 202/872-0886 fax

==============================================================
See and search back issues of NINCH-ANNOUNCE at
<http://www.cni.org/Hforums/ninch-announce/>.
==============================================================

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 21:30:09 +0000
From: David Green <david@ninch.org>
Subject: COPYRIGHT: Update on DataBase Protection Legislation

NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
February 17, 1999

UPDATE ON DATABASE PROTECTION LEGISLATION

There are many offshoots of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. While
many in our community may be focusing on the "Fair Use Study" and the
"Distance Education Recommendations" (to be made by the Copyright Office,
based on written statements, public hearings and written responses to those
statements and hearings), we should also be very much aware of the progress
of database protection legislation.

You may recall that the House's efforts to attach database protection
legislation to the DMCA were defeated due to opposition from our
communities as well as misgivings by the Administration.

Page Miller here gives a good update on a variety of related developments
on this issue, including Rep. Howard Coble's (R-NC) revised "Collections of
Information Antipiracy Act", (H.R. 354), incorporating two changes,
"responding to concerns of the nonprofit scientific, educational, and
research communities, to clarify and embody fair use and to address the
issue of perpetual protection;" and statements by Senator Orrin Hatch
(R-UT), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which, calling for a
balancing of interests between information industries and the users of
information and database collections, he included statement versions of
three different database protection bills: Coble's bill; a more narrowly
constructed one "proposed by certain commercial database users, with the
support of the scientific, education, and library communities;" and Hatch's
own draft bill put forward for discussion at the end of the last Congress.

David Green
===========

>Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 14:09:58 -0500
>To: H-NCC@H-NET.MSU.EDU
>
FROM:

NCC Washington Update, vol 5, #5, February 17, 1999
by Page Putnam Miller, Director of the National Coordinating
Committee for the Promotion of History <pagem@capaccess.org>

1. Update on DataBase Copyright Protection Legislation
2. Peggy Bulger To Head American Folklife Center
3. OMB Requests Comments on Regulation Regarding
FOIA Access To Some Data Produced Under Federal Grants

1. Update on DataBase Copyright Protection Legislation -- On January 19
Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), the Chair of the House Judiciary
Committee's Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, introduced
the Collections of Information Antipiracy Act, H.R. 354. In his
introductory statement, Coble said that this legislation is needed to
"prohibit the misappropriation of valuable commercial collections of
information by unscrupulous competitors who grab data collected by others,
repackage it, and market a product that threatens competitive injury to
the original collection." While noting that this bill is almost identical
to legislation that passed the House in the last Congress, Coble stressed
that he had made two changes, responding to concerns of the nonprofit
scientific, educational, and research communities, to clarify and embody
fair use and to address the issue of perpetual protection.

The efforts of the House to attach the database legislation to the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act in the last Congress were defeated. This was due
in part to the fact that the Senate had held no hearings on the database
bill, to opposition to the bill from many quarters including the scholarly
and library communities, and to the Administration's reservations about
the bill. While the Administration stated that while there should be
effective legal remedies against "free-riders" who take databases gathered
by others and reintroduce them into commerce as their own, they identified
several potential problems: constitutional constraints on legislation of
this type; the possibility that the bill would increase the costs of data
use; the lack of a balancing mechanism that would take into consideration
non-commercial research and educational uses; the use of vague terms such
as "potential markets;" and the likelihood that the bill could have the
unintended consequence of stifling the evolving market for digital
information.

On January 19, the same day that Coble introduced his bill, Senator Orrin
Hatch (R-UT), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, spoke on the Senate
floor on the database piracy issue, which he described as an issue of
great and escalating importance because "intellectual property has become
the heart of our nation's economy, information is its lifeblood." Yet he
called for a balancing of interests between the information industries and
the uses of information and database collections. He noted that database
legislation had been introduced in both the 104th and the 105th
Congresses and that Representative Coble had introduced a bill in the
106th Congress. Hatch committed himself to seeking passage of a bill on
this issue this year. To promote informed debate on the database
protection issue, Hatch included as a part of his floor statement versions
of three different database protection bills: Representative Coble's
bill; a narrower constructed bill than the Coble one that Hatch stated
"has been proposed by certain commercial database users, with the support
of the scientific, education, and library communities;" and a draft bill
that Hatch put forward for discussion at the end of the last Congress.
All three of these bills can be found in the Congressional Record for
January 19, 1999 on pages S316-326.

Also on January 19 Senator John McCain (R-AZ) introduced S. 95, a bill
which focuses only on financial data and which is designed to ensure the
continued public availability through banks and the media of information
concerning stocks traded on established stock exchanges. The intent of
this bill is to insure timely access to stock quotes for the 30 million
people who are trading on-line and to protect financial services companies
from the broad protection that the Coble bill could give to such
institutions as the New York Stock Exchange, enabling it as a database
publisher to prevent banks and the media from reconfiguring the
information contained in the databases that they had already paid for and
acquired. This bill has been referred to the Committee on Commerce,
Science, and Transportation, thus expanding the database protection
legislation consideration beyond the Judiciary Committee.

Both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have indicated that they
plan to hold hearings on database protection legislation; however, no
hearings have yet been scheduled.

>>>SNIP>>>

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NCC invites you to redistribute the NCC Washington Updates.
A complete backfile of these reports is maintained by H-Net.
See World Wide Web: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~ncc/
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===============================================================

David L. Green
Executive Director
NATIONAL INITIATIVE FOR A NETWORKED CULTURAL HERITAGE
21 Dupont Circle, NW
Washington DC 20036
http://www.ninch.org
david@ninch.org
202/296-5346 202/872-0886 fax

==============================================================
See and search back issues of NINCH-ANNOUNCE at
<http://www.cni.org/Hforums/ninch-announce/>.
==============================================================

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