Copyright Category

Fair Use and the ACM Copyright Licensing Agreement

Two years ago, in response to frequent requests for copyright advice around the time camera-ready papers for CHI or CSCW are due, I wrote a blog post explaining the ACM copyright license. At the end I included some notes about third-party material, but I’ve gotten some inquiries specifically about that and have also had to deal […]

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An Archive of Their Own (CHI 2016)

For years, I’ve been bringing up the fan fiction site Archive of Our Own (AO3) to folks in the HCI community, as a cool example of two things: (1) an amazingly successful open source project designed and built mostly by women; and (2) thoughtful incorporation of existing community norms into design. That last one in particular […]

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Reality and Perception of Copyright Terms of Service for Online Content Creation (CSCW 2016)

Do you understand the terms that you “click to agree” to when you post content on sites like Facebook, Craigslist, or DeviantART? It’s okay, neither does anyone else! But whether blog posts, photographs, or social media status updates, you own the copyright in your original content – which means that in order for one of […]

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Who cares about my dog pictures? Ownership of social media content+data

A quick content analysis of my Instagram profile reveals that it’s about 25% pictures of my dog, 25% pictures of knitting, a smattering of selfies to show off geeky tshirts, and a few other things: landscapes, coffee, cross-stitch versions of famous paintings that hang on the wall at my favorite cafe. I have 57 Instagram followers. […]

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The Chilling Tale of Copyright in Online Creative Communities

This piece originally appeared in an issue of XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students in 2013. Due to the ACM paywall, I am reproducing it here (as allowable under their copyright terms!), but you can also see the original, nicely formatted version by following the Authorizer link on my Publications page. Feel free to cite […]

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Fair Use Barbie: Changing the narrative & the legality of remix

If Barbie can learn about computer engineering, she can learn about copyright too, right? When I sat down with my laptop last week and started editing Barbie images in Photoshop, not in my wildest dreams would I have thought that what I was creating would end up shared more than 10,000 times and that I’d […]

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Understanding Copyright Law in Online Creative Communities (CSCW 2015)

Update: This paper was chosen as a Best Paper at CSCW 2015. You can download the paper here as well as the slides from my presentation here. Copyright is a difficult area of the law, but now with so many of us creating content online, it actually matters for normal people and not just lawyers […]

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LinkedIn Terms of Service: From one of the worst to one of the best

In the past year, I’ve been picking on LinkedIn a bit for the copyright licensing requirements in their Terms of Service. When talking about my work I routinely throw up a slide with this block of text as a visual demonstration of how unreadable TOS can be, and then explain worst case scenarios of what […]

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ACM Publication & Copyright

Last year, ACM changed its copyright model to offer three different options for authors publishing ACM papers: (1) a non-exclusive license to ACM that requires an “open access” fee; (2) a license granting ACM exclusive publishing rights; and (3) a copyright transfer to ACM. Previously, the third option was the only one available to authors, […]

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