EFF Urges Supreme Court to Block Law That Erodes Public Domain

San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block a federal law that erodes the public domain and hurts libraries, artists, and others who want to exercise their First Amendment right to share and receive information in an amicus brief filed today on behalf a coalition of libraries and other digital repositories.

The law in question is Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which takes potentially millions of works by foreign authors that were previously in the public domain and puts them back under copyright protection. Works affected by this law include Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, music by Stravinski, paintings by Picasso and drawings by M.C. Escher, and writings by George Orwell and J.R.R. Tolkien -- material that has been used and performed countless times. Now that the works are back under copyright protection, use of the works may require paying hefty license fees.

In the amicus brief, EFF argues that this law creates dangerous uncertainty about copyright policy, posing a significant threat to libraries, digital repositories, and others that promote access to knowledge.

"Libraries and digital repositories are using new technologies to make our cultural commons more accessible than ever, but they need a robust and stable public domain to be able to do that crucial work," said EFF Staff Attorney Julie Samuels. "Section 514 has up-ended a basic tenet of copyright law: once a work enters the public domain, it stays in the public domain."

"The public domain helps make sure the copyright monopoly serves its purpose: to promote the progress of science and the useful arts," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "Congress should not have put a small potential benefit to some authors ahead of the public interest."

EFF represents the Internet Archive and the University of Michigan Dean of Libraries. Joining the brief are the Wikimedia Foundation, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and the Association of Research Libraries.

For the full amicus brief:

https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/golan_v_holder/236590_Brief.pdf

For more on this case:

https://www.eff.org/cases/golan-v-holder

Contacts:

Corynne McSherry

Intellectual Property Director

Electronic Frontier Foundation

corynne@eff.org

Julie Samuels

Staff Attorney

Electronic Frontier Foundation

julie@eff.org

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A Better Alternative to Winzip That is Free!

WinZip and WinRAR are the two most popular utilities for handling archive formats like zip, iso, rar, tar and others.

The above utilities aren’t obviously free so the next best alternative is 7-zip. This is an open-source Windows-only tool that doesn’t have a very fancy GUI but can do everything that you would want a file compression utility to do.

7-zip can compress your files in zip, tar or 7z formats while it can decompress even larger number of formats including msi, cab, vhd and more. One of my favorite feature of 7-zip is that it can split a large zip file into multiple files of a desired size so that it becomes easier for you to send them in an email without exceeding the attachment size limitation.

7-zip is a powerful program but certainly not very user-friendly. For instance, if you drag a zip file from the desktop onto the 7-zip window, it will offer you to create an archive of that already-compressed file which is confusing.

If you are looking for an alternative to 7-zip as well, go with PeaZip. This is also a free and open-source zip utility that is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

PeaZip sports a more familiar Windows Explorer like interface and has shortcuts to all your frequently used folders like Documents, Downloads, Desktop, etc. It can compress files in all the popular archive formats including GZip and BZip2 (bz2). You may choose to TAR your files before compression (like .tar.gz) further reducing the archive size.

With PeaZip, you can compress /decompress files with a click but there are advanced options under the hood incase you want more control over the archives. For instance, you can password-protect your zip file using AES-256 encryption which is considered pretty strong. This feature is available in 7zip as well.

While compressing directories, you may setup filters so that files that match a particular extension, or name, get excluded from the archive. PeaZip, like all the other zip utilities, adds new menu items to your Windows Contextual and SendTo menu but here you can configure which entries should be included from the menu.

Both 7-zip and PeaZip have portable versions so may try them without installation.

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This story, A Better Alternative to Winzip That is Free!, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on June 13, 2011 under Downloads, Zip, Software.

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