From Wednesday, May 28 through Friday, May 30th, the Center for Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland  will be hosting the 8th Annual Intellectual Property Symposium at the UMUC Inn and Conference Center in Adelphi, Maryland.

This year’s symposium is titled MONOPOLY: PLAYING THE INNOVATION GAME. Three days of keynote addresses, panels, and round tables will address the conflicts resulting from the exclusive ownership and limited monopolies fostered by U.S. copyright laws and the technologies and practices that encourage sharing and collaboration.

The Center has invited an impressive line up of speakers and panelists including James Boyle, co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain and professor of law at Duke University School of Law as well as Georgia Harper, the CIP’s Intellectual Property Scholar (2006-08) and Scholarly Communications Advisor for the University of Texas at Austin Libraries. For a longer list of presenters with brief bios, browse the link at  http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/symposium/speakers.shtml

In addition the Center will host “The Institute for Copyright Leadership and Management,” which consists of pre- and post-conference seminars and workshops designed to help individuals or teams develop basic skills for effective leadership in copyright management while focusing on influencing skills and building strategic institutional partnerships and
bridges.

You may take advantage of the Early Bird registration fee, if you register before May 9th. The cost of the symposium is $350.00. For the Institute for Copyright Leadership and Management the cost is $900.00 per individual or $2,295.00 for a team of three.

Lodging is separate and runs $150 to $200.00 per night, depending on where you choose to stay.

Full symposium details may be found at http://www.umuc.edu/CIP2008 .

As I have indicated on many occasions, our work to determine public domain status of our digitized Benson volumes merges seamlessly into work to determine orphan work status. We pursue this inquiry even in the absence of legislative relief from the draconian penalties copyright law provides for infringement. I guess I feel strongly that one way or another, orphan works are going to find their way onto the Web for public access purposes, at least.

Two years ago, Representative Smith tried unsuccessfully to craft a bill that would deal with the issues. Now the effort is being undertaken anew. I blogged about it at Collectanea earlier today and would refer our readers there for links to other sites that are registering their optimism and concerns. A new bill has not yet been introduced, but it is reportedly going to be introduced as early as this week.

We might have better luck getting Full View of another series, Brazil’s Coleção das leis, a compendium of legislative and executive action printed every year by the Imprensa Nacional. The set is akin to the U.S. Congressional Record with bits and pieces of the Federal Register attached but the extended commentary of legislators removed. The annual volumes contain the texts of laws, decrees, resolutions, acts, and some notices related to legislation.

The text of several volumes of this series from the Bodleian and Harvard Libraries are now available online. Er…were available. Before Spring Break, an incomplete run of 23 volumes from the years between 1856 and 1908 were available in Full View. Don’t ask me what happened to these texts; maybe I just dreamt of them.

You can imagine the difficulties dealing with a series that has six formal titles. As listed in OCLC Worldcat, this series has been cataloged as “Collecção das leis do Brazil; 1808-21; Collecção das leis do Imperio do Brazil; 1822-Nov. 14, 1889; Decretos do governo provisorio da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brazil; Nov. 15, 1889-Feb. 13, 1891; Collecção das leis da Republica dos Estados Unidos do Brazil; (varies slightly); Feb. 14, 1891-19.”

Nevertheless, in whatever manner these sets are cataloged, every one of the volumes is in the public domain. Under Law 9.610 of February 19, 1998, the most recent Brazilian legislation that fully addresses author rights, the texts of treaties, laws, decrees, regulations, judicial decisions and official enactments are EXEMPT from copyright.

The University of Texas owns a complete set of the annual publications dating back to 1808. The series consists of more than 580 volumes that now grace 75 linear feet of shelves in the Benson. Only twenty-three other libraries, most of them in research institutions, listed some of the same titles among their holdings. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all these texts available online? All the titles in the Benson Latin American Collection were sent out for digitization last October (2007) but have not year appeared on Google Book Search. Maybe it is just a matter of time until Google can sort out the complicated bibliographic information for this set of books and put them all on line. Be patient.

Do stay alert to the titles opening up on Google Book Search. Meanwhile, take a look at the Central Library of the Tribunal de Justicia do Estado da Bahia That library maintains an online database of the series but the listing does not yield full-text. Other websites also provide bits and pieces of this colossal set. An interesting group, Causa Imperial, which promotes the restoration of a Brazilian Empire, provides access to the indices for the 1831-1840 series.

Lawyers interested in current issues have other sources. For English-speaking researchers interested in Brazilian law, take a look at the Legal Research Guide for Brazil provided by the Library of Congress.