At the moment I am busy researching Open Access Week 2009, which will be from October 19th until the 23rd. It will be an international event, which aims to:

“(…) broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research, including access policies from all types of research funders, within the international higher education community and the general public. The now-annual event has been expanded from a single day to accommodate widespread global interest in the movement toward open, public access to scholarly research results.”

 Last years Open Access Day thus got expanded into a genuine week and now it seems the Dutch Libraries and Institutions of Higher Education are actually organizing stuff (last year was rather disappointing in this respect, where it was a big success in the US). It seems we have the efforts of SURF to thank for this, as they are at the moment aggregating information about the events that are being organized by the different organizations during Open Access week. SURF also issued the special promotional Open Access Year movie which I posted before here. Anyway, our library is organizing some nice Open Access get-togethers and promotional events, and as I was asked to do some brainstorming for them I came across some nice copyright movies made by non-professional organizations. And I can tell you, they are way better than most of the professional clips – maybe less informative (I hate the word ‘educational’) but certainly funnier (and less boring).

 Ok, maybe rather corny, but I for instance do prefer the sock-puppet version of explaining authors copyrights to the ‘funny’ actor video. See for yourself underneath. (oh and thanks to www.canus.nl for directing me to the sock-puppet movie!). By the way, I love publishers and would never compare them to rats of course…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7giW7efQggo]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvN6JYJODrc&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eopenaccessweek%2Eorg%2F&feature=player_embedded]

I found other nice user generated copyright movies on copyright through a contest hosted by the Center for the Study of Public Domain at Duke Law School, set up amongst others by James Boyle, the author of the great book The Public Domain, which is available as a free download. According to the website, the contest:

“(…) asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film.”

I especially liked the People’s Favorite Stealing Home, by Terry Tucker and Andrew Fazekas, which you can see here. You can find the other winners here.

Stay tuned for future info on the 2009 Open Access weeks events!