Bill Clinton's My Life is already being pirated. So reports Blackmask, one of my favorite e-bookstore sites. Very possibly the piracy is happening from an edition in Microsoft Reader or Adobe Reader or Palm/eReader, all listed on the Random House/Knopf site and all very hackable.But guess what. All the Digital Rights Management in the cosmos won't do a bit of good in preventing the usual suspects from scanning the paper version. Piece of cake. Let the publishers use DRM if they want to try to keep honest people honest--that'll be the OpenReader approach--but don't ever expect perfect DRM. Software...

Yo, Brian Levine! Yes, you, the Kerry policy aide. You who would not answer my copyright-related questions even after I left messages twice after talking to you! I'd greatly appreciate your cooperating now even if you wouldn't several months ago. You and your colleagues will ideally get your man to do right by the schools and libraries. Will Sen. Kerry agree to work toward repeal or mitigation of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, the DMCA and other anti-child, anti-Net measures? I'm a lifelong liberal Democrat. I'd like the Party to leave Bill Clinton's copyright messes behind so...

Right near the battery rack at the local Safeway, across the aisle from the ice cream bars, I perused the pages of My Life--the new book by Bill Clinton. Something inside me balked at the prospect of paying for this thing. Other writers could better use the money; I'd wait for a library copy.Years ago I had differed with the Clinton White House over copyright policy and the Internet, and I was curious what the word "Copyright" might conjure up from the index. Zilch. I looked for the word "Internet" in the index. Nothing. Actually in the text itself...

In late 2002 I wrote a TeleRead item called "The Backwards West?"--noting how our medieval-minded politicians are jeopardizing America's superiority in areas such as biotech. Meanwhile countries like China are avoiding such stupidity and creating a reverse brain drain from the U.S. with some cutting-edge researchers fleeing our so-called enlightenment. Might the day come when the real progress happens in non-Western cultures, as when the Moslems led in such areas as science and math--and, in Spain, even the treatment of Jews? There is always hope, though. Even Nancy Reagan, indeed especially Nancy Reagan, is speaking out nowadays for stem...

Yale LawMeme contributor Ernest Miller points to TeleRead's reference to 1984 as a popular book that should be in the public domain by now. In Australia you can legally download 1984 for free amd keep it forever--but not in the States, thanks to special-interest legislation pushed by Disney and the rest.Fascinatingly, 1984 is the tenth most borrowed title on a library-related list of best-sellers. Simply put, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act will cost society big bucks over the long run. It's an efficient redistribution of wealth from consumers, schools and libraries to members of the copyright elite...

Hollywood is full of baby-killers--smug, greedy mediocrities who often can see only threats in new technologies, as the outrageous treatment of Net radio illustrates. Now it turns out that Warren Lieberfarb, "father of the DVD," was frequently viewed as a disruptive pest in his efforts to popularize DVDs and come up with standards. He prevailed, however, and today DVDs are a $9-billion-plus business for Hollywood. A lesson here for e-bookers? Ideally the industry will be smarter than many in Hollywood, where originally the movie tycoons even tried to resist VCR technology. From One Man's Flight of Fancy in Newsweek:Putting...

Dude, Where's My Country? leads OverDrive's list of the ten most borrowed library books if you go by the total stats from Cleveland, San Jose and other cities. In the e-book reader department: "PDF eBooks, read using popular Adobe Reader software, are the overwhelming format of choice for patrons and students while MobiPocket Reader is gaining ground among PDA and Smartphone users."The TeleRead take: The tenth most popular book was 1984. If we Americans were Aussies, we could download it legally for free off the Net and keep it forever. Alas, this could soon change because of Hollywood's lobbying...

John Kerry is raking in Hollywood dough. Copyright policy implications if he's elected? The campaign was mum some months ago when I asked for meaningful statements on the Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and repair of the DMCA. If Kerry wants to help tech, he'll think about legal reforms, not just new federal programs. From the New York Times:It could have been Oscar night, what with Billy Crystal cracking wise about movies and politics, money and baseball ...

Some library users are editing the books they check out. Talk about the desire for wiki-style interactivity! Meanwhile wiki fans can check out wikis of Free Culture and Smart Genes. (Library-related examples found via LISNews.)...

The Librie mailing list gained a bunch of new members after mentions on the eBook Community list and in this blog. Please join the list to free the Librie. Your membership will be a vote against Orwellian DRM and vanishing e-books. Meanwhile here are observations from Mark Hill, a Librie owner in the United Kingdom--follow by an example of the hardware hacking that very likely will follow.The unit is very slick, the screen quality is awesome, I cannot use it for anything, I do not speak Japanese, and I really bought it because I think if we can bypass...

More and more people are echoing our sentiments against the darker side of the Sony Librie.The new E Ink screen technology is awesome, but, alas, the Librie comes with Sony-stupid DRM. Books even vanish after 60 days. An anti-Librie mention in the TechDirt blog elicited such reader reactions as: "I feel sorry for the authors who will sell quite a few less of their e-books because of this kind of Orwellian technology." Now you can add the United Kingdom to the growing list of countries--including Japan itself--where angry e-book enthusiasts are speaking up. "Nice ebook, shame about the DRM,"...

NewsAloud can now read from RSS-enabled blogs such as this one--not just sections of commercial news sites like Yahoo's. The current price from NextUp.com, which offers a variety of other text-to-speech products, is $19.95. Despite its flaws, NewsAloud could be just the ticket for creating MP3 or .wav files for you to enjoy while you jog. And remember, blogs and news sites are just some examples of RSS-reading fodder--for example, Yahoo-based mailing lists are now reachable via RSS.Pros: You can set up NewsAloud for a variety of sites to read from in one swoop, rather than having to call...