PaidContent reports that Open Road has filed a 14-page response to HarperCollin’s lawsuit over Jean C. George’s Julie of the Wolves e-book rights. The response went about as expected: Open Road is claiming that the contract for Julie of the Wolves does not cover e-books, and so HarperCollins does not have a leg to stand on in its lawsuit. Among other things, Open Road alleges that HarperCollins has not spent any money on advertising or promoting Julie of the Wolves since the mid 1970s, and that it never had any intention of producing a Julie of the Wolves e-book,...

From an article in The Digital Shift: University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson, on behalf of more than 80 academics, sent a letter on Monday to Judge Denny Chin asserting that academic authors should not be included as part of a class authorization in the high profile Google Books case, due to fundamental disagreements between the interests of academics and other types of authors. Samuelson has written and lectured often as a critic of the Google Books case, and of the proposed settlement which was rejected by Chin last year. In her latest letter, she writes that the Authors Guild and other...

All may not be coming up roses in e-textbook land. Sarah Kessler reports on Mashable that one of Kno’s largest-selling textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, is attempting to pull its material from Kno’s store—and Kno is suing for breach of license agreement. Though Kno deals with about 40 publishers, Cengage’s content has historically made up 25% of its overall sales. However, Cengage doesn’t like the way Kno allows users to copy and paste passages from textbooks into a separate journal view, considering it an unauthorized derivative work. The publisher gave Kno 30 days to correct the issue, then terminated the...

From Publishers Weekly: An international alliance of publishers and publishing associations has succeeded in getting a Munich court to serve cease and desist orders to the operators of two Web sites that have been illegally offering more than 400,000 copyrighted books for free. The operators, currently based in Galway, Ireland, are estimated to have earned over $10 million annually from advertising sales, donations and premium subscriptions. According to the Association of American Publishers, the investigation took over seven months to complete and spanned seven countries. A total of 17 publishing companies filed requests for injunctions involving 170 titles. The Landgericht, a regional...

From a Radio Netherlands Report: The YouTube generation has gained an ally in the worldwide “copyright wars.” The Dutch government wants to change copyright law so new media users can continue to do “creative remixes” of protected content. The Hague will no longer wait for the European Commission to find a compromise. [Clip] [Bent] Hugenholtz, copyright law professor at the University of Amsterdam [and member of the Dutch state committee on copyright law] , discussed his views last Friday with representatives of European governments, the entertainment industry, internet entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists and librarians. They were gathered in The Hague for “Towards Flexible Copyright,”...

The name makes me think of uranium and radiation, the proprietary DRM issue remains, and Apple isn’t a supporter. But the Readium initiative, announced this morning, is a still big step forward for the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main e-book industry trade group. A demo reader mixes ePub 3 e-book format, XML, HTML5 standards and the WebKit rendering engine used in many Web browsers. Aided by this “reference implementation, developers will more easily be able to create ePub reading software with “support for video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements” (link added). Demos already exist as extensions for Chromium...

Over the last few days, a new social networking fad seems to have arisen: suddenly I’m seeing posts about Pinterest on PaidContent, Gizmodo, the blogs of my friends, and results that come up in my Zite searches on reading. “Stacked” book blogger Kelly Jensen writes about discovering it’s a great way to spread awareness of some favorite books. Journalist Adam Tinworth writes that “It does what so many people use Tumblr for—visual curation—better, and in a more agreeable layout,” Laura Hazard Owen discusses the unusual demographics of the social network—it seems to appeal more to women than men and higher...

Do as I say, don’t do as I do. In response to the Phoenix editorial about the New York Times committing a copyright violation by posting a PDF of a 36-year-old newspaper article even as Op-Ed columnist Bill Keller blasts the copyright violations of others, Keller suggests that irony should be “[kept] out of the hands of the clueless,” but seems to be clueless that he’s committing a significant irony himself. Keller writes that since the paper the article came from was long defunct without digital archives, he assumes the author of the article felt reposting the article...

From TorrentFreak.  More in the article. With their unconditional support for SOPA, PIPA and ACTA, Hollywood is pressing hard for new legislation to curb piracy. The studios want ‘rogue’ websites to be censored and are calling on Google and Internet providers to take responsibility. However, a new study reveals that movie industry itself has the key to decreasing piracy, without passing any news laws. In a paper titled ‘Reel Piracy: The Effect of Online Film Piracy on International Box Office Sales’ researchers from the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College examine the link between BitTorrent piracy and box office returns. As hypothesized, they...

When it comes to copyright and piracy, it often seems that some of the most vehement objectors don’t practice what they preach. The Boston Phoenix’s Carly Carioli has posted an editorial to the Phoenix’s blog calling out the New York Times, which published a couple of scorching columns on piracy over the weekend, for at the same time ripping off an article to which the Phoenix holds the copyright. The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an...

In a slightly odd reaction to the public anti-SOPA backlash, movie studio Paramount has decided to try to open a dialogue discussing copyright infringement.  The odd part is that they chose law professors to dialogue with.  Details are in the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article suggests that the strategy of talking to law professors, as opposed to tech experts (or, possibly, average students) will not result in anything useful: “I don’t understand why, if they truly wanted to engage consumers, they would approach law professors, especially those at the most elite schools,” Mr. Goldman wrote in an e-mail...

That's the title of an article by Stuart Kelley in The Scotsman.  It's worth reading and it goes into some of the interesting copyright issues in Europe.  Here's the beginning: On 1 January this year, the works of the two most significant modern novelists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, left copyright and entered the public domain. It is the second time in my lifetime this has happened. Back in 1992, when I was still a student, Joyce and Woolf left copyright, since at the time, copyright extended to fifty years after the author’s death. Finnegans Wake, beforehand,...