Friday, May 4th was the fourth International Day Against DRM, and wow — what a day! We were supported by our friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, the Accessible Computing Foundation, Fight for the Future, APRIL, and our sister organizations, FSF France, FSF India and FSF Europe. Our focus for this year's day was the threat of DRM on ebooks, and so we also welcomed support from several publishers. Libre Graphics Magazine, O'Reilly, No Starch, Angry Robot and others had their own sales on DRM-free ebooks, encouraging authors and readers alike to step up and vote with their wallets. Additionally, we...

I mentioned yesterday that as part of the Copyright Office’s 3-year DMCA exemption hearings, the office would hear arguments on whether to permit cracking the CSS encryption on DVDs. Although it doesn’t directly have anything to do with e-books, I found this coverage by Ars Technica/Wired of the CSS issue interesting enough to bring up in a general DRM-related sense. As with the last go-round, one of the proposals was to allow filmmakers and other clip-users to decrypt DVDs so as to excerpt clips for use in films and for other fair uses. This use was authorized last time,...

Wired’s Threat Level blog has some coverage of the latest hearing in the current round of U.S. Copyright Office DMCA exemption hearings. Topics argued today included the iPhone jailbreaking exception, cracking CSS on DVDs, cracking the protections on video game consoles, Prospects look poor for cracking video game consoles (sadly for PlayStation hacker George Hotz), but good for the jailbreaking exemption. Apple, which argued last time around that jailbreaking would destroy its business model and open cell phone towers to sabotage, was nowhere to be found at this meeting after its business model turned out to remain notably...

I found a press release in my mailbox this morning about the launch of Eric Hellman’s crowd-funded Creative Commons republishing initiative for copyrighted works, Unglue.it (which we’ve mentioned a few times already here). The site has officially launched just now, with campaigns for the following five books: Michael Laser, 6-321 Joseph Nassise, Riverwatch Nancy Rawles, Love Like Gumbo Budding Reader, Cat and Rat Open Book Publishers, Oral Literature in Africa, by Ruth Finnegan. The...

GlueJar Founder and CEO Eric Hellman and is interviewed by Chris Kenneally in the latest ‘Beyond the Book’ podcast from the Copyright Clearance Center. From the Blurb Posted on the Beyond the Book web page: We want to offer rightsholders the opportunity to get a one-time payment in exchange for making their books into Creative Commons-licensed e-books. And the way we’re going to do this is by crowd-funding campaigns,’ Hellman explains for CCC’s Chris Kenneally. ‘So if you have a favorite book, a book that’s important to you, a book that means a lot to you, that you’ve read, and you want...

A decision has come down in the Georgia State University e-reserves case, which we’ve covered here, here, and here. The case concerned electronic compilations of course material that professors bundle together from books in situations where they would not be using enough material from a particular book to make it worthwhile for students to buy it. A number of publishers objected to the practice, and filed suit against Georgia State University. (Presumably if the suit was successful, they could then have gone after other universities over the same practices.) The judge has spent a great deal of time working...

I say groundbreaking because it's the first time I've seen all these studies collected in one place.  Zero Paid takes a look at eight different academic studies of file-sharing.  These are not the usual industry sponsored drivel, but legitimate academic studies with science backing them up.  Unfortunately they haven't gotten the publicity they deserved.  As the first article in the series says: One question you might have right now is why are some of these studies seemingly unknown after all this time? There are a variety of possible reasons. One possible reason is that studies like this have a tendency to...

The secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement pushed by the US is probably dead in Europe, says EurActiv. This is good news for all those who believe in open and honest government. The liberal ALDE group in the European Parliament jumped onto the bandwagon to oppose the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) by declaring yesterday (25 April) that they will vote against it, as "too many provisions" were "unclear". In case a plenary vote was held before the summer, a majority of MEPs would therefore reject ACTA. The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in the European Parliament announced yesterday at a press conference that they...

One of the common reasons copyright foes give for the evils of long copyright or any form of copyright is that it stifles creativity.   Is this true? My own feeling is that it doesn’t, particularly in fiction. WHAT COPYRIGHT DOES AND DOESN’T COVER Many don’t understand what copyright covers.  They think the ideas within a story are copyrighted.  They aren’t.  Anyone can write a story about angst-filled vampires and the girls who love them, and many have, but if you write and sell a vampire story where the vampires glitter, the main characters are Edward and Belle, and the plot and setting are...

That's the question Michael A. Stackpole asks on his Stormwolf website.  His answer is that for the average person it probably isn't, and I tend to agree with him: Those of us who are early adopters, who are computer savvy, who are interested in digital books are at risk of forgetting some simple truths about readers in general and people who have bought dedicated e-readers. I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve had conversations with people about what I do, who profess to be Star Wars® fans, who profess to have read the novels, and who even tell me...

Publishing Perspectives reports that figures from a publishing industry lobby in Spain purport to show that the piracy rate for e-books has risen from 40% in 2010 to 49% in 2011—that is, almost half of all e-book content available online in Spain is being distributed without the copyright holders’ permission. While some challenge the neutrality of the figures, newspaper reporter Antonio Fraguas Garrido, who has been following copyright issues for a while, points out that they are the only numbers anyone has so far been able to provide. It seems to me that since English-language e-books have driven the...

It’s no secret that I’ve lately enjoyed laughing at the travails of copyright troll Righthaven, whose efforts to build a business model out of copyright infringement incensed free speech advocates, copyright lawyers such as Marc Randazza, and eventually judges in several states. But I’ve come across an interesting article by reporter Eriq Gardner, who has the distinction of having been (briefly) sued by Righthaven himself, that takes a look at the issues behind Righthaven and considers the question of whether Righthaven had good reasons for doing what it did. And the answers might be surprising. Beyond a...