Well, it’s that time of decade again. Someone in Congress has finally—or, rather, once again—taken note of how the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions step all over consumer rights and introduced legislation to try to balance the scales. Ars Technica reports that three Democrats and a Republican, including California rep Zoe Lofgren, have introduced the Unlocking Technology Act of 2013. This act would rewrite the anti-circumvention provision to make DRM-breaking illegal only if it’s done in order to “facilitate the infringement of a copyright.” Non-infringing uses, such as ripping DVDs, unlocking cell phones, and so on, would presumably be allowed....

From The Huffington Post comes this interesting story about the Kardashian siblings, who are suing their former stepmother, Ellen Pearson, over control of their late father's diary. Pearson has possession of the diary and has been releasing embarrassing snippets of it to the media. What makes the story interesting is that the Kardashians are alleging that the late Robert Kardashian's will bequeathed them not just his physical belongings, but his intellectual property as well. Therefore, they are alleging that Pearson is violating their 'copyright' by releasing the contents to the press. I suspect a case like this will, given the character of the...

Joe Konrath published a thoughtful piece yesterday on fair use and copyright. I thought he was spot on and made some excellent points. He started by talking about copyright as it applied to authors, not to the industry. Not surprisingly, the publishing industry (print, video and music) all focus on copyright as it applies to them and their needs and wants. Konrath points out that copyright doesn't belong to an industry. It belongs to the creator of the work, and that industries often exist to exploit the artists that the work creates. [caption id="attachment_83294" align="alignright" width="180"] Joe Konrath[/caption] You can agree or disagree...

It's been a little while since we've had any interesting news to share about Unglue.it, the online service provider that uses a crowdfunding method to obtain the copyrights of certain e-books, which are then made freely available to anyone—or any institution, for that matter, including libraries—interested in downloading a copy. (Unglue.it users participate by donating a financial amount of their choosing to a particular title being offered by the Unglue.it platform; if the minimum funding amount is achieved, the publisher releases the book under Creative Commons license CC-BY-NC-ND.) [caption id="attachment_82693" align="alignright" width="194"] Gluejar CEO Eric Hellman[/caption] * * * Here at TeleRead, we've long...

By now you've likely heard that the Supreme Court has ruled, in a 6-3 decision, in favor of immigrant scientist Supap Kirtsaeng in Kirtsaeng V. Wiley. In what's being heralded as a win for consumers and libraries, and a loss for publishers, the SCOTUS overturned a previous ruling against Kirtsaeng, who had been buying textbooks printed (legally) abroad—where they cost significantly less than they do in, say, the United States—and then reselling them in the U.S. on eBay and turning a handsome profit in the process. In a statement yesterday, Wiley's President & CEO Stephen M. Smith wrote: "We are disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided...

Remember the Supreme Court case about the Thai exchange student who bulk imported cheap overseas copies of textbooks and resold them in the U.S. (making over $1 million in sales) to finance his doctorate? The judges handed down a decision today. By a six to three majority, they found that the student’s importation and resale was legal under the Fair Use Doctrine. Just because the books were printed overseas did not exempt them from the right of First Sale, which means that people who buy them can resell them as they please. Ars Technica has more details on the decision. Essentially,...

Techdirt has a write-up on something I had never heard of--a special copyright introduced in 1996 which protects the contents of databases, even if all the works they list are public domain. The case Techdirt profiles involves a company which wanted to obtain some government records from the 1700s and 1800s and were told they could not: "In order to justify an exclusive right to its database, the department of Vienne told the court it had "committed more than €230,000 [about $300,000] to this project and that the digitization of documents archive had taken eight years." This is a scary story for...

I’ve written quite a few pieces here about the various attempts to try to create a workable digital resale market—most recently with digital music resale firm ReDigi, which is currently engaged in a legal dispute with music label EMI over its activities. Now it looks as if, as with a lot of its digital media sales, Amazon may have achieved yet another leg up on the competition. On paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports that Amazon has been awarded a patent on the idea of a marketplace for “used” digital content. Amazon applied for it back in 2009, and it...

Techdirt is one of many who have picked up this story about a copyright battle that's brewing in a Maryland school district over who owns work done by teachers—and students—during school time. The Prince George district is trying to pass a policy that would give it ownership over all materials that teachers create for use in the classroom—and over all work that students produce as a consequence. There are a number of things which are wrong with this theory. Firstly, as this write-up in The Washington Post points out: "It’s not unusual for a company to hold the rights to an employee’s...

Remember how, back in 2009, Wizards of the Coast pulled all its PDF products from on-line gaming store Paizo and announced it was ceasing PDF sales altogether? Apparently it only took about four years for the company to change its mind again. Wired’s GeekDad reports that WotC has launched a new e-book store site, dndclassics.com, in conjunction with on-line RPG e-book seller DriveThruRPG. The site currently offers over 80 products ranging in age from the old red and blue books up to the latest 4E stuff, with prices ranging from $4.99 for older products to $17.99 for...

On Friday, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment; he’d apparently hanged himself. Swartz was only 26, a brilliant and troubled young man who suffered from clinical depression, and also an Internet activist who spoke out and acted out in favor of making access to public information more free to everyone. He was a friend of both Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow. Swartz’s other accomplishments include RECAP, a tool that uploaded public-domain legal documents retrieved from the subscription-based PACER document record system into a duplicate free-access database. He was also reportedly involved in the early stages of...

Most days, us Canadians get the e-book shaft. Barnes & Noble won't sell to us. Amazon will, but at higher prices and with less selection. We're the forgotten child of the e-book world—with the exception of January 1, aka New Year's Day, aka Public Domain Day, when countries that calculate the length of an author's copyright based on the year an artist dies get access to a whole bunch of new entrants. Here in Canada, a glorious (for now) life + 50 land, authors whose death occurred in 1963 are now part of the public domain. In Australia and other life...