TOC Latin America was held last Friday in the beautiful city of Buenos Aires. Kat Meyer, my OReilly colleague, and Holger Volland did a terrific job producing the event. As is so often the case with great conferences, part of the value is spending time with speakers and other attendees in between sessions and at dinner gatherings Last Thursday night I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Kat, Holger and a number of other TOC Latin America speakers. We discussed a number of interesting topics but my favorite one was asking each person this question: What happens if DRM goes...

We’ve heard a lot of people arguing that publishers should fight Amazon by dropping DRM. However, in The Scholarly Kitchen, Joseph Esposito has written a long and thoughtful piece looking at the possible drawbacks of this approach. Esposito first looks at the question of whether unauthorized sharing of e-books increases the market for them. His own guess is that infringement helps sales when there is sufficient friction—i.e. the free copy is harder or more annoying to use for some reason—but hinders them when friction approaches zero. And since free e-books are getting easier and easier to find, publishers...

From DefectiveByDesign: On May 4th, members of the Defective by Design DRM Elimination Crew all over the world will join together at local events to protest Digital Restrictions Management. Events in Boston, Madrid, London and Toronto are already coming together, and more are on the way. See http://dayagainstdrm.org/ for the latest events. Let us know where you are located, so we can contact you about events in your area! While DRM has largely been defeated in downloaded music, it is a growing problem in the area of ebooks, where people have had their books restricted so they can't freely loan, re-sell or donate them,...

Piracy. Theft. They’re the favorite loaded words of the copyright lobby, which likes to sling them around like they’re going out of style, sometimes using them both at once. Copyright infringement is piracy! Copyright infringement is theft! Piracy is theft! Even if it’s true, it’s counterproductive—it tends to cause the discussion to wander away from the rightness or wrongness of the behavior to the rightness or wrongness of the words used to describe it. On Ars Technica, Asher Hawkins has an interesting exploration of the history of the words and their usage in the context of copyright infringement. It’s...

Looks interesting.  From Beyond the Book: At the recent OnCopyright 2012 conference, Robert Levine explained for the audience in a keynote speech how the commonly used language of copyright shapes the debate and makes for confusion on the fundamentals “I don’t think copyright infringement is stealing,” he told the Columbia Law School audience. “The idea that this is stealing, I think, introduces a moral tone that I don’t like....

Here are a couple more interesting points of view on the DoJ’s anti-trust lawsuit against some publishers and Apple. On ReadWriteWeb, Joe Brockmeier points out that for all the noise around the suit, it really isn’t going to change the major problems with the e-book industry right now. He points out three such problems: the rampant proliferation of DRM and platform lock-in, the perpetual copyright implemented by Congress and backed by the Supreme Court, and Amazon’s problematic relationships with publishers (including those who aren’t the Big Six). If you're taking sides in the DoJ vs....

From BoingBoing comes this article by Cory Doctorow, reprinted here under a Creative Commons license: ACTA is the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, an extreme, far-reaching copyright treaty drafted in secret by industry and government trade reps, under a seal of confidentiality that even extended to Members of the European Parliament, who were not allowed to see what was being negotiated on their behalf. In February, the EU rapporteur (a member of the European Parliament charged with investigating pending legislation and presenting it to Parliament) for ACTA handed in his report and resigned as rapporteur, concluding that the treaty was a disaster...

From AfterDawn: Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said the entertainment industry is "shooting themselves in the foot, or maybe worse than the foot" by trying to push anti-piracy legislation. Brin said the recently killed PIPA and SOPA legislation would have led to the U.S. becoming more like Iran and China, who censor their people. Even more importantly, Brin hit the nail on the head in regards to piracy, saying the industry cannot understand the simple concept that users will continue to download unauthorized content as long as it remains easier to acquire than authorized material. "I haven't tried it for many years but when...

Is paranoia over piracy leading publishers to extremes that could turn off their readers? Book reviewer Rebecca Blain was nonplussed to open a review copy of an e-book and discover a copyright warning that spanned several pages and included a threat of $250,000 fines for sharing it. She followed up with a post quoting the copyright notice in full, and comparing it to the copyright notices from printed books and a number of other e-books. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of copyright out there judging by some of the comments Blain got in response to her...

Received the following email from Greg Belvedere: Hello Paul, I enjoy reading teleread and I'm working on a project that might interest you. I'm trying to fix the problem of ebook licenses that prohibit legal sharing. I have found a solution that aims to satisfy readers and copyright holders. I plan to do this in two phases. In the first phase I will create an ebook lending social network for public domain works. Once I have done this I will convince authors and publishers to adopt a new ebook license that will allow sharing of copyrighted ebooks through the site. My goal...

I’ve posted a couple of stories about the copyright controversy Pinterest has been stirring due to its foundation on the use of other people’s images. However, there’s another side to that controversy, which is that as popular as the social network has gotten, magazine publishers have been almost frantically looking at ways to leverage it to drive more traffic to their own sites. Ad Age has an article about these publishers’ pushes for Pinterest. After Time Inc.’s Real Simple said that Pinterest had driven more traffic to it than Facebook, publishers such as the Hearst Group have been holding...

From a TechPresident Article: Americans accessing the Internet through five of the top service providers may start receiving “copyright alerts” in the near future, as a new organization called the Center for Copyright Information develops a new operational framework designed to make individuals aware that their potentially illegal activities online are being monitored. The center on Monday announced that it has hired as executive director Jill Lesser, who has a background in the world of public policy, media and technology. Until recently, she was a managing director at the Glover Park Group, a strategic communications and government relations firm in Washington, D.C. Prior...