I came across a rather interesting pair of posts on BookRiot today. Cassandra Neace opined that there’s no point in reading “the classics” anymore, because they are essentially boring—no four-letter words or sex and violence (because those classic writers were far too couth to include any such things), and too many dead white males. (Ah, how Roger Mifflin would cringe.) Amanda Nelson wrote a longer and amusing rebuttal, pointing out that a lot of classics became classics because they pushed the boundaries of couth for their day. (Indeed, some of them, such as Huckleberry Finn, continue to be controversial...

The Supreme Court yesterday issued a ruling on the Golan copyright case which we’ve discussed here a few times before. The case involved whether works that had previously been within the public domain in the USA could be taken back out of it in order to comply with the Berne Convention international copyright treaty. Disappointingly, the court ruled that Congress could indeed remove the works from the public domain—Congress did have the power to retroactively extend copyright on these works in order to bring the US into treaty compliance. The court rejected the idea that the First Amendment...

On a Murphy’s Laws calendar I once had, I found Weinberg’s Second Law, which goes “If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.” What about if programmers made e-books? The Toronto Review of Books has an interview with Chris Stevens, the co-creator of the Alice in Wonderland iPad app that has gotten a lot of positive attention. The discussion of the development of the app out of a public domain title is interesting in its own right, but in part of this interview, Stevens speaks out...

Happy New Year! This is the time of year when we make our New Year’s Resolutions (I think mine will be 1680 x 1050) and look forward to a brighter future. (At least until the world ends on 12/21.) But it’s also observed as Public Domain Day where, in some parts of the world, people take stock of what new works have entered the public domain. In the US, it’s currently the day we stare wistfully through the glass of copyright, like a homeless waif staring at a storefront food display, at the works that would have entered the...

Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

Looks fascinating.  Go over to BookofJoe for the details....

Here is another movie-related story (or a continuation of the same story) about YouTube rights abuses, with implications for all electronic forms of physical media (including e-books). In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about Universal’s allegedly fraudulent takedown of a Megaupload promotional video, Torrentfreak reports Megaupload has instructed its legal team to file suit against Universal over the matter. (One of my friends noted that, if Universal really did do what Megaupload accuses, it should also be liable for criminal charges of perjury.) It will be interesting to see what happens. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the...

Over the last few days, I’ve done something I’ve always meant to get around to but hadn’t yet: worked my way through the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories via their posting on Google Books. (Except for the last story collection, of course, which is not yet in the public domain in the US.) After that, I happened onto an interesting Conan Doyle work called Through the Magic Door, in which the author looks at his own bookshelf and discusses each of the works that are dear to his own heart. The first few paragraphs of the book especially...

I mentioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a couple of years ago as a great argument for the usefulness of the public domain. Over on eBookNewser, Nate Hoffelder noticed that the e-book now has an interactive iPhone/iPad app available for $4.99 in the app store. While I’m a bit “iffy” on the utility of stand-alone appbooks, I have to admit that this one has some interesting features. Some of them, such as the “original music score” or “buckets of gory animation”, sound like needless gimmicks, but I am intrigued by the way the app incorporates both the “And Zombies”...

On Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody takes a look at the interesting case of why Project Gutenberg has two copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost that were produced within a few months of each other. Project Gutenberg EBook #20, October 1991, was hand-typed by volunteer Judy Boss (who subsequently got a scanner). However, Project Gutenberg EBook #26, from February 1992, was a revision of, literally, the oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg. It pre-dates Hart’s famous decision to type the Declaration of Independence by a good six years, dating back to 1964-1965 and originally rendered in all capital letters by Dr. Joseph...

More news out of the Supreme Court: today it considered a case in which copyright reformers want to remove thousands of works by foreign authors from the public domain in order to “harmonize” US copyright law with international copyright standards. Ars Technica claims the case rose from the ashes of Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the court ruled that Congress was entitled to extend copyright because "when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary." So copyright reformers looked for cases where Congress had changed those contours...

I’ve found a couple of more points of view on the HathiTrust lawsuit over the last couple of days, and given that they are diametrically opposed it seems like a good idea to present them together for contrast. First, SF and fantasy novelist Elizabeth Moon strongly opposes the use that the universities and HathiTrust are making of scanned works. Moon is up in arms over HathiTrust’s plans to allow unlimited free download of “orphaned” works from the trust (though she seems to be under the impression that it would allow download of all works, not just the orphaned ones)....