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...

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...

What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such an Orwellian scenario is said to have actually happened. No, I’m not just talking about the remote deletion of 1984, but rather the mysterious zapping of the customer’s entire Kindle library. The most likely scenario here, as guessed at by BoingBoing, is that the Norwegian customer simply lived outside of the territories for authorized purchases. While I love content providers—I’m one myself—Amazon’s latest action shows why the Digital Public Library of America or another nonprofit needs to get into...

Here's a link to the second part of Akshay Pathak's overview of the state of publishing in India today. Where Part 1 focused on the need for better data, professionally trained editors and a more robust retail infrastructure, Part 2 looks at the roles Indian publishers play in the global marketplace, as well as the growing issue of both print and digital piracy. But perhaps the most contentious business issue in Indian publishing today is a proposed amendment to India's copyright law. If passed, it would sanction parallel imports, in effect rendering territorial rights moot and introducing potentially devastating foreign...

This little article by Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing is important news, so I reprint it in full: A UN treaty called the WIPO Copyright Treaty requires countries to pass laws protecting "software locks" (also called DRM or TPM). Countries around the world have adopted the treaty in different ways: in the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits all circumvention of software locks, even when they don't protect copyright (for example, it would be illegal to for me to break the DRM on a Kindle to access my own novels, were they sold with Kindle DRM). Brazil has just created the...

Ars Technica today has a great (and long—it goes on for seven pages) feature editorial about the past and future of e-books by Ars columnist John Siracusa. Siracusa, who took a job at the company that would eventually become eReader back when it was still called Palm Digital Media, has some fascinating insights and opinions about how e-books got started, what they are now, and what they might become. Siracusa holds several opinions about e-books that may seem controversial. For example, he feels that people still don't "get" e-books even now—which is why e-books have been so slow to catch...