Over the last few days, a new social networking fad seems to have arisen: suddenly I’m seeing posts about Pinterest on PaidContent, Gizmodo, the blogs of my friends, and results that come up in my Zite searches on reading. “Stacked” book blogger Kelly Jensen writes about discovering it’s a great way to spread awareness of some favorite books. Journalist Adam Tinworth writes that “It does what so many people use Tumblr for—visual curation—better, and in a more agreeable layout,” Laura Hazard Owen discusses the unusual demographics of the social network—it seems to appeal more to women than men and higher...

Do as I say, don’t do as I do. In response to the Phoenix editorial about the New York Times committing a copyright violation by posting a PDF of a 36-year-old newspaper article even as Op-Ed columnist Bill Keller blasts the copyright violations of others, Keller suggests that irony should be “[kept] out of the hands of the clueless,” but seems to be clueless that he’s committing a significant irony himself. Keller writes that since the paper the article came from was long defunct without digital archives, he assumes the author of the article felt reposting the article...

When it comes to copyright and piracy, it often seems that some of the most vehement objectors don’t practice what they preach. The Boston Phoenix’s Carly Carioli has posted an editorial to the Phoenix’s blog calling out the New York Times, which published a couple of scorching columns on piracy over the weekend, for at the same time ripping off an article to which the Phoenix holds the copyright. The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an...

That's the title of an article by Stuart Kelley in The Scotsman.  It's worth reading and it goes into some of the interesting copyright issues in Europe.  Here's the beginning: On 1 January this year, the works of the two most significant modern novelists, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, left copyright and entered the public domain. It is the second time in my lifetime this has happened. Back in 1992, when I was still a student, Joyce and Woolf left copyright, since at the time, copyright extended to fifty years after the author’s death. Finnegans Wake, beforehand,...

It seems like more and more people lately are coming to the same conclusion as Gabe Newell of Valve about piracy as a service problem. Paul Tassi has an op-ed on Forbes in which he points out that no matter what Hollywood and other media industries do, they will never manage to stomp out piracy through legislation. It’s already illegal in most of the world, but that hasn’t slowed it down much. Right now, Tassi writes, pirates have a big advantage over commercial interests in how easy it is to download and view their media. The editorial mostly applies...

In my email this morning, I received a notice from Quora that I had been invited to submit an answer for the following question: Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again? After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here: Not that I've ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should...

If you needed further evidence of just how out of touch with reality SOPA supporters can be, I just found this post by copyright attorney Lisa Alter decrying the fact that “[the] voice of the individual creator of intellectual property,” which is to say authors, has been largely “absent in the mainstream media debate.” She is coming down firmly on the pro-SOPA side of the debate, with little gems like this: The position of the anti-SOPA activists is antithetical to the principle of protection — for authors, that is — mandated in the Constitution of the...

The ReDigi lawsuit took an intriguing turn yesterday. Google sent a letter to the judge in the EMI v. ReDigi case asking permission to file an amicus brief. Google says that it is not taking sides in the case, but some points of law that will be considered could set important precedents for the future of the cloud hosting industry. Google brings up the Cablevision case that legalized remote-operated DVRs, and the Sony v. Universal case that legalized VCRs and explicitly called “time-shifting” fair use, But the really interesting part is this argument: The final...

Seems as though there’s still some life in the old “hot news doctrine” horse yet. The NY Times’s Media Decoder has a brief piece on a dispute between Hollywood news sites Deadline.com and The Hollywood Reporter set for a July 2013 court date. In their joint report, the plaintiff — that would be Penske, owner of Deadline — said it was considering whether to augment its legal complaint with a new claim for “hot news misappropriation,” some of which “occurred as recently as the week of the filing of this Report.” In other words, Penske says...

Found on PaidContent: A company called Gluejar has launched a new website called Unglue.it with the goal of “freeing” e-book versions of copyrighted books that do not have any yet. The site hopes to contract with the owners of particular books to determine how much money they want to allow free e-book versions of the books under a Creative Commons license, then raise that money from its users. [Site founder Eric] Hellman says Gluejar is in part a reaction to the changing role of libraries in the U.S. “We’re excited about the possibility of using libraries...

From boingboing: My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Digital Lysenkoism," a look at the bizarre internal forces that causes people who work at publishers to defend DRM, even though they know it doesn't work. I also recently chatted with a big-six digital strategist, who explained to me how his employer would soon be sending out all of its digital advanced reader copies (ARCs) as DRM-crippled PDFs. We shared a moment of incredulous silence at this. Most reviewers, after all, get hundreds of times more material than they can ever use. I literally get 100 books ...

From The Guardian: Rovio Mobile learned from the music industry's mistakes when deciding how to deal with piracy of its Angry Birds games and merchandise, chief executive Mikael Hed told the Midem conference in Cannes this morning. "We have some issues with piracy, not only in apps, but also especially in the consumer products. There is tons and tons of merchandise out there, especially in Asia, which is not officially licensed products," said Hed. "We could learn a lot from the music industry, and the rather terrible ways the music industry has tried to combat piracy." Hed explained that Rovio...