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...

Remember that report about how rife with plagiarized and duplicate books Amazon’s self-published titles are? Its author, Adam Penenberg, has written a follow-up article for Fast Company in which he tracked down one of the plagiarists to find out more about how and why he had published the title. The plagiarist is a Kuwaiti national who used the pseudonym “Luke Ethan”. Luke explains that he had gotten a lead on an Internet marketing forum to a private black-hat forum (with a $500 entrance fee), where he paid $100 for what he was told was a collection of material with...

From an Open Knowledge Foundation Blog Post by Sam Leon: At The Public Domain Review we’re always scouring the internet for public domain gems. It’s simply incredible how much of our shared cultural heritage is now available for free online. But with so much content out there and with so many different digital collections to choose from it can often be difficult to know where to start looking for interesting and curious works. On top of this, it can often be difficult to understand what you’re allowed to do with a given work and what the license that is applied to it actually...

“The Orphan Wars” appears in the new issue of EDUCAUSE Review. It was written by Professor James Grimmelmann, New York Law School. “Orphan books”—books that are in copyright but whose copyright owners can’t be found—have been in the news lately, thanks to lawsuits over Google’s plan to scan a copy of every book ever published. What started as a project to make a better search engine has gradually become a focal point for debate over whether the legal system can find a way to rescue the orphans from copyright limbo. Some of the libraries working with Google have announced plans to...