By now you've likely heard that the Supreme Court has ruled, in a 6-3 decision, in favor of immigrant scientist Supap Kirtsaeng in Kirtsaeng V. Wiley. In what's being heralded as a win for consumers and libraries, and a loss for publishers, the SCOTUS overturned a previous ruling against Kirtsaeng, who had been buying textbooks printed (legally) abroad—where they cost significantly less than they do in, say, the United States—and then reselling them in the U.S. on eBay and turning a handsome profit in the process. In a statement yesterday, Wiley's President & CEO Stephen M. Smith wrote: "We are disappointed that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided...

Canadian Government Creates Snitch Line to Report Librarians who Speak Publicly (Boing Boing) Self-Selling Self- Published Author Jennifer L. Armentrout Signs Six-Figure Deal (Digital Book World) Details on Copyright Register Maria Pallante's Call for Reform (Techdirt) Amazon Now Allows Schools to Buy Apps in Bulk with Whispercast (Good e-Reader) Kindle Daily Deals: Slipping Into Darkness by Peter Blauner (and 3 others)  ...

Remember the Supreme Court case about the Thai exchange student who bulk imported cheap overseas copies of textbooks and resold them in the U.S. (making over $1 million in sales) to finance his doctorate? The judges handed down a decision today. By a six to three majority, they found that the student’s importation and resale was legal under the Fair Use Doctrine. Just because the books were printed overseas did not exempt them from the right of First Sale, which means that people who buy them can resell them as they please. Ars Technica has more details on the decision. Essentially,...

Digital products like e-books are licensed—not sold—to a buyer, so they can’t be legally resold, shared, or loaned. (See my article on e-books and the first sale doctrine for more information.) A group called the Owners' Rights Initiative wants to change that. The ORI believes that the owner of a digital book should be allowed to sell it used.  Members of this group include some library trade groups, used resellers of paper books, and eBay. Some readers consider this a good thing, because they can get cash back on books they've read, in the very same way many readers do with paper books. But...

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...

Why Some Indie Authors Fail (Rich Adin) Amazon Maps the 50 Greatest Love Stories by State (Good e-Reader) Can Conservatives Break the Copyright Stalemate? (GigaOM) Self-Publishing Stigma: Because Revolution Takes Time (HuffPo) Kindle Daily Deals: Stone Maidens by Lloyd Devereax Richards (and 3 others)  ...

Techdirt is one of many who have picked up this story about a copyright battle that's brewing in a Maryland school district over who owns work done by teachers—and students—during school time. The Prince George district is trying to pass a policy that would give it ownership over all materials that teachers create for use in the classroom—and over all work that students produce as a consequence. There are a number of things which are wrong with this theory. Firstly, as this write-up in The Washington Post points out: "It’s not unusual for a company to hold the rights to an employee’s...

On Friday, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment; he’d apparently hanged himself. Swartz was only 26, a brilliant and troubled young man who suffered from clinical depression, and also an Internet activist who spoke out and acted out in favor of making access to public information more free to everyone. He was a friend of both Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow. Swartz’s other accomplishments include RECAP, a tool that uploaded public-domain legal documents retrieved from the subscription-based PACER document record system into a duplicate free-access database. He was also reportedly involved in the early stages of...

Can Ownshelf, the 'Dropbox for ebooks,' sail clear of lending controversy? (The Next Web) Lionsgate Censors Remix Video that Copyright Office Itself Used as an Example of Fair Use (Techdirt) Will Amazon 'Auto-Rip' Print Books Too? (The Digital Reader) Random House Australia Acquires Print/eBook Rights to Best-Selling Book App (Digital Book World) Kindle Daily Deal: Fuji San by Randy Taguchi (& 3 others!) * * * ...

Why Copyright Shouldn't be Considered Property and Why a Return to 1790 May be Desirable (Techdirt) Goodsreads Announces Winners of 2012 Goodreads Choice Awards (Goodreads) Amherst College Plans to be First All-Open-Access College Press (Digital Book World) Google and Amazon Launch New eBook Stores in Brazil (Good E-Reader) Kindle Daily Deal: Black Diamond by John F. Dobbyn {and} Stanley Goes for a Drive by Craig Frazier * * *    ...

Given the state of Republican rhetoric in recent years, I was very surprised to find them endorsing a cause I can actually wholeheartedly support—but they did so this past weekend, for less than 24 hours before they hastily retracted it. I refer to a paper issued by the Republican Study Committee, the caucus for House Republicans, stating that current US copyright law is stifling creativity instead of encouraging it, and is in dire need of drastic reforms. (The paper is embedded below this article.) The paper pointed out that copyright is all about encouraging the progress of the useful...

Ars Technica has a couple of great, in-depth pieces laying out in detail the facts of the matter surrounding the upcoming Supreme Court case concerning a Thai exchange student who imported and resold cheap foreign editions of English-language textbooks to finance his doctorate. Publishers contend he earned $1.2 million in revenues, and essentially set himself up as an unlicensed importer/distributor, damaging the publishers’ market for the books within the United States. The publisher plaintiff is John Wiley & Sons, which has also garnered attention for its recent lawsuits against unauthorized BitTorrent distributors of its books. The article discusses the Costco vs. Omega case, which I covered...