Joanna has railed at length about the obnoxiousness of the regional restrictions in publishing that limit the availability of e-books from country to country. Even though it is possible to import a printed book from another country, those who want another nation’s e-book are largely out of luck. It appears that at least some publishers are moving to reduce these frustrations; a few days ago GalleyCat reported on HarperCollin’s announcement that it was merging its US SF/fantasy imprint, Eos, and its Australia/New Zealand imprint, Voyager, into a global imprint called Harper Voyager. At eReads,...

We’ve previously covered the Associated Press’s attack on bloggers for quoting material, and a company called Attributor that was supposed to start filing copyright violation suits on behalf of various clients including the AP earlier this year. While I haven’t heard anything more about Attributor, the Las Vegas Sun has an article on a copyright-police company called Righthaven, with an interesting business model that could be described as copyright trolling. Whereas up to now most newspapers have simply asked violators to take their content down, and replace it with links to the papers’ own sites, Righthaven has filed copyright lawsuits against...

Never one to pass up a chance to poke fun at an easy target, Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has written a hilarious “Alt Text” column for Wired on “Library of Congress Rulings That Could Have Been”. Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market. ...

In a follow-up to last night’s story on the court case with implications for the DMCA, lawyer Nilay Patel takes a look at the case and declares it does not quite have the implications everyone is saying it does. Patel reminds us that even if the decision was binding, at the moment it is only valid in the 5th circuit states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—it’s going to take a review by the Supreme Court to make it the law of the land (or not). The case represents a “split in the circuits”—a disagreement between two or more...

Librarian of Congress Announces DMCA Section 1201 Rules for Exemptions Regarding Circumvention of Access-Control Technologies Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today released the following statement: Section 1201(a)(1) of the copyright law requires that every three years I am to determine whether there are any classes of works that will be subject to exemptions from the statute’s prohibition against circumvention of technology that effectively controls access to a copyrighted work. I make that determination at the conclusion of a rulemaking proceeding conducted by the Register of Copyrights, who makes a recommendation to me. Based on that proceeding and the Register’s recommendation,...

The Courthouse News Service reports on an appeals court case that, if it stands, has the potential to redefine the way the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is interpreted in regard to intellectual property. MGE UPS Systems, a manufacturer of uninterrupted power supplies, brought suit against GE for using a hacked hardware “dongle”, a device that plugs into a computer to authorize use of software, to access MGE software it needed to use to repair UPSes. The lower court judge dismissed MGE’s DMCA case against GE, and the 5th circuit appeals court upheld the decision. On page 6...

My father is fond of telling me a parable about the roads here in Missouri. I have no way of knowing if the story is true, but it seems reasonable. Once upon a time, he tells me, there were a lot of passing zones on the highways—the broken stripes on one or both sides of the road that signify there is enough visibility that one car may dare to pass another on that stretch of road. And life was good. But subsequently, due to a new restriction in visibility requirements or for some other unknown reason, many...

Rupert Murdoch has confirmed that the Wall Street Journal will be on the iPad. Meanwhile, the Washington Post just launched a paid subscription mobile news app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. The price isn’t bad—$1.99 for 12 months—but this could go up after the first year. From Nate’s Ebook News comes word that Opera has updated its e-book reader widget. Only reads DRM-free EPUB, but Nate seemed to find it a decent reading experience. The EFF has updated “Unintended Consequences”, its annual “__ years under the DMCA” whitepaper. The time count now stands at 12, and the paper...