"Fair Use" Takes Centre Stage at Google Books Appeal (Paid Content) Businessman Closes Product, Community Enraged! The Death of Tools of Change (Scholarly Kitchen) Smashwords Releases Data from eBook Sales Study (Good e-Reader) The Year of the Bookstore (Kristine Kathryn Rusch) Kindle Daily Deals: Captive in Iran by Maryam Rostampour (and 3 others)  ...

From The Huffington Post comes this interesting story about the Kardashian siblings, who are suing their former stepmother, Ellen Pearson, over control of their late father's diary. Pearson has possession of the diary and has been releasing embarrassing snippets of it to the media. What makes the story interesting is that the Kardashians are alleging that the late Robert Kardashian's will bequeathed them not just his physical belongings, but his intellectual property as well. Therefore, they are alleging that Pearson is violating their 'copyright' by releasing the contents to the press. I suspect a case like this will, given the character of the...

Joe Konrath published a thoughtful piece yesterday on fair use and copyright. I thought he was spot on and made some excellent points. He started by talking about copyright as it applied to authors, not to the industry. Not surprisingly, the publishing industry (print, video and music) all focus on copyright as it applies to them and their needs and wants. Konrath points out that copyright doesn't belong to an industry. It belongs to the creator of the work, and that industries often exist to exploit the artists that the work creates. [caption id="attachment_83294" align="alignright" width="180"] Joe Konrath[/caption] You can agree or disagree...

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,...

The Google Books lawsuit proceeds apace. paidContent and CNet report that, in Google’s latest filing, the search giant is appealing the court’s decision to certify class action status for the Authors Guild. Google argues that the majority of writers actually approve of its scanning (58% according to a Google-commissioned survey), and that its scanning to provide search capability is a transformative fair use. Google suggests that even if the court rules it is not fair use in general, it will still have to decide on a case by case basis whether each individual book is or not. Is Google...

The inimitable Michael Geist has a comprehensive blog post which "pulls together the Supreme Court's own language on how to assess fair dealing." Geist points out that even before the current round of copyright bill attempts, the courts here already had protections for both content creators and for consumers, but insisted that any defense involving 'fair dealing' (what Americans refer to as 'fair use') be decided using a six-part analysis to determine whether the use is really 'fair.' The six-factor analysis includes: The purpose of the dealing The character of the dealing The amount of the dealing The nature of the work Available alternatives to the dealing Effect of the...

Personanondata has a look at a recent legal decision in Canada’s Supreme Court concerning “fair dealing” (what we call “fair use”) as it applied to music and educational material—similar to the recent Georgia University ruling in the US. One particular point the judge made is that it’s unrealistic to expect universities to purchase entire copies of textbooks to provide to students if they only needed a small portion of the entire work. He also suggested that claims of financial harm from professors photocopying textbooks was spurious, and that many other factors could affect publishers’ income to a greater...

PaidContent has a copy of Google’s motion for summary judgment, and a summary of what it says. Google makes the case that its scanning of all those copyrighted books qualifies as fair use, and cites numerous examples of beneficial outcomes that have come out of the availability of that information to be searched. It also insists that inclusion in the search has been beneficial, not harmful, to sales of the books it has scanned, and even well-known literary agencies like William Morris recognize that. The Authors Guild was expected to file its own motion later today, but I haven’t...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting look at Japanese jisui company BOOKSCAN and its American subsidiary 1DollarScan, via an interview with CEO Hiroshi Nakano. Jisui companies are the do-it-yourself e-book makers who will, for a fee, take customers’ paper books and scan them into e-books for them. This allows the customers to get rid of the bulky books and replace them with compact electrons—extremely important in space-cramped Japan. Both the Japanese and American companies charge rock bottom prices for scanning, and both have been highly successful—the Japanese branch more so than the American, but both have been doing pretty well....

I’m glad I paid extra for the upgrade to unlimited free popcorn refills. Techdirt and Ars Technica are reporting on the continuing saga of Righthaven’s “Schroedinger’s CEO” Steve Gibson and his attempt to hire more lawyers to continue litigating one of the cases the copyright troll infamously lost. The Techdirt piece largely covers Gibson’s tortured arguments that the court-appointed receiver, Lara Pearson, lacks the authority to fire him. The reasoning seems to boil down to a bunch of legalese about the nature of limited liability companies. Gibson insists he does have the right to hire additional lawyers to argue...

While this case is not about e-books directly, the precedent it sets could give an important boost to many instances of fair use, including those that are e-book related. One of the most common problems with “fair use” is that it is a defense, not a right. That means that you can be perfectly within fair use on some media project, but if a content owner objects, he gets to sue you, and you have to go through the costly motions of a trial that could bankrupt you even if you come out the winner. So when someone...

Fifty Shades of Grey certainly seems to be taking the publishing world by storm, catching imagination not so much for the content but for what it represents. On the Bookseller’s FutureBook blog, Agent Orange turns up his (or her?) nose at the reading public’s taste (or lack thereof) in making such a work popular, but adds: What is far more worrying for the business is how completely the Fifty Shades story encapsulates the perilous position the traditional elements of the business are in. This is a book that no agent would have thought to represent had...