The estate of fantasy writer J.R.R Tolkien has reached a settlement with the studio behind the "Lord of the Rings" movies after alleging it had not received "even one penny" of royalties from the trilogy of money-spinning films, officials said Tuesday.
Submitted by Bibliofuture on September 4, 2009 - 10:32pm
The very public court case between Liskula Cohen and Rosemary Port seemed absurd at first, in part because it rested on the definition of the word "skank." But along the way, it set a legal precedent in New York about what constitutes defamation online. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Matt Zimmerman explains.
An appeals court in New York City has heard arguments on whether a Swedish author can publish a new book in America that was once promoted as a sequel to J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye." One of the appeals court judges, Guido Calabresi, indicated he had read the new book, titled "60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye."
He referred to it as a "rather dismal piece of work."
Submitted by Bibliofuture on September 3, 2009 - 10:30am
But in practice, online anonymity is seeping away. A growing body of legal decisions is making it easier for lawyers to use legal proceedings to unmask people who write anonymous blogs or make anonymous comments on public Web sites.
"You can claim anonymity, but there is a range of things that a judge will use to determine whether you have used your anonymity responsibly," says Judith Donath, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Amazon's expected objection to the Google Books Settlement landed in court yesterday and suggests the deal is "arguably unlawful."
"[I]t constitutes price fixing by horizontal competitors—namely, the Rightsholders, who are agreeing collectively on a mechanism for setting the highest possible prices to be charged for their works," argues the 49-page document, which was filed four days ahead of the September 4 deadline for written comments.
Amazon is part of the Microsoft-Yahoo-Internet Archive coalition, which is collaborating on preparing objections to the settlement. The coalition, called the Open Book Alliance, will be filing its own objection this week, while some individual parties, like Amazon, are also filing their own briefs. MediaBistro reports.
An Internet radio company has filed a straight-on challenge to the constitutionality of the Copyright Royalty Board, the three-member panel that determines the rates companies pay for statutory copyright licenses.
In a complaint filed yesterday at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Live365, an Internet radio aggregator, argued that the royalty board violates the Constitution’s appointments clause, because its members are selected by the Librarian of Congress. The suit argues that because of their significant authority, these non-Article III judges are “Principal Officers of the United States” who must be selected by the president.
FYI, our current Librarian of Congress is James Billington, who was appointed by President Reagan (way back) in 1987.
There is currently speculation about the possiblity of a new LoC being appointed...see this story from Library Journal.
Interesting story with significant implications from Legal Times.
Submitted by Bibliofuture on August 28, 2009 - 3:35pm
Mansfield librarian has refiled a lawsuit that alleges three faculty members defamed him during a 2006 dispute over a required reading list for freshmen.
Scott A. Savage is suing Norman W. Jones, Hannibal Hamlin and Gary Kennedy in Richland County Common Pleas Court. Savage is seeking $25,000 in compensatory damages and $25,000 in punitive damages from each of the three faculty members.
Savage, who characterizes himself as a devout Christian and member of the Religious Society of Friends, sought to have several conservative book titles included on the reading list. He claims faculty members maliciously attacked his character and damaged his reputation with e-mails and statements during spring 2006 faculty meetings.
Interesting question from Karen Coyle: The question surrounding the settlement is: are authors (as defined by the Author's Guild) served by the Google/AAP settlement -- yes or no? The bigger question, What is the future of the book in our civilization? is not on the table. Yet, in the end, that may be the question that is answered by this settlement, whether that outcome serves authors or not.
Former President George W. Bush had his heart set on an expansive Presidential Library, but his requirements have been harder to achieve than he thought. No eminent domain for the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
A deal that was supposed to end a long-running lawsuit against SMU – and smooth the path for George W. Bush's presidential library – has fallen apart amid charges that both sides broke the terms of a confidential agreement. Report from the Dallas News.
Last month, Southern Methodist University and two former condominium owners announced that they had settled the bitter four-year fight over who is the rightful owner of land now slated for the grounds of the Bush library.
The lawsuit has become increasingly hard-fought since President George W. Bush left office in January and returned to Texas.
Earlier this year, Hoffman ruled that Bush would have to give a deposition in the case. The condo owners said they wanted a chance to ask Bush about meetings with SMU officials who discussed putting the library on the condo site before it owned the land; (the condos have since been demolished). An appellate court reversed Hoffman's order, and the condo owners appealed the matter to the Texas Supreme Court.
A blogger stripped of her anonymity by the US courts has said she plans to sue Google for handing over her real identity.
Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old fashion student from New York, has said she will file a $15m (£9m) lawsuit against the internet giant after it complied with an order from a US court to reveal that she was behind the vitriolic "Skanks in NYC" blog.
The case erupted last week after the Manhattan Supreme Court ruled that Google must hand over the identity of the writer, who had targeted 36-year-old model Liskula Cohen online and called her a "psychotic, lying, whoring... skank".
Cohen had filed a lawsuit demanding that the writer's identity be revealed, an argument that judge Joan Madden agreed with. Guardian UK , Salon, New York Post report.
Submitted by Bibliofuture on August 9, 2009 - 11:28pm
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments on September 3 to help decide whether an injunction barring publication of Swedish author Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye constitutes an “impermissible prior restrain and an unwarranted extension” of copyright protection. Lawyers for author J.D. Salinger claim 60 Years is an “unauthorized sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye. A number of high profile organizations, including major media companies like the New York Times, the Associated Press, Gannett, and Tribune, as well as librarians, free speech advocates, and legal scholars, have filed amicus briefs supporting Colting, urging the Appeals Court overturn Judge Deborah Batts’ injunction barring U.S. publication, asserting that Batts erred by not allowing the case to proceed to a full trial.
The Associated Press -- which thinks you owe it a license fee if you quote more than four words from one of its articles -- doesn't even care if the words actually came from its article. They'll charge you anyway, even if you're quoting from the public domain.
I picked a random AP article and went to their "reuse options" site. Then, when they asked what I wanted to quote, I punched in Thomas Jefferson's famous argument against copyright. Their license fee: $12 for an educational 26-word quote. FROM THE PUBLIC FREAKING DOMAIN, and obviously, obviously not from the AP article. But the AP is too busy trying to squeeze the last few cents out of a dying business model to care about little things like free speech or the law.
Full Paper [PDF]: The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers
would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the ‘open access’ movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.
The British Library made public yesterday a 30,000-word memoir in which Anthony Blunt, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th-century art historians, and curator of the Queen's art collection, described spying for the Soviet Union, beginning in the mid-1930s, as “the biggest mistake of my life.”
The NY Times reports on the unsealing of the memoir after twenty five years. Blunt intended it as a testament to family and friends, and it was given to the British Library in 1984 by the executor of Blunt’s will, John Golding, on the condition that it be kept secret for 25 years. Frances Harris, the library’s head of modern historic manuscripts, told the BBC on Thursday that its existence was so closely guarded that even she had not read it until recently.
The memoir’s tone of regret for the price Blunt paid personally for betraying his country, coupled with the absence of any apology to those who suffered as a result of his actions, including secret agents working for Britain whose identities he passed to the Russians during World War II, contributed to harsh criticism of the document on Thursday from British historians and commentators.
James Boyle has been rereading the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act. He has come to the conclusion that 100 years ago we were smarter about copyright, about disruptive technologies, about intellectual property, monopolies and network effects than we are today. At least, the legislative hearings were much smarter. The hearings he's looking at took place in 1906 — thanks to the wonder of Google books you can read them yourself, if you are really nerdy.
Submitted by Bibliofuture on July 16, 2009 - 11:34am
The public domain is the greatest resource in human history: eventually all knowledge will become part of it. Its riches serve all mankind, but it faces a new threat. Vast libraries of public domain works are being plundered by claims of "copyright". It's called copyfraud - and we'll discover how large corporations like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon have structured their businesses to assist it and profit from it.
A 35-year-old Southeast Washington woman was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in federal prison for using the purloined identities of Library of Congress employees to purchases nearly $40,000 in goods.
Federal prosecutors said Labiska Gibbs enlisted a relative, a Library of Congress worker, to access an internal database and give her the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of at least 10 employees, prosecutors said. Gibbs used that information to open credit accounts at retailers, including Target and Victoria's Secret. In court papers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn S. Leon said Gibbs made a living selling gift cards she fraudulently purchased.
Gibbs's second cousin, William Sinclair Jr., 27 (who worked in HR at the LOC), was sentenced to three years of probation for his role in the scam. Prosecutors said Gibbs approached Sinclair and that he did not receive any money for his participation.
Amazon.com had better think up a better business model than cheating Uncle Sam and other nationalities out of their fair share of sales taxes.
Wall Street Journal reports: TOKYO (Dow Jones)--The Tokyo Regional Taxation Bureau told Amazon.com Inc.'s (AMZN) affiliated company Amazon.com International Sales to pay back taxes of $119 million, the Asahi Shimbun reported in its Sunday morning edition.
Amazon's Japanese affiliates, called Amazon Japan and Amazon Japan Logistics, are responsible for sales and logistics operations in Japan while Japanese customers make contracts of purchasing products with Amazon's affiliates in the U.S. Therefore those U.S. companies booked sales in the U.S. from their business in Japan.
And in the U.S., Hawaii has gotten the pink slip from Amazon (in addition to Rhode Island and North Carolina): Market Watch (via WSJ) reports: Amazon.com is ending relationships with its marketing affiliates in Hawaii to avoid collecting sales tax.
Submitted by Bibliofuture on July 2, 2009 - 11:54am
The morning after federal Judge Deborah Batts ruled that a Swedish author could not publish the follow-up to "The Catcher in the Rye," the book's distributor vowed to appeal.
AP: The Obama administration is not fighting a nearly $500,000 judgment for a Library of Congress hiree (Diane, formerly David Schroer) who lost the job while undergoing a gender change from a man to a woman.
The Justice Department let the deadline to appeal the decision pass Tuesday, a day after President Barack Obama hosted gay supporters at the White House and promised to be their "champion." Some activists have complained he has not led on their causes, including ending the ban on gays in the military.
The Library of Congress and President George W. Bush's Justice Department had argued unsuccessfully that discrimination because of transsexuality was not illegal sex discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.
Diane Schroer, a retired Army Special Forces commander from Alexandria, Va., had been offered a job at the Library of Congress when he was a man, David Schroer. The job was rescinded the day after Schroer told a library official he was going to have an operation to become a woman.
Previous LISNews reports on the case: here, here, and here.
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