Intellectual Property

About two minutes of googling turned up a professor emeritus of one of the HathiTrust “orphan works” candidates. He lives in suburban Maryland. His second book sold a reported one million copies, and he’s listed in IMDb (two of his books were turned into movies: one starred Elvis Presley, the other Warren Beatty). He has a literary agent, and he signed an e-book contract earlier this month.

No, we’re not making this up.

Full blog post

Aaron Swartz, 24, was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

A letter to Cory Doctorow asking him to allow purchasers of his ebooks to OWN them.

Pirate Central is at the ereads.com website.

Some recent Pirate Central posts:

We have seen the pirates and they are us

Would you work 3000 hours for nothing? This pirated artist did.

When pornsters attack file swappers, watch out

The Supreme Court this week heard oral arguments in a copyright case that publishers say holds major implications for their businesses—even though the case doesn’t involve books. In Costco Wholesale Corporation v. Omega, S.A, the court will decide whether retail giant Costco can re-sell copyright-protected, foreign-made Omega wristwatches exclusively licensed for sale abroad in the U.S. market. But wristwatches aside, the copyright case holds larger implications for the publishing industry, as well as for libraries and booksellers, as it could also apply to the sale and importation of foreign-made editions.

The conflict began after Costco purchased Omega watches from third parties overseas which had legally acquired the watches from licensed Omega dealers. Costco then imported and sold the foreign-made watches in the U.S. at a steep discount, exploiting the foreign price differential. Omega watches, however, are subject to copyright, and after authorized Omega dealers in the U.S. complained about Costco’s price-cutting tactics, Omega sued to enjoin Costco from selling the foreign watches.

Full article at Publisher's Weekly

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Piece on NPR about the book Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

Excerpt: Some people believe that not only are current copyright laws too stringent, but that the assumptions the current laws are based on are artificial, illogical and outdated.

Among them is Lewis Hyde, a professor of art and politics who has studied these issues for years. In his new book Common As Air, Hyde says he's suspicious of the concept of "intellectual property" to begin with, calling it "historically strange." Hyde backs it up with an impressive amount of research; he spends a significant amount of time reflecting on the Founding Fathers, who came up with America's initial copyright laws.

Hyde is a contrarian, but he's not a scorched-earth opponent of all copyright laws.

Full story here

It’s no longer illegal under the DMCA to jailbreak your iPhone or bypass a DVD’s CSS in order to obtain fair use footage for educational purposes or criticism. These are the new rules that were handed down moments ago by the U.S. Copyright Office. This is really big. Like, really big.

[Full article at TechCrunch]

David Pogue has an interesting opinion piece in the New York Times regarding amateur scanning and archiving of sheet music on the internet...which, naturally, brings up copyright issues. It also touches on whether or not the past generations of information professionals have done as good a job as they should have in preserving non-book materials.