The Georgia State 10 percent Copying Rule….What if 10 Libraries from 10 different library systems each copy one chapter of a 10 chapter textbook and make it available on the Internet at the same time?
Make no mistake about your interpretation of the stakes involved in the Georgia State decision. College libraries are trying, without explicitly declaring, to constructively destroy the textbook industry that no longer ought to be entitled to copyright protection granted in this country a long long time ago to offset the cost of paper print. There is no moral highground or low ground at 9.9 percent or 10.1 percent.
“Instead, the court fashioned its own quantitative test. For books of nine or fewer chapters, the court set a threshold of 10% of the total page count; for books of ten chapters or more, the threshold was a single complete chapter. (The chapter-based rule creates an odd incentive for publishers to create books with a surfeit of tiny chapters.) Copying of any amount under this threshold, the court held, would be treated as “decidedly small.” In practical terms, this ended up being a one-sided bright-line rule: copying of less than 10% or one chapter always ended in a fair use win for Georgia State.”
The fate of an estimated 25 million English language orphan works hangs in the balance as Great Britian awaits the report of Professor Ian Hargraeves.
BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz writes that much of the support for a not-for-profit licensing system comes from the copyright enforcing publishing world itself, which now realizes the profit potential of digitaliation of archives.
We hope that the holders of these archive materials take action, licensing statutes in place or otherwise, before the certain and ongoing deterioration of physical works causes irreperable harm to our cultural history.
“Ian Sigalow, a partner at Greycroft Partners LLC, talks with Bloomberg Law’s Spencer Mazyck about legal challenges confronting technology start-ups and model venture capital financing documents.”
Skeptical about efficacy of spending money on business process patents.
We think, of course, that Google has nailed the coffin shut on the Oracle copyright infringment claim with respect to its API: “Computer programming languages are not copyrightable, and neither are Oracle’s APIs. Oracle accuses Google of infringement for doing what the Oracle API specifications describe. That is a classic attempt to improperly assert copyright [...]
As the Authors Guild pursues here in New York its injunctive relief copyright case against the Hathitrust Orphan Works project, it sues, among others, Hathitrust, The Regents Of The University Of Michigan, The Regents of the University of California, The Board Of Regents Of The University Of Wisconsin System, The Trustees Of Indiana University, and [...]
Bloomberg News, April 16, 2012: “The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider whether discount retailers violate copyright laws by selling tens of billions of dollars in “gray market” products after buying them overseas at a reduced price.” Massive opposition to the Wiley case has been filed by the major United States discount superstores, including Walmart, [...]
The statistics and anecdotal evidence are overwhelming. Easy duplication and sharing have dramatically driven up revenues and creativity despite the claims of legacy media. Background for this project. Share on Facebook
Rebecca Blain and TechDirt force us to ask the question of whether there are really attorneys practicing law who formulate such draconian threats about what we cannot do with our eBook files: “Your non-refundable purchase of this e-book allows you to only ONE LEGAL copy for your personal reading on your own personal computer or [...]
Yes, at $150,000 per song, that is 8 billion dollars on my new digital device. Yes, it is hard defending a copyright claim and not losing one’s Jesuit trained mind. Share on Facebook
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