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Publishers abandon fight against Google book scanning. Five large publishers have made a separate peace with Google over the inclusion of their books in Google Books, announcing a settlement that resolves the seven-year-old litigation with the search giant. Google had been fighting a two-front war over its Google Books program. In addition to its dispute with the publishers, it is also defending a lawsuit by the Author's Guild, which is seeking to head a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the nation's authors.

Last year, a federal judge threw out a class-action settlement that would have resolved both lawsuits and given Google permission to scan and print thousands of out-of-print books. "It's been obvious for several years that the authors are going forward [with the lawsuit] and the publishers are uninterested," said James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at New York Law School. He said that after the class-action settlement was rejected, the publishers were ready to cut a private deal. Joyce Copyright Expires, Ending Grandson’s Reign of Terror. Happy New Year! Consider celebrating by staging a seasonal reading of “The Dead” in Dublin, which you can now do for free!

Yes, on January 1, 2012, all of James Joyce’s writings published during his lifetime entered the public domain in the EU, freeing up the characters, stories, and words for use by ordinary people. Though already available to Canadians and Australians, and partially available to Americans , public domain status for Joyce’s works in his home country of Ireland has a lot of people very excited. The new availability of Joyce’s writings is more important than one would expect for two reasons: Bloomsday, and Stephen Joyce. June 16, the day of the events in Joyce’s , is Bloomsday, when celebrations of Joyce occur around the world.

These celebrations are particularly enthusiastic in Dublin, where the novel is set, and they generally include public readings of . It Is Time To Stop Pretending To Endorse The Copyright Monopoly. There is a saying in the political discussion in Sweden: "Anything you say before but in a political statement doesn't count. " We've seen a lot of that practice in recent years with increasingly horrendous cultural monopoly laws. People in corporate and political suits alike are climbing on top of one another to be the most statesmanlike in stating "We are fully committed to the copyright monopoly, but these proposed enforcement laws are just nuts," worded in all the synonyms you can find in a thesaurus. Why? Why do people feel forced to phrase their views on policy like that?

If the enforcement laws are nuts, but still needed for the monopoly to be effective, why is the part before the "but" there -- where people say they support the copyright monopoly, but are firmly rejecting the laws needed keep it in effective existence for a few more years? For I believe that the copyright industry is actually right that these ridiculous laws are needed to sustain the copyright monopoly. About. Want to let people share and use your photographs, but not allow companies to sell them? Looking for access to course materials from the world’s top universities? Want to encourage readers to re-publish your blog posts, as long as they give you credit? Looking for songs that you can use and remix, royalty-free? If you answered yes to any of the questions above, then you should learn more about Creative Commons. Probably the quickest and easiest introduction to CC is to watch the following short video: What is Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that enables the sharing and use of creativity and knowledge through free legal tools. Our free, easy-to-use copyright licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give the public permission to share and use your creative work — on conditions of your choice. Creative Commons licenses are not an alternative to copyright.

What can Creative Commons do for me? Our mission Our vision Why CC? What we provide Where we’re going Volunteer. Welcome | Teaching Copyright. International Activists Launch New Website to Gather and Share Copyright Knowledge. San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other international copyright experts joined together today to launch Copyright Watch -- a public website created to centralize resources on national copyright laws at www.copyright-watch.org. "Copyright laws are changing across the world, and it's hard to keep track of these changes, even for those whose daily work is affected by them," said Teresa Hackett, Program Manager at eIFL.net. "A law that is passed in one nation can quickly be taken up by others, bilateral trade agreements, regional policy initiatives, or international treaties.

With Copyright Watch, people can learn about the similarities and differences in national copyright laws, and they can use that information to more easily spot patterns and emerging trends. " Copyright Watch is the first comprehensive and up-to-date online repository of national copyright laws. Copyright Watch: Unintended Consequences: Twelve Years under the DMCA. March 2010 This document collects reported cases where the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA have been invoked not against pirates, but against consumers, scientists, and legitimate competitors. It will be updated from time to time as additional cases come to light.

Previous versions remain available. Executive Summary Since they were enacted in 1998, the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA"), codified in section 1201 of the Copyright Act, have not been used as Congress envisioned. Congress meant to stop copyright infringers from defeating anti-piracy protections added to copyrighted works and to ban the "black box" devices intended for that purpose.

In practice, the anti-circumvention provisions have been used to stifle a wide array of legitimate activities, rather than to stop copyright infringement. The DMCA Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research. DMCA Legislative Background Chilling Free Expression and Scientific Research. Richard Prince Lawsuit Focuses on Limits of Appropriation. Theft or fair use? A collection of pieces by artists who appropriate images created by others. A key to the works above is available here. In March a federal district court judge in Manhattan ruled that Mr. Prince — whose career was built on appropriating imagery created by others — broke the law by taking photographs from a book about Rastafarians and using them without permission to create the collages and a series of paintings based on them, which quickly sold for serious money even by today’s gilded art-world standards: almost $2.5 million for one of the works.

(“Wow — yeah,” Mr. Prince said when a lawyer asked him under oath in the district court case if that figure was correct.) The decision, by Judge Deborah A. In many ways the art world is a latecomer to the kinds of copyright tensions that have already played out in fields like music and movies, where extensive systems of policing, permission and licensing have evolved.

Mr.