Purchasing books on the Kindle has always struck me as a bit of a Faustian bargain: once you enter the Kindle ecosystem and purchase some books, those books are forever locked to Amazon’s e-reader. Now Amazon has made it easier for small-scale publishers and authors to opt-out.
Techdirt discusses why you shouldn’t be concerned if someone “steals” your work and sells it, noting that “it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
As I noted a few days ago, there has been increasing attention to the idea of authors moving away from traditional publishers when it comes to e-books. Here’s more from the New York Times about one author doing just that:
Ever since electronic books emerged as a major growth market, New York’s largest publishing houses have [...]
The cloud consists of data and services that live on someone else’s servers. Although the term itself is new(ish), the basic idea is embodied by traditional legal research services like LexisNexis and Westlaw — data lives on someone else’s servers, not your own. Thus, someone else controls the data, not you. And someone else can delete or modify the data, and you’d never know…
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Random House now disabling text-to-speech function of Kindle e-books:
Random House has thrown the dreaded “kill switch” on about 40 of its titles, including authors such as Toni Morrison.
Cory Doctorow adds some background:
Back in February, the Authors Guild, a lobby group representing less than 10,000 writers, argued that the Kindle’s ability [...]
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While this sounds like a headline ripped from a newspaper of today, it actually comes from an 1897 article in the New York Times. Enterprising Canadians were selling the sheet music of popular songs via mail to Americans for 5 – 10 cents, undercutting the 20 – 50 cents charged by copyright owners:
“Canadian [...]
Quite honestly, I had never heard of Kelsen before. Perhaps this is unsurprising, considering the almost complete lack of theory in the law school curriculum. I also never encountered him in my studies of history, philosophy or literary theory, but then again, I’m hardly a specialist in such matters. So I found the following discourse [...]
I wondered previously why critical theory approaches (like the much-criticized Critical Legal Studies) haven’t had much of an impact on U.S. law or legal analysis.
Maybe “litcrit” has relied too much on the fabled “Death of the Author” (even without realizing it) when trying to analyze case law. If your “author” keeps popping back up to [...]
The “Introductory Guide to Critical Theory” (which I extract from and link to below, along with other useful reference sites) provides an excellent basic introduction to some of the main points of contemporary critical theory (which I encountered as part of historical, literary and “textual” studies). It has amazed me so far in law school [...]
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