Randy Picker has a fascinating post on the Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago’s law school of the copyright status of scans (by Google, for example) of public domain works. Does the effort of digitizing the work qualify as enough original effort to create a new copyright?
300 years ago Saturday, the Statute of Anne created the first modern system of copyright.
In reaction to claims that copyright exists to protect creators because of the effort they’ve put into their work, Techdirt points us to a Supreme Court case that clearly says otherwise. History and precedent back it up.
Dan Cohen gave an interesting talk at the American Historical Association meeting recently, where he discussed the benefits Google brings to historical research, as well as some pointed criticisms.
For anyone using any kind of electronic reader — including a regular computer — this addition to Google Books may well prove quite useful: EPUB as a download format.
What does it mean to our culture that we have imposed the most draconian restrictions on the reuse of intellectual creations than at any other time?
The AP has begin trying to license content through a payment scheme. Some of the content — as recently demonstrated by James Grimmelmann “purchasing” a Thomas Jefferson quote — is in the public domain. Does the AP have the right to sell/license this public-domain content? What does it mean to be in the public domain?
California courts are turning over attorney work product to for-fee services like LexisNexis and Westlaw, which then resell them (or merely make them available?) to customers. Does this violate copyright law?
From thepublicdomain.org comes this interesting and revealing series of excerpts from the legislative history of the 1909 Copyright Act.
The Register and Slashdot have picked up a theme from a 2006 law review article by Jason Mazzone on “copyfraud,” extending the idea to explain a new incarnation of it emerging in relation to Google Books.
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