From the monthly archives: January 2008

In search of a problem?

On January 31, 2008 By

I have written before about the PRO IP bill introduced in Congress in December of 2007; its primary purpose seems to be to dramatically increase the amount of statutory damages available to a copyright owner whose work is infringed. The specific way this is accomplished — by allowing a separate recovery of statutory damages [...]

Continue Reading →

What is the Creative Commons? (weekly widget)

On January 24, 2008 By

Creative Commons is an organization that was founded to help authors and creators who are interested in sharing their work avoid the very restrictive rules of copyright, and their subsequent chilling effect on users. The licenses available through Creative Commons allow authors and creators to attach a recognizable legal document to their work, especially [...]

Continue Reading →

How do licenses work? (weekly widget)

On January 17, 2008 By

Often a copyright owner (or the owner of any other kind of right) does not want to give her rights away, but does want to allow some people to use the subject of the rights in some way. This permission to use the subject of an exclusive right without liability is called a license. [...]

Continue Reading →

Caveat emptor!

On January 15, 2008 By

This posting on the NY Times Technology blog – “On eBay, Some Profit by Selling What’s Free” – caught my eye over the holidays because it recounts a situation very similar to one in which we have found ourselves at my university. The post describes the experience of purchasing an old film from [...]

Continue Reading →

But it is just so easy!

On January 11, 2008 By

The ease with which we can copy and use stuff found on the Internet, particularly photographs and other images, leads to some delicious ironies when some of the major corporate interests that rail against file-sharing are caught infringing other peoples’ copyrights. The Washington Post published an interesting story on Wednesday that looked at some [...]

Continue Reading →

How is copyright transferred? (weekly widget)

On January 10, 2008 By

Copyright, like most other “property” rights, can be sold, inherited through a will, given away or otherwise passed to other people (or corporate bodies). Since copyright is really a bundle of rights – reproduction, distribution, public performance, etc. – it can also be divided up and the different pieces transferred to different people under [...]

Continue Reading →

Still waiting

On January 7, 2008 By

It seems we have been waiting for years for the e-book to “arrive.” The promise of having a whole library in a hand-held device has been made for a long time, but the technology has seldom lived up to expectation. The early readers were awkward to use and difficult to read. The latest generation [...]

Continue Reading →

Without certainty, how does fair use help? (weekly widget)

On January 4, 2008 By

Congress recognized that fair use is hard to apply, since one is only certain that a use was fair after a judge decides that it was. So Congress added a provision to encourage teachers and librarians to use fair use where it reasonably can apply. Section 504(c)(2) of the copyright law, part of the section [...]

Continue Reading →

Changing the economics of scholarly publishing

On January 2, 2008 By

Inside Higher Ed recently published an article about a “New Collaboration for Scholarly Publishing” that describes how five university presses hope to alter the discouraging economic situation for publishing scholarly books. NYU, Fordham, Temple, Rutgers and UVA presses are collaborating to create a joint system for copy editing, design, layout and typesetting [...]

Continue Reading →