Photo by author. This week the Supreme Court declined to consider the Authors Guild v Google case, which lets stand the Second Circuit Court ruling that Google’s use of scanned published works for its search tool Google Books constitutes a fair use. Various pundits and advocates have hailed this as a victory for the fair use principle. In fact, I ...
In Part I of this essay, I responded to a post written by Parker Higgins for Techdirt, criticizing him for trying to pack a big, unexamined conclusion into a small article. Asserting, as Techdirtians are want to do, that copyright is the omnipresent saboteur in our otherwise grand, digital machine, Higgins blames copyright’s complexity and length of terms for causing ...
Given the way information tends to distort at lighting speed these days—particularly through the filter of tech v copyright referenced in my last post—I’m not surprised to read articles like this one by Ellen Duffer writing for Forbes on a thesis proposing reasons why Google Books is “good for publishers.” And it’s not that everything she says is incorrect so ...
Recently, on the CCIA’s Project DISCO blog, Jonathan Band wrote a post that could make a person spit out the ol’ ball gag, if you know what I mean. He tells readers that the best-selling, S&M trilogy Fifty Shades of Grey, with film adaptation opening this weekend, exists thanks to the principle of fair use, a component of U.S. copyright law. While one must submit ...
I had to share this article by New York theater critic David Cote because it really is an indictment of digital-age jitteriness screwing up culture and literacy instead of broadening same as was promised. It’s not really surprising that a contemporary theater audience doesn’t know that a play is not typically an interactive experience, and yet it is still a little surprising. Cote’s ...
