Michael Helft writes in the NYTimes to update the status of the Google book scanning project. The longer it has been pending, the more the objections, now in the hundreds, and the greater the messiness of any settlement link here.

The two great public goals of the settlement are being largely forgotten in the squabble over who gets what from the deal. Those goals are obvious--making so many books searchable on line and available to all at a reasonable price.

The orphan-books issue is a legalism, as they have been of no interest to the owners for years, not even enough for them to come forth and assert a claim. Why owners ever have any interest in orphan works remains a mystery; they are nothing more than abandoned books and properly public property.

In this respect, the proposed settlement gives a wide group a vested interest in the money to be generated by the settlement, for which they have done nothing.

The settlement also creates an effective monopoly on sale of the books, not as a matter of law but as the practical outcome since Google has already paid the sunk costs of scanning the books and putting them on line.

As was noted here in August, Canadians were offered a chance to express their wishes for the next version of the Copyright Act of Canada. The volume of submissions (estimated to be over 8,000) may have caught the Federal Government off guard; the consultation period is now closed, but many submissions have not yet been posted.

My favorite might well be the remarks of David Allsebrook, submitted August 10, who observed that the protection of copyright should require adherence to the prevailing legal limitations of copyright - those who deny the public legitimate access to copyrighted materials through "restrictive license terms, technical protection means, or abuse through collective administration," should have the their entire protection revoked!

I am less enthusiastic about the request from the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, for a special exception so that students and faculty may utilize publicly available works from the Internet (as discussed in the Gatineau roundtable of July 29). To give the Association the benefit of the doubt, I must say that Canadian education operates under tightly constrained and cumbersome educational exceptions to copyright. That said, it's a little hard to overlook the fact that this request is being made in the name of works that are "publicly available." The Association is conceding infringement where none has happened, which raises concerns of liability to all those who will not be sheltered within an educational institution.

Moreover, once published, all material is available for the good-faith productive uses that are specified under fair dealing (private study, research, criticism, review, and news reporting) provided that the conditions of fair dealing are met (citation, appropriateness of use, etc.) Unlike fair use, fair dealing is this closed set of activities. However, in 2004, a unanimous Canadian Supreme Court described fair dealing as an integral part of copyright law, stated that it should be interpreted liberally, and offered considerable guidance regarding how to use fair dealing.

One advocate of the Association's proposal informed me that other jurisdictions are considering similar schemes. But, there was no mention of which jurisdictions. If anyone has information to share, please do.

More information on the Association's proposal can be found in my submission.

Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge has a really persuasive interview with cartoonist/short firm maker Nina Paley on the costs of making an independent firm on songs (with cartoons added) ostensibly out of copyright but for many purposes, still in link here. It is 20 minutes long, so be prepared to pay attention. But it really is riveting to see all she had to go through and the costs, in money and time. If you think copyright is great, this should persuade you that it is a curse, a blight on creativity, and a robbery of the public. She is a great respondent.

Oh Boy. You can see and hear it here: link here

Does it scare you or make you mad?

Interesting post by the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow: Homemade Braille edition of Little Brother from Detroit public school teacher, in which he notes that he was sent a Braille copy of his young adult novel Little Brother, by a teacher of visually impaired students in Detroit. She had run off a Braille copies using her school's Braille embosser to supply to her students. The teacher noted, "What I could not enclose is the gratitude from my Braille reading students. For various reasons, most books in Braille are aimed at younger children. My students are all between the ages of 12 and 15 and have no real interest in reading a Kindergarten level book. I was finally able to give them something interesting, compelling, and, most importantly at their grade level."

What I was especially interested in was how Doctorow's use of the Creative Commons license contributed to this:

Patricia notes that she was able to do this only because the text of the novel is available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download (though US copyright law grants her the right to prepare a Braille edition of any book, the cost of doing so from a traditional printed book is prohibitive, and converting from a DRM-crippled ebook is technically difficult).

[StephanKinsella.com cross-post]

As reported here:

AP: Speaking of technology, how has the band been affected by the digital turn the music industry's taken?

Cray: Not too many people get the million-selling plaques anymore and all that stuff like that. And a lot of bands survived just on selling records and didn't think about touring so much. And a lot of bands based their whole careers on just getting that one hit. But it has affected a band such as ours, but only in a different way. I mean, it would nice to have had the same kind of sales more recently as we had in the past, but we started playing in bars and as long as it's fun, we'll continue to do so.

[SK cross-post]

I was talking with Kevin Carson about the problems with the "contractual" model of IP "that so many people grab at in desperation" (for more on this see here and here). Carson said:

As Cory Doctorow put it, a computer is a machine for copying bits. If you put a cultural artifact into bits, it's going to get copied. And anybody whose business model depends on stopping people from copying bits is f*cked, plain and simple. As horrifyingly accurate a prediction as Stallman's "Right to Read" is of the copyfascists ideal world, I think it's about as plausible a threat as Khrushchev's plan to catch up with the West by 1970.

See A very long talk with Cory Doctorow, part 1; also Cory Doctorow, Microsoft Research DRM talk and Copying Is What Bits Are For.

[SK crosspost]

Disney to buy Marvel Comics for $4B. Disney "will acquire ownership more than 5,000 Marvel characters." The most popular ones, such as Spider-Man (who used to be my favorite until he swooned over Obama, revealing his fascist mindset), are not that old--Spider-Man was created in 1962. One can only imagine the Disney lobbying that we can expect when Spider-Man's term nears expiration...

[SK cross-post]

The long arm of Google is now reaching out to Europe to get changes in the treatment of out-of-print and orphan books in connection with its plan to digitize all books and sell them link here. The European Commission is proposing draft rules to make access easier and a single digital copyright to cover all of the EU rather than many, each with one of the member states. A hearing will be held next month in Brussels on Google's efforts to digitize major collections of books and the company's proposed settlement with book publishers in the United States. Public comment will be open until mid-November. So far, the proposal sounds like that in the United States, to create registries of orphan and out of print works so that companies like Google could reproduce works contained in the registry in exchange for paying money to a central authority that would redistribute the proceeds.

The news article implies that the European commissioner views the US settlement favorably. That would make the work of dissenters from the US deal more difficult. Nothing in the news story suggests that Google's lock on the sale of the digitized copies of books would be diminished so the problem of getting competition remains.

The problem of unauthorized book sequels have been with us since the beginning of copyright. Charles McGrath brings us up to date on it link here. By his account, if the originator doesn't object, the sequel writer can get away with it. If not, he can be made to pay or be banned completely. The problem seems to be showing that the sequel is transformative. That obviously is in the eye of the beholder and judges don't seem to be very sympathetic and may not recognize the point. It is clear that the sequel writer wants to capitalize on the popularity of the original but is also paying a form of homage and sends readers back to the original. Unfortunately, author ego gets heavily engaged and appears to prevail in the courts.

It would be hard to write a clarification of copyright that might serve the public interest as well as the originator's. To me it seems that the possible net harm of a sequel, even a bad one, is so small as to warrant allowing them all.

It would be a good move, short of drastically shortening the validity of copyright or abolishing it entirely.