Second Circuit Hears Google Books Case — This week, the 2nd Circuit heard arguments in the dispute between authors and Google over the search giant’s mass digitization program. While this specific dispute has been going on for nearly a decade, the dispute over this issue is at least half a century old. A draft bill for copyright revision in 1964 provided that a copyright owner’s exclusive right to copy included “the right to reproduce the work in visual copies, to make or duplicate sound recordings of it, to make a translation, adaptation, or any other derivative work from it, and to reproduce it in any form in the programming or operation of an information storage and retrieval system.” This language did not appear in the final bill, passed in 1976.
The Strand’s Stand: How It Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon — A fascinating look at the legendary used bookstore in Manhattan.
‘Investing in Music’ report shows record labels invest US$4.3 billion in A&R and marketing — The report shows the significant contributions the global recorded music industry makes to promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) uses copyright law as censorship canard again — “Sutton lists 9 instances in which content was removed for allegedly political reasons via a DMCA notice. Not to minimize any wrongdoing in these particular instances, but has Ms. Sutton bothered to examine the millions of legitimate removals that occur each week worldwide? In any enforcement system there exist errors and potential for abuse, but the the truth is that the volume of legit DMCA notices far outweighs illegitimate ones.”
Virginia Woolf Goes to the Movies — Originally published in 1926, a year before the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, was released, the esteemed author pens a prognostic look at the brand new medium. “Yet if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema.”