blog.rightreading.com

The reader, Bradley LaShawn Fowler, is suing two Bible publishers (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan), alleging that the translators erroneously rendered a passage resulting in a false suggestion that it condemns homosexuality.
At issue is I Corinithians 6:9, and whether two Greek terms allude to homosexuality or prostitution or something else. (The King James version of the [...]

The law firm of Bromberg and Sunstein has an unusually handy flow chart of U.S. copyright duration on their website.
Speaking of copyright, the flow chart bears a copyright notice. But I think I’m okay since the image below is too small to be usable. Click through to the original.

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If you will glance down at the footer on this page (or follow the “about” or “policies” links) you will see that I have replaced my copyright notices with creative commons ones. I’m hardly a leader in this — as a guy who has worked in book publishing for many years I have had the [...]

Ellen M. Kozak has written a nice summary at Wisconsin Lawyer about “Spotting the Publishing Scam.” You can read the full post there, but I think it’s worth summarizing the main points:

Real publishers don’t make offers overnight. A publisher who offers an agreement a couple days after the ms. arrives is pulling a scam.
A scam [...]

Midnight at the end of December 31 marked the passing of countless works into public domain. Copyright laws vary by country around the world. Most countries observe passage into public domain at death of the creator plus fifty years. In other words, the works of authors and artists who died in or before 1957 are [...]

That’s what Stanford professor Larry Lessig says in this lecture (it takes about 19 minutes and it’s well worth watching the whole thing — but in any case be sure not to miss the mash-up about 9:30 in). Dan Blank summarizes:
He concludes that copyright laws remain antiquated with regards to how our kids are using [...]

There’s a fellow named Kevin Harris who thinks he can copyright a list of comments of Albert Einstein. Gosh, do you think the Einstein estate will have to go to this guy from now on to get permission to use the quotes?

You don’t want this sad story to be yours.

Rufus Pollock, a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Cambridge, has done a calculation that he says shows the optimum term of copyright is 14 years. He will present his paper, entitled Forever Minus a Day? Some Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright, at the 2007 SERCI Congress in Berlin this week.
Links:

announcement on [...]

Below is part one of the Disneyfied copyright video.
I previously linked to part two — which proves the information must be reliable.

Disney characters recite the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use.

By Condoleezza Rice

Okay, we know books published in the U.S. before 1923 are probably in public domain. And the copyright of books published after 1963 was automatically renewed. But books published in the forty years between those two dates might or might not be in public domain, depending on whether the copyright holder renewed the copyright.
Books published [...]

In D-Lib magazine David Bearman provides an abstract of the argument Jean-Noël Jeanneney (President of the Bibliothèque nationale de France) presents in his Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: A View from Europe (University of Chicago Press, October 2006). Jeanneney argues:

Google’s selection skews “the world’s knowledge” toward English-language texts, especially those from the U.S. [...]

On a worldwide web where anybody can post anything any time (unless they live in a place like China, but that’s a subject for another post), how can we identify original content? How much does proper attribution matter?
There’s a whole parasitic industry of taking other people’s content and manipulating it to draw hits and bring [...]