Our Continuing Fascination With Copyright

It’s hard to tell when we fell in love. Was it the marmot? Or the camel? The nuthatches, spiders, or horses? Or was it the fact that Tim O’Reilly publishes books with covers that make us happy*? O’Reilly is one of those pro-electronic publishing guys who talks the talk and walks the walk. We imagine him as tall and lean with floppy hair falling over his eyes. Do not send links to photos — without our fantasy life, we are nothing. O’Reilly discusses a few key points relating to piracy and the art of making entertainment — especially those works

All week long, we’ve been bringing you stories and glimpses into the wonderful world of the future. Which reminds us, not a single story on a flying cars has crossed our desk this year. What’s up with that? We really want our car to float high above traffic. We’ll work out those pesky, plaguing navigation problems later. Instead, we’ll bring you an insider’s look at the (legal) book scanning industry. Dark, dusty tomes. Windowless, airless compartments. Not the greatest of pay. Books that simply do not lend themselves to easy imagining. Ms. Ridolfo scanned her first book — an early

It turns out that intellectual property is the stuff that drives the American economic engine. Oh, man, we so have to stop typing sentences like that. They are painful on so many levels. NBC Universal went out and did a study on how much IP contributes to the economy. It turns out to be a number with a whole lot of zeroes. More than we can recall, so how ever many a trillion is, that’s what we’re talking about. Without the contributions of motion pictures, music, software, and the like, things would be bleak. We are assuming that books and

What with all the brouhaha over the notion of Google Print, it nearly went unnoticed that the actual service went live this week. Now is the time for friends and countrymen to actually check out the service; there is a rumor that facts help with the decision-making process. While we don’t subscribe to this notion, we understand that others enjoy having real information. So yes, the service is live. It’s cool. It requires a login for certain searches. You get limited results. You can’t grab text. You have links to purchase the book. You can read the cover copy, flip

Our issue with copyright extensions has always been the lack of quid pro quo: the public protects your right to exploit and profit from your work through laws and enforcement. In return for this service, you, the artist, give back to the public by allowing your work to enter the public domain after a reasonable period of time. The definition of reasonable is quite elastic, and as we’ve seen in recent years, subject to expansion to meet corporate needs. So the public is all quid pro while copyright holders aren’t doing the quo. The Eldred decision is a good example.