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Allyson McCabe talks with Matt Sullivan, founder of Light in the Attic Records, about how he’s preserved the label’s commitment to great music while also meeting the demands of a changing, and often challenging, market.
...moreA new copyright lawsuit has been initiated against Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson for their single “Uptown Funk.” Collage, a funk band out of Minneapolis, alleges that the hit rips the instrumentals of their 1983 song “Young Girls”: Upon information and belief, many of the main instrumental attributes and themes of “Uptown Funk” are deliberately and clearly […]
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John Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
...moreA long list of known and respected musicians from a wide variety of genres have signed a petition against the systemic enabling of illegal streaming provided by entities such as YouTube and Google. The petition urges Congress to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects companies that host user sharing from being held accountable […]
...moreAxl Rose has issued Google a takedown notice regarding the “Fat Axl” meme, which uses a shot of the singer performing with Guns N’ Roses in 2010. The notice is operating on the grounds that Guns N’ Roses owns the copyright to all photos taken at the band’s performances, according to a waiver all photographers must sign […]
...moreSelf-publishing has never been easier, and that means plagiarism has never been easier. Thieves are using self-publishing services like Amazon to republish back catalog or out-of-print books to sell for a profit. In some case these “authors” change minor things like character names, but not always. The thieves are able to sell titles on Amazon for […]
...moreWorld Intellectual Property Day, the greatest of all spring holidays, was this Tuesday, April 26th. In honor of the holiday, the UK’s Intellectual Property Minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe made a statement calling for an update in the legal concept, Billboard reports: The process of digitization has transformed the world around us at a furious pace. It […]
...moreThe fight against Google’s digital library continues, and this time the effort has support from big-name authors like Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Malcolm Gladwell, Peter Carey, and J. M. Coetzee. The case against Google making millions of books—many of them still under copyright protection—searchable online without paying for any licenses to do so goes […]
...moreThe question of copyright infringement in Pharell Williams’s and Robin Thicke’s song “Blurred Lines” has been raised again, following an appeal that the pair filed this Monday against the March decision that ruled against the use of Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” in the song’s instrumentals. Vulture presented a breakdown of the reasons why some […]
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Rick Moody about his new book Hotels of North America, unreliable narrators, hotel porn, how titles are uncopyrightable, and Internet comment sections.
...moreFor the New York Times, Doreen Carvajal reports that in order to extend the copyright of Anne Frank’s diary to 2050 in Europe, the Swiss foundation that holds the book’s copyright is crediting Anne Frank’s father as a legal co-author for the work. The move has met opposition, as some argue that the best “protection” for […]
...moreSeveral western authors have had their names pirated by a Russian publisher that prints books about Vladimir Putin, reports the Guardian. The journalists, analysts, and authors did not write the books nor did they know about their publication. The Russian language books were published by Algoritm, a two-decades old publisher of controversial political and social content. […]
...more140 characters may not seem like much, but when writing is your career, every letter counts. Joke-stealers beware: Twitter is coming for you.
...moreKlingon: Where intellectual property and language collide. One of us. One of us. One of us. One of us. One of us. Poverty is all in your head. Really. After this expose, they are going to need an even darker net. Emails and faith.
...moreProspects for your serialized proto-fictional new generation adaptation of The Hunger Games are bright. As fan fiction solidifies its status as a literary genre in its own right, publishers are catching on: …what was once viewed as either uncreative, a legal morass of copyright issues, or both, is now seen as a potential savior for […]
...moreThough copyrights on creative works are automatic, those protections get complicated quickly, especially when it comes to publication. Howard Richard Debs breaks down the basics of copyrights for writers, explaining over at The Review Review some of the elemental concepts like First North American Serial Rights.
...moreA Tolkien scholar writes about how he fought off a lawsuit from the Tolkien Estate: I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and put my research skills to work on my defense. Unfortunately, the case law was sparse. The only similar case I found was The Estate of S. Morgenstern v. William Goldman over the latter’s […]
...moreThere’s been no shortage of Sherlock Holmes spin-offs in the past few years, and with the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear a case from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, contemporary re-imaginings of the detective savant will continue to thrive. The Guardian reports that by refusing to consider an appeal of a seventh-circuit court decision naming […]
...moreAfter a panel at the House of Commons about copyright issues, author Joanne Harris writes in the Telegraph about the difficulty of being successful within the publishing industry. Among other factors, she attributes some of the failure to readers’ misconceptions about the lives of writers: Part of the problem…is that, thanks to the media, the […]
...moreSherlock Holmes has been freed by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. The estate of Arthur Conan Doyle claimed copyright over the character who first appeared in 1887 and has appeared in more than fifty-six stories and four novels. The copyright claim stems from the final ten stories, published between 1913 and 1927. The court […]
...moreThe Authors Alliance officially launches on May 21st at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. The group, founded by Pam Samuelson, Cory Doctorow, Katie Hafner, Kevin Kelly and Jonathan Lethem, is aimed at digital writers and will “represent the authors who like fair use, users’ rights, and who reject censorship and surveillance,” Doctorow stated at Boing Boing. […]
...moreWhat happens when the reproduction rights of literary works and an author’s public image are taken out of their owner’s control, but without any law infringement? Over at the Paris Review, Evan Kindley tries to find out. He compares the case of the upcoming David Foster Wallace movie, adapted from David Lipsky’s memoir Although Of Course You […]
...moreExcellent news: Your X-rated Sherlock/Watson slashfic now has the blessing of the American legal system! Well, sort of. A US district court has ruled that, with the exception of a few stories published after 1923, the material from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series is in the public domain. AÂ New York Times article from earlier […]
...moreCounterpoint asked “a lot of people” (as Cory Doctorow put it) to reflect on the world of copyright on the 300th anniversary of the passage of Queen Anne’s Law, and to look at how copyright is being used (or abused) today, as well as how it might need to evolve. I’ve only read a handful […]
...moreExactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist.
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