copyright
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Repost At Your Own Risk
140 characters may not seem like much, but when writing is your career, every letter counts. Joke-stealers beware: Twitter is coming for you.
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Weekly Geekery
Klingon: 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.…
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Fifty More Shades of Grey (And Counting)
Prospects 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…
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Protecting Our Writing
Though 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…
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Walking the Road Into Mordor
A 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…
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It’s Fair Use, My Dear Watson
There’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…
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Why We All Can’t Be J.K. Rowling
After 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…
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Judges Release Sherlock
Sherlock 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…
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The Fair Use Posse
The 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…
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Public (Image) Domain
What 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…
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Sherlock Holmes Enters the Public Domain
Excellent 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…
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Celebrating 300 Years of Copyright
Counterpoint 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)…