Recently there is a wave of plagiarism haunting young German literature talent … errr … promoters. Jens Lindner, Helene Hegeman are two authors whose books “Döner for One” and “Axolotl Roadkill” have been denounced as copies of “One for the money” by Janet Evanovich and “Strobo” by Airen respectively. It’s nothing new, and particularly […]

To RIAA or Not to RIAA, That was the Question, according to this blogpost by the Authors’ Guild. Not to was their answer. I’m happy to read that. It is very sensible. And the reasons behind it are equally sensible. “One could fill a good-sized law-school classroom with copyright professors […]

“On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books”, amazon.com reports in its press release on 26 December 2009.
Commentary:
This could mean that online delivery foor books, after a long wait and a few false starts, might be accelerating much faster than for other media, as electronista suggests.
As long […]

Germanys Intelligentsia is involved in a continuous fight against everything that cuts publishers’ revenues, using authors’ and human rights as a fig leave. We’ve seen the “Hamburger Erklärung”, and now it is “Lettre International”. In its most recent edition, Uwe Jochum tries to make us believe that Open Acces (i.e. the right to freely access […]

There are no other words than “stupid” or “insane” to the recent PR stunt of the US Authors Guild calling Amazon Kinlde’s text to speech technology “illegal” (see http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/02/10/authors-guild-claims.html). It’s most likely the Germans will follow suit.
This alleged “audio right” isn’t.
It’s like reading abook using glasses. But I’m sure you’d find a […]

Paulo Coelho got quite some press exposure after his speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair last week — which he startet with a reference to the heretic Giordano Bruno. Quite purposefully, I think, as he goes along picturing himself as the “pirate Coelho” who is giving his books away for free, on the Internet and […]

According to the Beeb, or more accurately: according to Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, as cited on BBC, writing for the Royals is “a hiding to nothing.”
So do we have to rewrite all these business models based on the idea powerful platforms of performance? Do we have to revert back to the old fashioned royalties […]

Hidden away in the official Live Search blog Microsoft announced last week that they are going to shut down Live Book Search as of today. The reasons are simple: there is no money to be made for Microsoft by digitizing content. It is now up to the partners in the project — publishers and […]

Due to a heavy influx of comment spam site management took the decision to close commenting to any non-registered users. Apologies for any inconveniences this might cause.

In an otherwise rather lengthy (but interesting and relevant) blog-entry (on statements of ASCAP about CC licensing) Lawrence Lessig makes a good and important point:
“ASCAP historically has played a crucially important role in helping artists get paid for their work. Today, the nonexclusive ASCAP agreement is a model for collecting rights societies internationally. In […]