We have not reported on the latest ASCAP scam, their money raising campaign for the “Legislative Fund for the Arts”. An email to their members, exposed here (page 1, page 2) is full of factual errors (again), claiming that copyleft licenses ‘undermine our Copyright”‘ — and they call their members to arms to ‘wage […]

Jason Robert Brown has been hailed as “one of Broadway’s smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim” — at least that’s his self-branding on his website at http://www.jasonrobertbrown.com/about/. Now let’s for a moment assume that is true and he’s telling the truth on his blog anyway. Then there is a funny story: he found […]

“Kindle users will be able to post book passages to Twitter or as Facebook updates, as Amazon updates the device’s firmware with ever more web-friendly features” the Register reports. So is there another Class Action Suit in the making, as we’ve seen in the case of Google Books? Publishers surely are firmly against any new […]

There is an interesting interview with Jason Epstein and Dane Neller, chairman and CEO respectively of On Demand Books in New York, at Knowledge@Wharton — with some interesting insights:

“Authorship (…) will remain what it always has been.” — collaborative will remain the exception
Publishers are not innovative and have never been — anecdotic evidence on how […]

When selling copies stopped bringing in big money for the content industry, publishers and other middlemen were looking for new sources of revenue. First there was the blank media tax. Then came suing consumers for consuming content not strictly the way the industry liked it. Now they seem to have found a new way to […]

The US Department of Government Accountability Office just published an authoritative report on piracy and counterfeited goods entitled “Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods”. This must by, finally, the proof how damaging piracy is to people wanting to make a living from Copyright, Patents and Trademarks. Just skimming […]

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 […]