http://www.yourauthor.org The Author's Rights Awareness Campaign Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:10:47 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Andrew Wiley, representing literary heavyweights like Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, both alive, and among others the estates of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov, has done a deal with Amazon to make many of these works available for the Kindle platform. This is, however, not a step of authors taking ... http://www.yourauthor.org/news/amazon-deal-with-andrew-wiley-literary-agent/ 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 ... http://www.yourauthor.org/blog/copyleft-is-not-a-danger-for-authors-but-a-freedom-lessig-clarifies/ With a little bit of schadenfreude we report, that the RIAA once again missed its business goals by a factor of 10, when Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay some $67k instead of $670k -- similarly to Jamie Thomas (down to from $2m to $54k). That's why the business model ... http://www.yourauthor.org/news/once-again-riaa-suffers-massive-setback-%e2%80%93-this-time-the-tenenbaum-case/ 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 ... http://www.yourauthor.org/blog/jason-robert-brown-pulling-out-of-copyright-discussion-while-reminding-me-of-giuseppe-verdi/ "Weaker copyright leads to more artistic production." This is in shorthand the findings of Felix Oberholzer‐Gee from Harvard University and Koleman Strumpf from the University of Kansas in their most recent paper on "File Sharing and Copyright" (Chicago Journal on Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 10, Nr. 1, pp. ... http://www.yourauthor.org/news/weaker-copyright-more-artistic-production/ "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 ... http://www.yourauthor.org/blog/impending-class-action-suit-against-amazon/ 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 ... http://www.yourauthor.org/blog/the-espresso-book-machine-and-why-big-publishers-really-need-to-panick/ 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 ... http://www.yourauthor.org/blog/is-there-a-new-business-model-for-copyright-holders-out-there/ "Fair use" and other copyright exceptions are worth real money and create real jobs. This is what the CCIA -- the Computer & Communication Industry Association -- found in a study. Industries that rely on fair use exceptions to copyright law grew faster than the rest of the U.S. economy ... http://www.yourauthor.org/news/fair-use-is-worth-real-money/ 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, ... http://www.yourauthor.org/news/is-your-writing-a-handbag/