Copyright Law

Slouching Toward the Weekend

Posted on November 18, 2010
At least according to some observers, my laments about the poor writing skills in the legal profession don't stop with practitioners, but include the Supreme Court. (As an aside, it's a good thing that study didn't attempt to deal with European courts...

Smorgasbord Link Sausages

Posted on November 17, 2010
A particularly disparate set of link sausages today, from many species (and that's not even counting the "other species" that get swept into sausages). This is positively the wurst of the week so far: A short GBS note: Google has reached an agreement with Hachette Livre (in France) for more in-copyright-out-of-print scanning...

Abbreviated Tuesday Link Sausages

Posted on November 16, 2010
Abbreviated in all senses of the word... It appears that some scholars are attempting to use digitized analysis and databases to understand artistic output, which is a worthy endeavour... to an extent. But art is as much a process as it is a thing, so I'm hoping for some caution on overstatements of what it all means...

Don't Make My Link Sausages Decaf on a Monday

Posted on November 15, 2010
Too late... The Economist offers some thoughts on where science gets done that bring a new twist to "outsourcing to cheap-labor nations." After acknowledging that artistic progress leads to scientific progress, perhaps someone will wonder why ? in the wake of Arundati Roy, Salman Rushdie, et al...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

The Million-and-First Little Lie

Posted on November 13, 2010
Just a short note today on James Frey's apparent inability to learn, especially regarding ethics... and how that affects authors, and particularly authors who have stars in their eyes regarding "new publishing paradigms." Leaving aside whose fault the whole fiction or memoir? controversy was ? it was at least partly the publisher's own damned fault ? Frey has branched out into being a book

A Lament for the Dead

Posted on November 11, 2010
Not much for today, between past responsibilities and present cooking (getting ready for the remora's pre-Nationals team carb-up). Just this: Repealing DADT is unlikely to harm military readiness, according to the military's own report. As a thought experiment, consider what would happen if every member of the federal government who has not completed at least one full term of military service

Midweek Link Sausage Platter

Posted on November 10, 2010
Filled with tasty treats and sawdusty goodness! The real problem with the current generation of e-books is that ? unlike a dead-tree edition ? they're not yours. Instead, distributors are using "software licenses" as a model. The obvious problem is that when a legal preference meets an incompatible behavior-set, both get undermined, requiring changes in the underlying statutes...

Tiny Little Cocktail Link Sausages

Posted on November 09, 2010
Just a few cocktail weenies this morning, as I have remora duties... Where does W's memoir belong? Probably not in "serious nonfiction"; I nominate "religious and inspirational," myself... For those of us old enough to remember VHS v...

Full Link Sausage Platter

Posted on November 08, 2010
From the usual (which is to say undisclosed and definitely not USDA-inspected) meat-packing plants that make Upton Sinclair's descriptions seem clean and wholesome... The UK fascist party has been done in by IP lawsuit after it poached from.....

Martha Grimes and the Case of the Missing Document

Posted on November 06, 2010
In 2009, Martha Grimes ? a bestselling mystery/crime fiction writer ? was sued by her former literary agent, Peter Lampack Associates,1 alleging that Grimes had breached her contract with Lampack by not paying commissions to Lampack for books licensed through Grimes's new agent on an option clause for an earlier book that had been licensed through Lampack...

Post-Election Migraine Attack

Posted on November 04, 2010
But, on the other hand, I don't need elections to give me a migraine. It's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). That leads to two short pieces of homework: Evil Overlord's List, which applies to everyone (yes, there are lots and lots of evil overlords in even the most literary of fiction ? it's just that their evil is often of the banal kind), and the Fantasy Novelist's Exam (

Better Dead Than Red (State)?

Posted on November 03, 2010
Congratulations to the winners; and commiserations to the losers ? mostly the American public that was forced (in Leo's words) to choose between the lesser of "Who cares?" yesterday, thanks to the dysfunctional "two-party system." First off, congratulations to incoming Speaker of the House John Böhner (to spell his name as his German ancestors would have)...

Only Two More Days Until No More Campaign Ads

Posted on November 01, 2010
... which I suppose merits some celebration. But that won't change the fact that it's Monday. Congratulations to the nominees for and winners of the World Fantasy Awards. Looking at the list of nominated book-length works, there is exactly zero chance of a positive sales effect...

Scary Anticipation of the Real Veterans' Day

Posted on October 31, 2010
In the best of all possible worlds... We'd amend the Constitution so that Election Day always falls on Veterans' Day; or, conversely, we could change the statute that sets Veterans' Day as 11 November ? in commemoration of what is, with 20/20 hindsight (hell, with 20/200 hindsight), merely a cease-fire agreement in 1918 ? to be the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November...

Devil's Night on the Campaign Trail

Posted on October 30, 2010
Just a few Devil's Night thoughts about the upcoming election... Should Mark Kirk be elected to the US Senate from Illinois ? and, at present, the race is rather too close to call ? I will be writing separating to demand that he resign his commission as a Naval Reserve officer...

All Hail the Philosopher-King Sausages!

Posted on October 28, 2010
Rather bizarre stuff today (although, given the strange stuff that one ordinarily finds here, you'll just have to take my word that this is bizarrer than usual). Old men sending young men off to die has been the central feature of national policy in the west for about six hundred years, give or take...

Street Fightin' Men

Posted on October 27, 2010
This is just surreal: The Hells Angels have filed a lawsuit against Saks Fifth Avenue, among others... for trademark infringement. The complaint (PDF) is, itself, not very remarkable; further, on the basis of the attachments, it's going to survive any motion to dismiss and most motions for summary judgment...

It's Still Monday, Isn't It?

Posted on October 26, 2010
It sure feels like it. In a sign of other shoes dropping, the Tory–LD coalition government will be cutting payments to authors for the public lending right at the same time it "privatizes" (or otherwise transfers) administration of the payments...

The Leaky Courier Bag

Posted on October 24, 2010
Just a very short comment on the Iraq war logs/WikiLeaks controversy: It was a good thing for the nation when Daniel Ellsberg provided the documents that became the Pentagon Papers. In my experience as a military historian, custodian of historical secure materials, etc...

Prime Time Saturday Reruns

Posted on October 23, 2010
Don't ask about the ingredients for rerun link sausages. Just. Don't. So, selling books over the internet will be a perfect, seamless replacement for brick-and-mortar stores, eh? Texas certainly thinks so, asserting that Amazon owes the state $269 million in back sales/use taxes...

Montag am Dienstag

Posted on October 21, 2010
This is yet another installment of "two wrongs don't make a right... but three, apparently, do." Once upon a time, back before the invention of fire ? or at least before the invention of the "personal computer" ? I was a student at a high school in a rather small school district with continuing difficulty understanding the First Amendment...

Midweek Link Sausages

Posted on October 20, 2010
Even more so than usual, you really don't want to know how these link sausages were made. Or where I got the ingredients. Even among college students, e-books are not making printed books obsolete. The irony, though, is that publishers are going to use reduced print runs as a rather pathetic excuse to keep raising prices far, far beyond the rate of either inflation or printing-cost

Publishing Link Sausages

Posted on October 19, 2010
All of the links today are about publishing, in one way or another. That's sort of like making sausages out of sausages, isn't it? Here's a real shock: Spanish media conglomerate just as disingenuous as American media conglomerates over royalty accounting...

Bleary-Eyed Monday Morning Link Sausages

Posted on October 18, 2010
No hate mail from Saturday's rant... yet... Lots of e-books-in-the-marketplace chatter today, ranging from why are so many e-books misformatted? (hint: maybe the print versions weren't either formatted or coded correctly in the first place ? relying on Quark quirks, for those that have electronic files at all) to Amazon UK attacking resale-price maintenance on e-books (the proper term for

Bad Faith

Posted on October 16, 2010
The Seventh Circuit screwed up yesterday ? in a way that I expect courts to screw up all the time. Unfortunately, this will have a lasting effect on the bullying problem, because it reinforces one of the primary causes of bullying in the public schools: The improper injection of religious values into those schools...

Forrest Gump Must Be In Charge

Posted on October 14, 2010
I'm not irascible; I'm permanently irasced. One of those secrets that isn't really a secret, or even confined to mortgages: Sometimes mortgage financiers didn't follow the rules that they demand purchasers follow when they transferred mortgages from originator to servicer to whomever...

Seeing Thunder and Hearing Lightning

Posted on October 13, 2010
Thunder rolling through, as typical for fall/spring days around here. In a follow-up to her ruling declaring DADT unconstitutional on its face, Judge Phillips has issued a sweeping permanent injunction against the Don't Ask, Don't Tell "policy" barring gays from serving in the military...

I Apologize

Posted on October 12, 2010
... for the delay, for the shortness, for the general malaise after another sleepless night. Why might actors boycott The Hobbit? It's not about distrust of Peter Jackson ? he's actually providing a better nonunion deal than called for by the union contract...

1/cos(3?/2)

Posted on October 11, 2010
Yet another upper-middle-class literati longs for a return of the days of Empire and "beauty" in contemporary fiction... primarily because the Empire's horizon's have been set far too narrowly. First, and perhaps most obvious, there's the category problem: Both the review and the underlying book presume that only "serious literary fiction" has ever qualified as "beautiful," let alone does so now.

Weekend Sausage Factory

Posted on October 09, 2010
As usual, I'm on no particular schedule here; I blawg when I can, and when I feel like it, and yesterday was neither.     I'll start off with a public service announcement, and note that ? although it's not quite as amusing (or horrifying) as "President Quayle" ? there's a very simple way to deal with the problem: Vote, wherever you're eligible...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.