I have been too busy to write part 2 of my series on copyright law. Part 2 will be about the exciting legal case American Geophysical Union v. Texaco so you will all want to stay tuned for that.
Instead today I link to a bOING bOING post by Rob Beschizza mocking a claim by the Authors Guild that text-to-speech software infringes copyright. The scenario: a reader pays to download a Kindle book and activates the Kindle's read-out-loud feature causing a transient copy of the work to manifest as vibrations in nearby air molecules.
Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire joins the Linked Open Data cloud
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In a significant enhancement to the study of Roman imperial coinage, nearly
5,000 coin hoards from the Oxford Coin Hoards of the Roman Empire project
hav...
2 days ago
2 comments:
I have not seen a more rediculous lawsuit in some time. The scary thing is that in the bizarro world we live in they may actually win!
Agreed.
Marilynn Byerly has a nice blog post on Kindle Text-to-speech.
Congress passed very complex copyright laws with no clear guidelines. The courts have created all sorts of "balancing tests" but it's kind of pathetic that in 2009 we need a human judge and 2+ lawyers to figure out if a work is OK to manipulate in some way for some purpose. Maybe in 1900 when there were only a few hundred printing presses this made sense. If every printer, CD-R burner, DVD-R burner, fax machine and computer speaker counts as a printing press then I have a dozen "printing presses" in my home. There are probably more presses than people now. Congress needs to wake up and simplify copyright.
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