Paul Courant, one of the founders of the Hathi Trust, explains this week’s ruling throwing out a lawsuit by the Authors Guild claiming that Hathi’s scan-and-index program violated copyright.
Posts Categorized: copyright
Michael Jensen on NAP’s decision to publish for free
Michael Jensen explains why the National Academies Press decided to make its material openly available.
Eric Frank on open textbooks
Eric Frank is the president and co-founder of Flat World Knowledge, Inc., which publishes peer-reviewed online textbooks available under Creative Commons license. He explains his business.
Michael S. Hart
First, an email from Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive about Michael S. Hart: A dear friend and an inspiration unfortunately died yesterday. He dedicated his life to getting books to everyone in the world. He did this with no compensation and lived a life of near poverty. But he always shined with good cheer,… Read more »
MacKenzie Smith on open licenses for data and metadata
MacKenzie Smith of MIT and Creative Commons talks about the new 4-star rating system for open licenses for metadata from cultural institutions: The draft is up on the LOD-LAM site. Here are some comments on the system from open access guru Peter Suber.
Eric Hellman on freeing works for all
Eric Hellman explains how GlueJar.com will enable readers to pool money to buy the rights to works so that those works can be made available for free to the world. (Recorded at the LOD-LAM conference in San Francisco.)
Libraries can own the Kindle, but who owns the books?
Mathew Ingram at Gigaom reports on one of the catches in Amazon’s plan to allow libraries to lend e-books on the Kindle: Who owns the books? Since preserving our heritage is one of the key value of our libraries but not of Amazon, there are troubling consequences of turning libraries into distribution sites for corporate… Read more »
Imperial College takes on Elsevier and Wiley Blackwell
Felix Online, the online news of Imperial College in the UK, reports (in an article by Kadhim Shubber) that Deborah Shorley, Director of the Imperial College London Library, is threatening to end the library’s subscriptions to journals published by Elsevier and Wiley Blackwell, two of the major publishers in the UK. Upset with 6% increases… Read more »
Has HarperCollins lost its mind or its soul?
[Note: As always with posts on this blog, authors speak for themselves. - dw] HarperCollins has changed its agreement with the main distributor of e-books to libraries: e-books will now become inaccessible after 26 checkouts. I understand publishers’ desire to limit ebook access so that selling one copy doesn’t serve the needs of the entire… Read more »