Here’s a cautionary tale about using stock photography. Grove Press loved the cover of the German edition of Sasa Stanisic’s first novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, so they used it for the U.S. edition, too. There was a surprise in store.

From New York Times reporter Dwight Garner’s blog, Papercuts:

Grove did all this without noticing that the man on the cover and the catalog is none other than Daniel Handler, the well-known novelist, musician and author of the Lemony Snicket books.

…

Handler – who says he found Stanisic’s novel charming – thinks he knows how this all happened in the first place.

“A friend of mine, Meredith, took a lot of photos of me at one point early in my career, and I was scarcely able to pay her. I said she could sell them wherever she wanted. And some of them ended up at Getty, filed not under my name but under ‘assorted’ or something.”

There’s a happy ending though, as Handler gave Grove permission to use the image, setting a new standard for least scandalous pre-career photos.

From Reuters:

Billionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling would feel “exploited” if a fan’s unofficial encyclopedic companion to the boy wizard series was published, she said in court papers made public on Thursday.

Steve Vander Ark has written The Harry Potter Lexicon – a 400-page reference book based on his popular fan Web site (www.hp-lexicon.org). Rowling and Warner Bros. are suing RDR Books, which planned to publish the book last November.

“I am very frustrated that a former fan has tried to co-opt my work for financial gain,” Rowling, 42, who wrote the seven hugely successful Harry Potter novels, said in a declaration filed in U.S. District Court this week.

We’re not copyright lawyers, but we’re pretty sure that lexicons, literary guides, book-length exegeses, annotated editions, and literary companion volumes existed long before little Harry took his first trip aboard the Hogwarts Express.

(And note how Rowling dubs Ark a “former fan” – zing!)

Mark one small victory for supporters of Creative Commons, the alternative licensing protocol that gives authors more freedom to dictate restrictions on their work. As reported on the Nebraska Library Commission blog, several CC titles are now registered in its catalogue – including PDF versions and several spiralbound editions. Apparently, processing the titles presented some problems for the library’s fastidious staff.

Not being a cataloger myself I can’t give a completely accurate accounting of what I put our cataloger through, but I owe her a lunch. Some of the questions raised by these items were just who the “publisher” was and what should be listed as the publisher’s “location.” Larger issues such as whether these were newly unique editions or just reprints of a previously released edition also needed to be addressed. Discussion ensued and decisions were made. Are the records perfect, I’ll leave that for others to judge.

The newly catalogued titles include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow; Trigger Happy by Stephen Poole; Shike by Robert J. Shea; My Own Kind of Freedom: A Firefly Novel by Steven Brust; and The Future of Ideas, Code Version 2.0, and Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, the Stanford law professor who created the protocol.

(Thanks to Bookninja for the link.)

Bad news, folks: new technology like the Kindle will enable the greedy, unruly masses to bankrupt the publishing industry as we know it. Glum futurist and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sounds the death knell on his blog:

Users may buy a book or two on Kindle, but many users will simply steal the content they want to read. Thanks to Amazon, that’s really easy to do on their slick new device.

Should users do this? No, and we do not encourage this. But will they? I think we all know the answer to that.

Good news, folks: the common decency of book readers, who understand that “[w]ider access to copyright materials and fair remuneration for rightsholders are not mutually exclusive,” will carry us over the shoals of the new digital age. Guardian blogger Penny Grubb keeps the faith:

The digital revolution is no different from any of the other new, unprecedented so-called threats to hit us. Everything’s new the first time it happens. Of course it’s faster, bigger, slicker, more efficient and encompasses the globe in a way we’ve never seen before. That’s the way the world works. It’s called progress. But not everything changes. Most people won’t knowingly break the law and will be happy to pay a fair price for what they use. All they need to know is what to pay for and how to do it. Of course, the how-to-do-it had better fit the falling-off-a-log model of 21st century convenience.

When lost books by well-known authors are found, it is usually an occasion for celebration. Not in the case of a non-fiction book about oil exploration written by Wallace Stegner, an award-winning novelist and creative writing professor who taught, among many others, people like Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurty, Raymond Carver, and Gordon Lish.

From the International Herald Tribune:

The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.

For reasons that now are a subject of dispute between Barger and the late author’s son, however, an edited version of Stegner’s manuscript was not published in the Arabian American Oil Co.’s in-house magazine until 1967. It was not available to the public until Vista, Calif.-based Selwa put out a trade edition of “Discovery!” in September without permission from Stegner’s estate.

“His particular version of the manuscript was one that was cut up by one of their PR people. It was never put up for sale,” said Carl Brandt, Stegner’s longtime literary agent. “If Wally had wanted to publish that edition, he would have been on the phone with me saying, ‘Let’s go, and get Viking to do it.’”

Barger has said that he secured the rights to the company-approved version from ARAMCO’s Saudi-run successor and that he did not need consent from Stegner’s heirs. Selwa’s edition was serialized in the company’s magazine in 1967 and later published in Beirut as a freebie paperback for employees.

Freebie paperbacks – now there’s a job perk we’d like to see come back into fashion.

In publishing, where the problem has always been with books not selling, the hip, new trend appears to be not selling books. More and more authors are making their work available for free (sometimes with the expectation of a tip or donation), with the idea that, as with music, spreading the word(s) as widely as possible can only help build a writer’s profile. Paradoxically, it can even help sell books – Coach House Books used to post almost all of their new books, in their entirety, on their web site, with the assumption that few people would read an entire book online, but they might just read enough to order the ink-and-paper version. (More here.)

The latest to open the cage on her own work is Toronto author Sheila Heti, who has placed her entire first book, The Middle Stories, on her website, along with info on how to buy the real thing. (She’s even willing to walk to the post office to mail it.)

Given how short The Middle Stories is, it may work just as well on the screen as on the page. And we have to say, Heti’s clean, easily navigable scans of the book are a lot more readable than that Kindle thing.

With all the hoopla surrounding the launch of the Kindle, Amazon’s portable e-book reader, it’s easy to forget that for some authors the digital revolution has already happened. First among them would be science-fiction author Cory Doctorow, who offers his novels and stories for free download through his website using a Creative Commons license.

In an interview with the alternative comics blog The Daily Cross Hatch, Doctorow explains how he got IDW Publishing, a major U.S. comics publisher that’s adapting some of Doctorow’s stories, to also agree to a Creative Commons license.

My agent said, ‘Creative Commons – you guys okay with that?’ expecting to get a ‘go away, hippie, and never darken our door again.’ Instead, they said, ‘[O]h yeah, we’re totally cool with it, but we’re not sure if we’re going to be able to sell that to comic book store owners, so how would you feel if we just did that with the trade, at the end of the run?’ And that sounded great. That was the entire thing. It’s like the world’s least interesting story, in that it was just kind of an agreement.

Doctorow adds that in his experience free downloads don’t displace physical sales, but actually encourage them. Plus, he says, sharing is the only way to foster culture.

[Copying and sharing] is as old as culture itself. In fact, when we say ‘culture,’ that’s more or less what we mean. ‘Art’ is the stuff that the artist makes and ‘culture’ is what we do with the stuff that the artist makes. It’s pretty radical to say ‘culture must stop.’ I think it’s pretty conservative to say that you can just go on making copies the way that you spritual [sic] ancestors did, forever. I would hate to be the guy who says, ‘[Y]ou guys are all jerks for loving my work too much, I hate you so much, please stop copying my stuff.’ That would be just a terrible outcome. Creative Commons works, if it’s unpopular, and it works ever more, if it’s popular.

While it may be a bit of a stretch to call free downloads “conservative” from a business perspective, Doctorow seems to have scored a victory for Creative Commons advocates by getting IDW to play along.

Related reading: Doctorow also discussed giving it away in this 2003 Q&Q story.

Ever notice that kids these days just aren’t into ol’ fashioned, ink-and-paper comic books? Well, apparently comics publishers have, and they’re worried that new fangled technologies like the Web and video games are diverting kids from the wholesome pleasure of printed matter. Here’s a Marvel Publishing bigwig – as reported by AP, among other news sources – waxing nostalgic for the golden age of comics readership:

“You don’t have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local five-and-dime any more,” said Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Publishing. “We don’t have our product intersecting kids in their lifestyle space as much as we used to.”

In an attempt to appeal to young readers on their own turf (or “lifestyle space”), Marvel is releasing part of its backlist – about 2,500 titles in total – online, where subscribers can browse, for example, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee’s Amazing Spider-Man for $9.99 a month – or for $4.99 a month for annual subscribers.

The move is the most aggressive Web push yet for comics publishers, reports AP, but still, their embrace of the Web has been tentative at best. Marvel, for example, won’t be releasing new titles online until they’ve spent at least six months on newsstands. For its part, DC Comics – which releases “teasers” of new titles for free on Myspace – is rumored to have shut down one of the most popular Superman fansites for alleged copyright infringement.

That dovetails well with a recent feature article in Wired, in which Daniel H. Pink explores the blossoming culture of dojinshi in Japan. An increasingly popular subgenre, dojinshi is essentially fan fiction that recasts and remixes well-known manga characters and storylines – in flagrant violation of copyright law, it should be added.

Amazingly, mainstream manga publishers seem to have embraced dojinshi, or at least to tolerate it, because, so the theory goes, it sustains the interest of manga’s most fanatical fans while potentially attracting new readers.

Here’s Pink on a recent dojinshi convention – “acres of territory in which the basic tenets of intellectual property seem not to apply,” he writes – which attracted upwards of half a million consumers.

The people selling their wares at the [dojinshi] markets are consumers and producers, amateurs and pros. They nourish both the top and the bottom. If publishers were to squash the emerging middle, they would disrupt, and perhaps destroy, this delicate new triangular ecosystem. And remember: If manga craters, it could drag the entire Japanese pop culture industry down with it.

Whether the dojinshi “business model” can be exported to North America, as Pink suggests, seems unlikely at the moment, but his article does provide an interesting counterpoint to the comic industry’s baby steps online.

According to a website called China View, Malaysian readers are scooping up pirated editions of the final Harry Potter installment in droves.

Cashing in on the popularity of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, pirates have mass-produced paperback editions which are retailed at 48 ringgit (14 U.S. dollars) each, the New Straits Times reported.

They are available at selected news vendors and bookstores, some of whom are selling the books at 60 ringgit (18 U.S. dollars) but with a 20 percent discount.

Checks at several news vendors and bookstores showed that the pirated book copied the original version wholesale, from its front and back covers and publisher’s logo to even the barcode.

Apparently, the pirated editions are selling like hotcakes, especially among the country’s student population. No word yet if the book’s Malaysian publisher will be cracking down on this, but we’re sure that Bloomsbury and Rowling herself are feeling very disappointed with the Malays right about now.

If Judd Apatow’s and Rebecca Eckler’s lawyers weren’t already going to spend a lot of time debating whether tales of drunken insemination constitute intellectual property (see here for context), a new up-knocking contender is about to enter the field.

In October, Avery, a imprint of Putnam in the U.S., will be publishing Louise Sloan’s Knock Yourself Up: A Tell-All Guide to Becoming a Single Mom. The book, which is being marketed with the tag-line “No Man? No Problem!,” is part memoir and part how-to guide, though that latter part will probably not feature frozen daquiris in quite the same measure as either Apatow’s film or Eckler’s book.

Last Sunday, author Mark Helprin wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that writers and their descendents should own the rights to their works in perpetuity, not just for 70 years after their deaths. The article has attracted a lot of online debate in the days since, and yesterday Gawker posted an “Ask an Expert” interview with Maud Newton, in which Newton haughtily dismisses most of Helprin’s assertions. The gist of her position is as follows:

Authors hold copyright for life plus 70 years, meaning that their heirs reap the benefits of exclusive rights for seven full decades after they die. But the purpose of exclusive rights like copyright and patent — both of which flow from the same twenty-seven words of the Constitution — is “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to fund vacations for John Grisham’s great-great-grandchildren.

While we understand the grossness of celebrity spawn leeching off their parents’ life work, we have to wonder why authors should be treated any different from real estate moguls, say, or corporate bigwigs. Why do they get to pass on the benefits of their life’s work in perpetuity and not lowly artists?

One of the best counter-arguments we’ve seen was made by Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford University law professor and copyright expert. He has created a wiki-style page for the express purpose of rebutting Helprin’s argument, and in it he makes this fairly convincing point:

Physical property, such as real estate, is a finite resource that operates as a zero sum game. And the laws regarding physical property treat it as such. Intellectual works are abstract concepts and do not naturally operate as zero sum games.

(Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education for the Lessig link.)

Dan Blacharski, a columnist for ITworld.com, has weighed in on the Microsoft vs. Google book search debate, pointing out that while it is fashionable to bash Microsoft as a corporate bully, the Microsoft Live Book Search system treats copyright holders more fairly than Google Book Search does, because Microsoft only “displays books that are past their copyright, or have been specifically authorized by the copyright holder.”

The big question is that do I, as a creator of content and writer of books, have a problem with my books being on Google Book Search? It’s a tough question. When a library carries one of my books, they have purchased it from the publisher, and I get my fifty cents worth of royalty payment. But a library makes that book available only to a local community; if an online library makes a book available in digital form to the entire world, there should be adequate compensation to the author. But as I said, that’s not what Google is doing. They are, however, providing a summary, table of contents, title page, index, and copyright page, a link to buy the book, and a place to search the book. Search results will show snippets of text, maybe a few paragraphs, related to the search. Frankly, it doesn’t seem like such an egregious imposition on my rights, and it may help me sell a few books in the process. The grey area comes in deciding whether Google has a right to scan and index those books without permission from the publisher. Publishers may well decide it’s to their advantage to grant permission-but it would be more fair for Google to seek out that permission before scanning.

A Google feature in TIME magazine last year reported that the company’s founders use the informal corporate motto “don’t be evil.” Perhaps they also should add a corollary from everybody’s mom: “And always ask politely before you borrow something.”

The New Yorker has a story by Jeffrey Toobin on Google’s staggeringly ambitious and hugely contentious Google Books project, in which the company intends to digitize and make fully searchable more than 30 million books over the next decade. (Toobin quotes the Google vice-president in charge of the project who describes the undertaking as Google’s “moon shot.” The lengthy article details the legal challenges some publishers are making to Google Books, and the possible dangers inherent in a possible cash settlement on Google’s part.

The article is as interesting for the information on the project and on the murky history of U.S. copyright law as it is for the glimpses into Google corporate life: pajama days (which most employees rightly spurn), free food 24 hours a day, and a 10,000-strong workforce, to which 50 people are apparently added every week.

An impressive constellation of literary stars has come to the defence of British author Ian McEwan, who was accused by a writer for The Daily Mail of plagiarizing the memoir of romance novelist Lucilla Andrews, who died in October, in his novel Atonement.

Letters from Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, and even the reclusive Thomas Pynchon were published in The Daily Telegraph. “Most of the writers said that they were intimately familiar with what Mr. McEwan had done, having done the same thing themselves,” an article in The New York Times reports. There is a difference between plagiarism and using other works for research and historical information, the writers argue.

If it is sufficient to point to a simultaneity of events to prove plagiarism, then we are all plagiarists, and Shakespeare is in big trouble from Petrarch, and Tolstoy stole the material for ‘War and Peace,’ ” wrote the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, the author of “Schindler’s List.”

McEwan has freely acknowledged using Ms. Andrews’s book for its period detail, but has pointed out that he “had gone out of his way to praise her publicly,” The New York Times article said.

He seems to have the support of the London literati. Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times of London was quoted saying, “I thought, well, we have come to a pretty pass where an author like Ian McEwan has to write on the front page of The Guardian explaining what research is.”

Related links:
Click here forThe New York Times article

Author and writer Heather Robertson’s long-running class-action lawsuit against The Globe and Mail took one more step on Thursday toward — well, toward something.

Ten years ago, Robertson took the Globe to court because the paper was making money off of electronic databases of its archives without getting clearance from — or offering compensation to — freelancers. Now the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that (in the words of, er, Globe and Mail reporter Kirk Makin) databases “compiled by newspapers and other publishers cannot simply reproduce freelance work without the specific agreement of writers, photographers and illustrators.”

It was a close one, though: a 5-4 decision. And because the decision concerned a pretrial motion only, Robertson must still actually take the case to trial. Makin provides a preview of the Globe’s courtroom strategy: “A central argument at trial will be whether, in selling their work to the newspaper, freelancers presumed that it could end up being used in any way the newspaper desired.” Quillblog’s no expert on the law nor yoga, but that argument seems like a mighty stretch.

Related links:
Click here for the Globe story about the Supreme Court ruling
Click here for commentary from the Creators’ Copyright Coalition
Click here for the official ruling summary
Click here for the full decision

Literary Saloon links to a VietNamNet Bridge story on the difficulties Vietnamese publishers face.

Vietnam has been tightening control over copyrights in the wake of the ratification of the Bern Convention for Literary and Artistic Works, making it difficult for indigenous publishers to buy rights to foreign titles. Vietnamese publishers complain of having to exchange hundreds of e-mails with Western publishers to hammer out the details, a process which can take the better part of a year, and being forced to offer up cover designs, distribution plans, and cover prices before the Western publishers will agree to sell rights.

Related links:
Read the full story here

With the extortion-esque prices of books these days, it always feels good to stick it to the Man and grab a good deal on a read. And what better deal than free?

Book lovers everywhere can enjoy “free access to 300,000 texts online” this summer, according to an article in the L.A. Times.

A third of a million e-books will be on offer for a month at the first World eBook Fair, courtesy of Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library. The downloading frenzy will begin at the fair’s website as of July 4, Project Gutenberg’s 35th anniversary.

Penny pinchers can revel in bypassing World eBook Library’s usual annual $8.95 fee, and those who cherish the oldies-but-goodies can go hogwild with Gutenberg’s selections, which are made up of “mostly [books] no longer protected by copyright, [and] include fiction, nonfiction and reference books and will be available for worldwide readers in about 100 languages.”

Related links:
Read the L.A. Times article here

Macmillan UK chief executive Richard Charkin has been keeping a mostly Macmillan-related blog since late last year. On it, he discusses copyright issues and Google, outlines Macmilan’s expansion into Asia, and, um, posts pictures from his holidays.

Last week, however, Charkin posted a dispatch from Charles Jenkins, international sales manager at Palgrave Macmillan, who attended the International Book Fair held in Erbil, in Northern Iraq, the first to be held in that country in 30 years.

“The Iraqi government had budgeted about £700,000 for the purchase of books relating to Higher Education in the English Language,” Jenkins writes. “Cash sales were brisk, and in the purchasing frenzy one could witness the unusual sight of boxes of books being hauled away in supermarket trolleys by librarians, academics, students and private individuals, under the watchful eye of the ubiquitous, gun-toting Peshmerga soldiers…. theft was not a problem at this Fair!”

Clearly, the book market in Iraq is not quite in its last throes.

Related links:
Read Richard Charkin’s blog post

On the eve of BookExpo America in Washington, The New York Times Magazine has run a cover story on the future of the book by Wired’s Kevin Kelly. He begins with some familiar rhetoric about a new Library of Alexandria — a future online interface where any piece of narrative or art from all extant human history will be immediately accessible by anyone, anywhere. From there, he argues that Internet technology will forever change the way we experience books (and other artforms, incidentally), and will render the copyright system obsolete.

This very long piece is devoted to some very long-range forecasting, so it may be a while before Kelly’s arguments are revealed as prophetic or misguided. But he does make some thought-provoking points, one of the main ones being that searchability will change everything. “Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library,” Kelly writes. “The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.”

Related links:
Click here for Kevin Kelly’s NYT Magazine article

The controversy over Kaavya Viswanathan’s plagiarism keeps picking up speed, so here’s a quick recap. The Harvard student scored a $500,000 advance for her debut chicklit novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, but that book has now been shown to be suspiciously similar to two previous chicklit novels by Megan McCafferty. The echoes range from plot points and character types down to the specific wording in no less than 45 passages. Viswanathan has admitted to being a fan of McCafferty’s work, but says she must have “internalized” the other author’s novels and that any similarities are unintentional. McCafferty’s publisher, Crown, isn’t buying it, but Viswanathan’s, Little, Brown, is standing by her for now.

The twist is that Viswanathan produced her book in concert with a book packager, 17th Street Productions, which shares copyright on the novel and no doubt took a big piece of that half-million advance. The firm is known best for producing the Sweet Valley High series.

In a piece on the Slate website, British author John Barlow provides his own account of the strange experience of trying to produce a novel with a book packager – and the packager in question is none other than 17th Street. “[J]ust how do you write a novel by committee?” asks Barlow. “Answer: with a great deal of pleasure. We would gather on the phone, me in Europe, they in New York, and chew the fat for hours about development, character, plot digressions, key moments…. I imagined this was how prime-time TV gets written: lots of witty, divergent opinions slowly converging on a highly predictable and uninspiring concept.”

Related links:
Click here for John Barlow’s piece on Slate
Click here for Harvard Crimson coverage of the Viswanathan controversy

Hearings for the Dan Brown copyright infringement case wrapped up yesterday, and Sarah Lyall of The New York Times, for her part, thinks she knows who will win. Brown’s publisher, Random House, is being sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of three authors of a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a book whose premise — that Christ married Mary Magdalene and that descendants of their offspring live in France, where a secret society aims to return the western world to theocracy — resembles that of The Da Vinci Code.

In closing statements issued last week, the claimants’ lawyer lamented the fact that Brown’s primary researcher, his wife Blythe, neither took the stand nor issued a statement for the trial. The defendants claim that copyright law does not protect ideas and that The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was consulted by Brown late in the writing process and was thus, contrary to Baigent and Leigh’s claim, not instrumental in forming his book’s “architecture.” Although the verdict will be made in the coming weeks, the Times‘ Lyall has divined the outcome of the proceedings by the sets of questions the judge posed to each side. “His tough questions appeared to reflect skepticism, even exasperation, toward some of the arguments put forward by the lawyer for the plaintiffs,” she wrote in this morning’s Times. “During the start of closing arguments last week, Justice Jones asked similarly pointed questions of the lawyer for Random House U.K., Mr. Brown’s publisher and the defendant in the case. But the questions were less frequent and less adversarial, suggesting that Random House’s lawyers have had an easier time making their case.”

And in case you just can’t get enough of the trial, check out additional links below.

Related links:
Click here for Sarah Lyall’s story in The New York Times
Click here for coverage from The Book Standard
Click here for coverage from the CBC

Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown took to the stand yesterday as the star defence witness in a copyright infringement lawsuit being launched against his publisher, Random House. The claimants this time around are Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, two of the three authors of a book called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which hypothesized that Jesus Christ survived crucifixion and went on to father children with Mary Magdalene and that a secret society in France is currently involved in attempting to reinstate Christ’s descendants into political power.

That Brown was aware of the book is doubtless: Brown’s tattered and heavily marked copy of the book was submitted as court evidence; the author even named a character Leigh Teabing, an anagram of the claimants’ last names. Yet according to an article on the Times Online, because they’re suing to compensate for lost revenue, Baigent and Leigh’s lawsuit is unlikely to win them much, even if they prevail. On the first day of the case, Amazon sales for The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail shot up 3500%. (On Tuesday afternoon, the book was the 18th best-seller on Amazon.com.)

And if Baigent and Leigh do win, it might change the nature of copyright law as we know it. The authors are not contesting individual passages of Brown’s book so much as its entire premise. “The legal maxim that ‘there is no copyright in an idea’ is being tested,” writes Alex Wade of the Times, “just as, in televisual media, there have been successive attempts to claim format rights in reality television shows.” When one considers the extent to which writers reinterpret, recontextualize, and otherwise borrow the material of other writers, a successful lawsuit could mean much in the world of books.

An interesting result of this whole mess is that those intrigued by biographical details can now learn a lot about Brown: his writing process, the fact that his wife researches most of his books, that they used to sell books from the back of their car, and that one point in Brown’s career ebb saw him write and sell a story under the pseudonym Danielle Brown called “187 Men to Avoid.”

Related links:
Click here for the Times story
Click here for the Book Standard’s take on events
Click here for trial coverage from The New York Times
Click here for a story on The Guardian website

Associated Press reports that some Italian publishers have run into a royalty dispute with the Vatican over reprinted quotations and writings by Pope Benedikt XVI (formerly Joseph Ratzinger).

Writes AP staffer Frances D’Emilio: “After Ratzinger was elected pope April 19, the Holy See’s No. 2 official, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, signed a decree assigning “in perpetuity and worldwide” the copyrights of all Benedict’s works — including the hundreds he wrote before becoming pope — to the Vatican’s publishing house, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, known as LEV.”

LEV is asking for royalties on all separately published writings by the pope, including encyclicals and other teachings. (The story notes that Benedikt has a history of donating to charity his personal profits from his writing.)

Counters another religious publisher: “Let’s say a government makes a law. It’s in the interest of the government to have the law published. And it’s in its interest to have citizens read it, in an inexpensive edition.”

(Thanks to Bookninja.com for the link.)

Related links:
Click here for the AP story

A number of bloggers who watch both politics and cultural matters closely have taken a keen interest in a fundraiser for Toronto Liberal MP Sarmite (Sam) Bulte, who has chaired the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage and the Interim Report on Copyright Reform. The $250-per-person event (which features a performance by Cowboy Junkies singer Margo Timmins) at Toronto’s Drake Hotel on Jan. 19 is being sponsored by a group that includes Canadian Publishers’ Council executive director Jackie Hushion. (Many of the other names, like Doug Firth, who heads the Canadian Motion Pictures Distributors Association, are similarly involved in cultural industry associations.)

Not surprisingly, some people have taken exception to this rather blatant endorsement. On his blog, University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who has criticized Bulte before for accepting donations from groups with a keen interest in the copyright issue, points out that everyone is acting within the rules of the Election Act and then lets her have it: “[W]ith the public’s cynicism about elected officials at an all-time high and Canadians increasingly frustrated by a copyright policy process that is seemingly solely about satisfying rights holder demands, is it possible to send a worse signal about the impartiality of the copyright reform process? At $250 a person, I have my doubts that many of the artists that Ms. Bulte claims to represent will be present. Instead, it will lobbyists and lobby groups, eagerly handing over their money with the expectation that the real value of the evening will come long after Margo Timmins has finished her set.”

In 2004, as Geist points out, Bulte’s riding association received donations from the CPC, the Association of Canadian Publishers, and Access Copyright. A couple of publishers, McArthur & Company and McGraw-Hill Ryerson, also chipped in some cash. The riding association for the Conservative Party’s Canadian Heritage critic, Bev Oda, also shows donations from the likes of Ted Rogers and Leonard Asper.

None of this is surprising, but it’s still problematic. Jack Kapica, blogging for The Globe and Mail – one of an increasing number of mainstream outlets, including the Hollywood Reporter, of all things, to write about this – offers a solution: “Should the outcome of the election be favourable for the morally besieged Liberal Party, perhaps leader Paul Martin should consider rewarding Ms. Bulte’s hard work and loyalty with a different portfolio entirely, if only to show that Canadians won’t dance to every tune the Americans wish to play and charge us for.”

Related links:
Click here for all of Michael Geist’s posts on this topic
Click here for a brief on this issue in the Hollywood Reporter
Click here for Jack Kapica’s blog (scroll down for item)

Amidst the constant presence in the news of library scanning projects and lawsuits for copyright infringement, Matthew Battles, an editor of the Harvard Library Bulletin, reiterates in an article for The Boston Globe the importance of books as artefacts, as objects worth more than the information they contain.

And what could show the value of books more than the desire to illegally possess or destroy them? Telling the stories of book thieves — of Harvard graduate student Joel Clifton Williams, found guilty of stealing 2,000 library books in 1932, and his modern counterpart, Stephen Blumberg, who stole a whopping 20,000 books by 1990 — and citing the historical theft and destruction of books in times of political upheaval, Battles concludes that, antiquities trafficking notwithstanding, book theft stems from the value placed on tactile representations of the past. He writes, “[Old] books offer us a sense of direct access to the past…. With their weight in our hands and their scent in our nostrils, we reflect not only on the stories they tell … but on the printers and artists who made them, and the readers who came before us.”

Related links:
Click here for Matthew Battles’ piece in The Boston Globe

Wouldn’t we all be better off without copyright laws as they’re currently conceived? That’s the position of an International Herald-Tribune opinion piece. Co-writers Joost Smiers and Marijke van Schijndel (who were, presumably, paid for the article) argue that copyright is excessive and benefits “cultural monopolists,” who “desperately want us to believe that without copyright we would have no artistic creations and therefore no entertainment. That is nonsense. We would have more, and more diverse ones.” How exactly this would work, alas, may still be unclear even after you’ve read the piece.

Related links:
Click here for the IHTM opinion piece

Last year, Google made big news at the Frankfurt Book Fair when it announced plans to launch its Google Print program, which would see copies of books scanned so the content could be searched online. From the start, there have been a lot of people who have had big concerns with this plan, but the story took a more serious turn this week, again in Frankfurt. This time, five huge publishers — McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley & Sons — announced that they were jointly filing a lawsuit over the Google Print for Libraries program.

Writes Edward Wyatt in the International Herald-Tribune: “Patricia Schroeder, president of the Association of American Publishers, a trade group, said the publishers tried to negotiate with Google over their differences, to no avail. She said the publishers wanted to file the lawsuit before the Nov. 1 deadline that Google set to resume scanning works under its Library program. This summer, Google put the program on hold to allow copyright holders to opt out of the program by telling Google that they did not want specific works included in the library collections to be scanned.”
Related links:
Click here for the article in the International Herald-Tribune

Representing more than 8,000 writers from across the United States, the Authors Guild is suing Google for “massive copyright infringement,” claiming damages and “demanding the search engine stop uploading the contents of library books,” James Sturcke of the Guardian reported yesterday.

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said the Authors Guild president, Nick Taylor. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

Google’s product management vice-president, Susan Wojcicki, says authors will be the ones losing out in the end. She claims the project will encourage the sales of books by making out-of-print, obscure, and lightly marketed titles accessible to millions of potential buyers, while preventing piracy with safeguards that include disabled copy and print functions. Says Wojcicki: “At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Guardian
Click here for a press release from the Authors Guild
Click here to access Google Print

An article on Wired.com presents arguments both for and against Google’s plan to create digital copies of millions of books from the libraries of Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, and Oxford universities, as well as the New York Public Library. The controversial project, which has an expected completion date of 2015, involves the scanning of books both under copyright protection and in the public domain.

Opposing the project are publishers and librarians fearful of the long-term decrease in revenues and the industry precedent the project represents. Many of them claim that Google’s Print Library Project, as it is officially called, is an infringement of copyright law.

Google claims that the project is protected by “fair use” provisions that are a part of that same law. The search engine intends to establish restrictions that it hopes will prevent the unlawful use of books. “Under Google’s strictures, readers can see just five pages at a time and no more than 20% of an entire book through multiple searches,” reports The Associated Press.

The project, which was put on hold in August to give publishers a chance to submit lists of books they do not want distributed online, is set to resume Nov. 1.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from Wired.com

Today, Salon.com unveiled the first of 10 installments of Cory Doctorow’s new novella, Themepunks. Born and raised in Toronto, Doctorow, an acclaimed science fiction writer, has made all of his books available for free download, saying on his website that “the increased scope and duration of copyright are strangling free expression, privacy and innovation, and … that enabling my fans to trade my words makes me more money.”

Related links:
Click here to read the first installment of Themepunks
Click here to visit Doctorow’s website
Click here for a Q&Q article on Doctorow from June 2003

The Toronto Star takes a skeptical look at the recently released Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection — a 1,082-title collection of literature from The Iliad to modern classics. Writes reporter Jordan Heath-Rawlings: “Laid down page by page and end to end, the Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection would stretch about 84 kilometres, or about the same distance as a morning commute to downtown Toronto from Kitchener. And it can all be yours — all half a million pages of it — for the low price of $7,989.99 (all figures U.S.).” Aside from these jabs at the collection’s unwieldy volume, Heath-Rawlings discusses the real “completeness” of the collection, noting that important contemporary figures like Ernest Hemingway have been omitted due to copyright restrictions.

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Toronto Star

Tonya Maracle’s six-year-old “legal nightmare” ended recently when an Ontario Superior Court judge awarded her $40,000 in a copyright case against Key Porter. According to The Globe and Mail, the case began in 1998 when Maracle, who specializes in making dream catchers, was approached about participating in a book about the “webbed hoops” and agreed to submit her work to the publisher as long as they credited her and her company. After Key Porter returned the dream catchers, Maracle didn’t hear anything else about it and assumed the project had been cancelled. As Paul Waldie writes in the Globe: “Key Porter released a 127-page book in 1999 called Dream Catchers: Myths and History. It contained 21 pictures of Maracle’s dream catchers, including a full-page picture on the cover. Maracle’s first name was misspelled in the credits and Soaring Eagle [Maracle’s company] wasn’t mentioned.”

Related links:
Click here for The Globe and Mail article

Google’s plan to digitize thousands of public-domain books from the New York Public Library, Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, and the libraries of Harvard and Michigan universities is drawing fire from concerned publishing associations according to an article in Business Week magazine. A number of American organizations and publishers — including the Association of American University Presses and the Association of American Publishers — have recently written letters to Google expressing concern that the world’s largest search engine might expand its program to include copyrighted material. Publishers are also worried about the potential loss of revenues should consumers choose to download free copies of public-domain titles.

Related links:
Read the Business Week article