Re: selling e-articles

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

For anyone who does not follow Barbara Fister's playful reference to the
link on the BoingBoing blog, it may indeed appear that the Wal-Mart company
is indeed making bizarre assertions about copyright.  But follow the link;
the blog post is by the talented science fiction writer but unreliable
copyright authority Cory Doctorow.  The "copyright is forever" comment is
made by a Wal-Mart employee, not an authorized spokesperson for the company.
This is demagoguery on Doctorow's part.  No doubt you could find a librarian
somewhere who would assert that a library could take an in-copyright book,
scan it, and put it on an open Web server for all the world to access and
call it fair use.  But I doubt that that interpretation would accord with
the institution's policy.

I have no quarrel with Fister here, who provided me with a welcome
early-morning chuckle.  But Doctorow, sigh.

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Barbara Fister" <fister@gac.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>; "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 2:33 PM
Subject: Re: selling e-articles

> Yes - the National Geographic case involved photography. Tasini
> found in favor of the authors, though there's still some fallout
> litigation going on; National Geographic was found in favor of
> the NGS, because unlike Tasini it didn't disaggregate the photos
> but reproduced the whole shebang on a CD.
> http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2008/07/greenberg.html
>
> Though everything has been simplified: Wal-Mart has recently
> ruled that "copyright is forever" - :o)
> http://www.boingboing.net/2008/08/12/walmart-you-cant-sca.html
>
> Barbara Fister
>
> Quoting "B.G. Sloan" <bgsloan2@yahoo.com>:
>
>> Pippa Smart said:
>>
>> "The problem that your colleague was thinking of is Tasini, a
>> case where the NYT took photographs that it had used in one
>> publication, and then created a new database product without the
>> permission of the photographers - the problem was the creation of
>> a new product."
>>
>> Didn't the Tasini case involve freelance writers who claimed that
>> publishers had violated their copyrights by placing their works
>> in third party electronic databases without obtaining permission
>> from the freelance writers?
>>
>> Bernie Sloan
>> Sora Associates
>> Bloomington, IN
>