Monday, April 15, 2013

My Copyright Career; New York Times, 4/13/13

Tracey L. Armstrong, New York Times; My Copyright Career: "Then, in December that year, I found a job as a clerk at the Copyright Clearance Center, which was then in an old mill building in Salem, Mass... I thought that I would keep the job for about a year and move on, but the copyright area began evolving from a back-room specialty to a basis of corporate competition. There were, and still are, a lot of challenges in helping businesses and academic institutions quickly access and license copyright-protected materials and compensate publishers and creators for the use of their content... In 2007, the center’s C.E.O., Joseph Alen, retired, and I was named to replace him. My challenge has been to change the company from a licensing agent for print materials to one offering global licensing solutions for all media, including images, blogs and e-books."

Monday, April 8, 2013

The Slow Death of the American Author; New York Times, 4/7/13

Scott Turow, New York Times; The Slow Death of the American Author: "Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution, which instructs Congress “to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The idea is that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy. That culture is now at risk. The value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers."

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

A Setback for Resellers of Digital Products; New York Times, 4/1/13

Ben Sisario, New York Times; A Setback for Resellers of Digital Products: "The case has been closely watched as a test of whether the first sale doctrine — the legal principle that someone who owns a copy of a copyrighted work, like a book or album, is free to resell it — can be applied to digital goods. In an order dated Saturday, Judge Richard J. Sullivan of United States District Court in Manhattan ruled that ReDigi was liable for copyright infringement, and seemed entirely unmoved by ReDigi’s arguments."