Why Protecting Recipes Under Intellectual Property Law May Leave a Bad Taste in Your Mouth; Above The Law, August 27, 2018

Tom Kulik, Above The Law; Why Protecting Recipes Under Intellectual Property Law May Leave a Bad Taste in Your Mouth

[Kip Currier: Interesting and useful information--in case you're thinking about monetizing your own BBQ rub...or marketing Grandma's secret recipe for fill-in-the-blank.] 

"What may be pleasing to the palate, however, is not always acceptable under intellectual property law."

Printed book sales rise for first time in four years as ebooks decline; Guardian, 5/13/16

Mark Sweney, Guardian; Printed book sales rise for first time in four years as ebooks decline:

"Sales of printed books have grown for the first time in four years, lifted by the adult colouring book craze and 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland, as ebooks suffered their first ever decline.

Ebook sales fell by 1.6% to to £554m in 2015, the first drop recorded in the seven years industry body the Publishers Association has been monitoring the digital book market. Meanwhile, sales of printed books grew by 0.4% to £2.76bn."

What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us; New York Times, 1/22/16

Joe Karaganis and David McClure, New York Times; What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us:

"COLLEGE course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear.

Some schools archive them, some don’t. Some syllabus archives are public, some aren’t. Some faculty members treat their syllabuses as trade secrets, others are happy to post them online. Despite the bureaucratization of higher education over the past few decades, syllabuses have escaped systematic treatment.

Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.

This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history."

10/22/13 & 10/24/13 Copyright/Open Access Presentations at University of Pittsburgh

John Barnett, University of Pittsburgh ULS Scholarly Communications Librarian, has kindly provided the information below about two upcoming presentations: Event #1- Copyright & Your Research Tuesday, October 22, 4 to 5 pm Ballroom A, University Club Speaker: Peter B. Hirtle, Senior Policy Advisor, Cornell University Library, and Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet Security and Society, Harvard University * Learn about copyrights, author agreements, and publishing contracts * Learn to navigate public access requirements in federal grants * Discover new publishing options for Pitt authors Event #2- Open Access Policies: Coming Attractions Thursday, October 24, 4 to 5 pm Ballroom A, University Club Speaker: Michael W. Carroll, Professor of Law and director, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University, Washington College of Law * Learn more about the White House directive on Open Access and the University of California System policy on Open Access * Better understand how scholarly publishing will be impacted * Discover the importance of reuse rights for Open Access works

Copyright's Paradox: brilliantly argued scholarly book tackles free speech vs. copyright - BoingBoing.net, 9/18/08

Copyright's Paradox: brilliantly argued scholarly book tackles free speech vs. copyright:
"Netanel explores the history of copyright through this free speech lens, starting with the first copyright statutes in the 18th century and moving through the history of American publishing, the explosion in reproduction technologies at the start of the 20th century, and the horrible mess that is the 21st century."
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/18/copyrights-paradox-b.html