Lawyers in ‘Spider-Man’ Battle Spin Their Early Arguments; New York Times, 6/1/12

Patrick Healy, New York Times; Lawyers in ‘Spider-Man’ Battle Spin Their Early Arguments:

"Lawyers for the Broadway producers of “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” argued in federal court on Friday that the musical’s former director, Julie Taymor, had borrowed so many ideas from Spider-Man superhero lore that she was not entitled to copyright protection for her initial three-page script outline for the musical, which features characters and subplots from Spider-Man comics and movies. Ms. Taymor’s lawyers, who regard the outline as crucial to her copyright claims and battle for more than $1 million from the producers, countered that the document reflected what they termed originality and the singular vision that she had demonstrated as the Tony Award-winning director of “The Lion King.”"

Judge Allows Class-Action Suit Over Google’s Book Scanning; New York Times, 5/31/12

Julie Bosman, New York Times; Judge Allows Class-Action Suit Over Google’s Book Scanning:

"A federal judge in Manhattan granted class-action status on Thursday to authors suing Google over the company’s ambitious book-scanning project, allowing the long-stalled case to move forward...

James Grimmelmann, a professor at New York Law School who has studied the legal aspects of the case, said the judge’s decision “makes it very likely that we’re going to have a very high-stakes decision about Google’s book-scanning project.”"

Daddy, What Were Compact Discs?; New York Times, 5/30/12

Sam Grobart, New York Times; Daddy, What Were Compact Discs? :

"ONE day, when my children are a little older, I will gather them close and I will tell them about how I lived through the Great Format Wars.

I will recount to them a seemingly endless cycle of battles. From LP to cassette to minidisk (oh wait — not to minidisk) to CD. From Betamax to VHS to DVD to HD-DVD to Blu-ray. From punchcards to magnetic tape to floppy disks to zip drives to DVD-ROMs."

Libraries Grapple With The Downside Of E-Books; NPR's Morning Edition, 5/29/12

Ben Bradford, NPR's Morning Edition; Libraries Grapple With The Downside Of E-Books:

"BRADFORD: Another problem is that almost all U.S. libraries that offer e-books do so through an outside company called Overdrive. And libraries don't actually buy the e-books. They're in a way renting them. Here's Tom Galante, who runs the Queens Library.

GALANTE: When you license content through them, you really aren't owning the content. Every year you have to pay them to continue to have that subscription service or you lose your content that you've already paid for.

BRADFORD: If a library stops using Overdrive, it could lose all the books it's licensed through the company. Robert Wolven heads an American Library Association group that's trying to develop a new model - one that that publishers would buy into and would eliminate middlemen."

Google Publishes Data on Copyright Removal Requests; PCMag.com, 5/24/12

Chloe Albanesius, PCMag.com; Google Publishes Data on Copyright Removal Requests:

"Google today announced plans to disclose the number of copyright-related takedown requests it receives on a daily basis.

The search giant today released information dating back to July 2011 and said it will update the data every day. "The number of requests has been increasing rapidly," Fred von Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, said in a blog post. "These days it's not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests each week, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009.""

UCSF Implements Policy to Make Research Papers Freely Accessible to Public; University of California San Francisco, 5/23/12

Kristen Bole, University of California San Francisco; UCSF Implements Policy to Make Research Papers Freely Accessible to Public:

"The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.

The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so.

“Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,” said Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative at UCSF. “The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research,” he said. “By opening the currently closed system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in research.”"

'Canal Zone' Collages Test The Meaning Of 'Fair Use'; NPR's All Things Considered, 5/16/12

Joel Rose, NPR's All Things Considered; 'Canal Zone' Collages Test The Meaning Of 'Fair Use' :

"Richard Prince is an art world superstar. His paintings sell for millions, and many hang in the world's great museums. But one recent series of works cannot be shown in public — at least, not lawfully. Last year, a judge found Prince liable for copyright infringement for using the photographs of another artist without permission. A federal court in New York is set to hear Prince's appeal Monday, and the outcome of that appeal could have major implications for the art world and beyond."