copyright | Chris Aldrich

👓 Sorry, Sony Music, you don’t own the rights to Bach’s music on Facebook | Ars Technica

Read Sorry, Sony Music, you don’t own the rights to Bach’s music on Facebook (Ars Technica)

Public shaming forces publisher to abandon ridiculous claim to classical music.

When is the industry going to finally fix this issue of false positives like this. Surely in the case of Bach, it should be even easier?

👓 Project Gutenberg blocks German users after court rules in favor of Holtzbrinck subsidiary | TeleRead

Read Project Gutenberg blocks German users after court rules in favor of Holtzbrinck subsidiary by Chris Meadows (TeleRead)

The global Internet and highly territorial real world have had a number of collisions, especially where ebook rights are concerned. The most recent such dispute involves Project Gutenberg, a well-respected public domain ebook provider—in fact, the oldest. It concerns 18 German-language books by three German authors. As a result of a German lawsuit, Project Gutenberg has blocked Germany from viewing the Gutenberg web site. The books in question are out of copyright in the United States, because at the time they passed into the public domain US copyrights were based on the period after publication rather than the author’s life. The three authors involved are Heinrich Mann (died in 1950), Thomas Mann (1955) and Alfred Döblin (1957).

Some interesting thoughts on cross border intellectual property and copyright. Even if a site blocks the content, there are easy enough means of getting around it that local jurisdictions would need to enforce things locally anyway. Why bother with the intermediate step?

👓 Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement | EFF

Read Federal Judge Says Embedding a Tweet Can Be Copyright Infringement (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Rejecting years of settled precedent, a federal court in New York has ruled [PDF] that you could infringe copyright simply by embedding a tweet in a web page. Even worse, the logic of the ruling applies to all in-line linking, not just embedding tweets. If adopted by other courts, this legally and...

This is an insane bit of news and could have some chilling effects on all areas of the web.

Reposted “My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims! :)” by Sebastian Tomczak (Twitter)

My ten hour white noise video now has five copyright claims! 🙂 pic.twitter.com/dX9PCM1qGx

— Sebastian Tomczak (@littlescale) January 4, 2018

Information Theory and signal processing FTW!

(Aside: This is a great example of how people really don’t understand our copyright system or science in general.)

👓 Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated! | Archive.org

Read Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated! (Internet Archive Blogs)

The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane University calls this “Library Public Domain.” She and her students helped bring the first scanned books of this era available online in a collection named for the author of the bill making this necessary: The Sonny Bono Memorial Collection. Thousands more books will be added in the near future as we automate. We hope this will encourage libraries that have been reticent to scan beyond 1923 to start mass scanning their books and other works, at least up to 1942.