By Andrew Albanese
In a major ruling, Federal judge Harold Baer this week tossed the Authors Guild case against the HathiTrust. In granting the HathiTrust’s motion for summary judgment, Baer ruled that the scan program was a clear fair use under the copyright law, and in the process dealt a potentially fatal blow to the Authors Guild’s other long-running lawsuit filed against Google over its scanning program.
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By Andrew Albanese
The battle, of course, is far from over as PIPA still has over 30 co-sponsors in the senate, and SOPA could very well be amended and brought forward again.
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By Andrew Albanese
Librarians and book re-sellers say their core activities are now in question after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals on August 15 upheld a lower court decision finding that the “First Sale” doctrine in U.S. copyright law—the provision that enables libraries to lend and consumers to re-sell books they’ve lawfully purchased—does not apply to works manufactured outside the U.S. While the verdict stands as a major victory for the publishing industry, which has long fought the “illegal importation of foreign works,” especially textbooks, critics say the broad decision goes too far, and could harm libraries and encourage the outsourcing of jobs.
The ruling comes in the case of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. v. Supap Kirtsaeng, in which Kirtsaeng, a Thai-born U.S. student was accused of importing and re-selling foreign editions of textbooks, made for exclusive sale abroad, in the U.S. market via online service eBay. In its verdict, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit affirmed by a 2-1 margin that Kirtsaeng “could not avail himself of the first sale doctrine,” because language in the statute says that products must be “lawfully made.” The court ruled that those two words—“lawfully made”—limits First Sale “specifically and exclusively to works that are made in territories in which the Copyright Act is law, and not to foreign-manufactured works.”
The verdict is the second decision in a year to limit the First Sale doctrine.
By Andrew Albanese
Can foreign works that have passed into the public domain in the U.S. be withdrawn by Congress and put back under copyright protection? That question will be addressed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which this week granted a writ of certiorari in a case, Golan v. Holder, that questions the constitutionality of a federal statute that restored copyright protection to thousands of foreign works, including symphonies by Shostakovich and Stravinsky, books by Virginia Woolf, artwork by Picasso, and films by Fellini and Hitchcock.
The case has had a winding legal road so far. The challenge stems from a 1994 amendment to the Copyright Act, known as the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), which removed some foreign works from the public domain in the U.S. in order to implement intellectual property treaties. …read more
By Andrew Albanese
For book industry veteran Kristen McLean, the idea for her new business began, naturally, with a book. “I was under contract to write a book about the decision-making chain in the publishing industry, what I call the passion chain—the number of critical decisions that have to line up exactly right for a book to make it successfully from the author to the reader,” she tells PW. “Three chapters in, I found that I couldn’t write the book, at least not the book the publisher wanted. Instead, I built a company.” On February 15, McLean will make the first public presentation of that company—Bookigee. …read more
From research and pilot programs, digitization efforts and financial support for vendors, libraries have helped prepare the way for e-books. But now that the consumer market for e-books has taken off, are libraries in danger of being marginalized? A standing-room-only panel discussion on Saturday, January 8, at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego, CA, looked at the challenges and opportunities e-books hold for libraries, with two overarching observations: e-books have arrived, and, as moderator Rick Weingarten noted in kicking off the discussion, e-books are not just another format—they are different, just as web pages are different from printed pages, and e-mail is different from regular mail. “And because e-books are different,” he said, “what libraries do with them is different.”….read more
