Medium – Who should be responsible for maintaining and troubleshooting open-source projects? – “…It’s hard to demand that programmers who are working for free troubleshoot problems or continue to maintain software that they’ve lost interest in for whatever reason — though some companies certainly try. Not adequately maintaining these projects, on the other hand, makes the… Continue Reading
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Category Archives: Intellectual Property
Why Angry Librarians Are Going to War With Publishers Over E-Books
Slate – “If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No. 1 fiction bestseller—from my local library in my preferred format, e-book, I’d be looking at about a 10-week waitlist. And soon, if the book’s publisher, a division of Macmillan, has its way, that already-lengthy wait time could get significantly… Continue Reading
Appeals court rules web scraping doesn’t violate anti-hacking law
arstechnica: “Scraping a public website without the approval of the website’s owner isn’t a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an appeals court ruled on Monday. The ruling comes in a legal battle that pits Microsoft-owned LinkedIn against a small data-analytics company called hiQ Labs. HiQ scrapes data from the public profiles of… Continue Reading
Our past on the internet is disappearing before we can make it history
Lapham’s Quarterly – Please, My Digital Archive. It’s Very Sick. “Digital history isn’t history at all—until, without warning, it is. In an age in which any internet user is a creator-in-the-making, reaching a handful of virtual friends or entire corners of the web in a moment’s notice, the line between archive-worthy material and the detritus… Continue Reading
Tech Paging Big Brother: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite
The New York Times – As fake and illegitimate texts proliferate online, books are becoming a form of misinformation.The author of “1984” would not be surprised. “I started browsing Orwell on Amazon after writing about the explosion in counterfeit books offered by the retailer. The fake books appeared to help Amazon by, for example, encouraging publishers… Continue Reading
The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets Not Enforcement Drive Down Copyright Infringement
Quintais, João and Poort, Joost, The Decline of Online Piracy: How Markets – Not Enforcement – Drive Down Copyright Infringement (August 14, 2019). American University International Law Review, Vol. 34 , No. 4, pp. 807-876 (2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3437239 “This article deals with the acquisition and consumption of music, films, series, books, and games… Continue Reading
Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images
Eye on Design – Meet the cast of stock image characters that grace dozens of book covers – “…The book cover design world, it turns out, has something of an all-star squad of stock and archival image that show up on book covers time and time again. James Morrison, an editor, designer, and avid reader who… Continue Reading
Can AI Hold Patents?
Law.com – Can AI Hold Patents? Quick Takes on the USPTO’s Questions About Artificial Intelligence – “Academics have been debating for a while whether machines can be inventors for the purposes of patent law. Earlier this month, University of Surrey IP professor Ryan Abbott and others upped the ante, forming the Artificial Inventor Project and… Continue Reading
Toward a new kind of Big Deal for open source academic articles
Inside Higher Ed – University librarians and some academic publishers are optimistic about the possibility of reaching new agreements to make more academic articles fully open, but they acknowledge many challenges ahead. “Making the transition from paying to read to paying to publish academic research won’t be easy for universities or publishers. But it is… Continue Reading
Book publishers sue Audible to stop new speech-to-text feature
ars technica – Publishers say Audible’s new captions feature is illegal. Is it? – “Seven of the nation’s top book publishers sued Amazon subsidiary Audible on Friday, asking federal courts to block the company from releasing a new feature called Audible Captions that’s due out next month. The technology does exactly what it sounds like: display… Continue Reading
Linking Liability
Inside Higher Education – Sci-Hub, a repository for pirated research papers, is widely acknowledged to be illegal. But is sharing a link to the site illegal, too? “There is little dispute that Sci-Hub, the website that provides free access to millions of proprietary academic papers, is illegal. Yet, despite being successfully sued twice by major… Continue Reading
Anti-Piracy Efforts Are Unlikely to Beat Sci-Hub
Follow-up to previous posting with related links – Elsevier sends copyright threat to site for linking to Sci-Hub – see Torrent Freak – “Elsevier and other academic publishers see ‘pirate’ site Sci-Hub as a major threat to their billion-dollar industries. Many researchers, however, can’t function properly without the notorious site. Since anti-piracy efforts are unlikely… Continue Reading
