In 1920, H.G. Wells published The Outline of History — Wells’ take on the unfolding of human civilization that was especially harsh on religion and superstition. In response, Hilaire Belloc, a devout Roman Catholic, wrote a series of articles attacking The Outline of History which he compiled into 1926′s A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline…
Tag archives for Copyright
Creative Commons now has a Public Domain Mark designed for designating works for which there is no known copyright for anywhere in the world. In a press release announcing the creation of the Public Domain Mark, Creative Common said, The Public Domain Mark in its current form is intended for use with works that are…
GoToHellMan recently published a hilarious parody of publisher complaints about piracy Offline Book “Lending” Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $1 Trillion, Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that “publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy” comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to…
This Weblog Tools Collection post by Mark Ghosh from earlier this year had me shaking my head. The short version: YouTube users upload videos and don’t alter privacy settings, so YouTube displays an embed code. Ghosh and his cohorts embed them on one of their sites. Angry YouTube users then email and complain that Ghosh,…
If you want to understand just how complicated it is to determine whether or not a work is still copyrighted in the United States, check out Paul Herman’s analysis of the copyright status of works by Robert E. Howard who died in 1936 but had many works published posthumously (in some cases, several decades after…
Yale University Press has just published James Boyle’s new book about the damage being wreaked by intellectual property laws, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. Boyle also has a website for the book at ThePublicDomain.org, where the book can be downloaded for free as a PDF (the book is available under a…