THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS
An occasional newsletter about forthcoming
books and events |
August 2022 In this newsletter . . . progress on: The last papermakers of Fukushima a forthcoming event: the Ludlow Fine Book Fair 2022 a diatribe: about copyright |
a date for your diary: Ludlow Fine Book Fair |
The Old School Press will be there | |
29-30 October 2022 Clive Pavilion Ludlow Racecourse, SY8 2BT |
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a diatribe on: Copyright |
. . . and the internet | |
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I emailed the recommended ‘take-down’ request to the Internet Archive and received a reply telling me that ‘as a courtesy [sic] we have disabled controlled digital lending access for general patrons to the identified item(s), preserving access for blind and print-disabled patrons’. It can still be previewed, presumably only by the blind. One of the legs they claim to stand on is ‘exhaustion’ which ‘allows the owner of a particular copy of a work to sell, lend, or give away that copy without payment to or permission from the rights holder’. I’ve no problem with a physical library lending out a physical copy – presumably they bought that copy. I don’t remember an order from the Internet Archive. The other leg is ‘fair use’. Say no more. The major publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley have an ongoing lawsuit in New York against the Internet Archive. The SoA notes in particular that ‘at the beginning of the Covid-19 health crisis, as authors faced cancelled bookings, contracts and other financial hardship, in an unprecedented attack on the rights of authors and publishers, the Internet Archive announced that it would offer unlimited lending of its collection "to serve the nation’s displaced learners". The site stoked further controversy in November 2021 when it teamed up with The National Library of New Zealand and proposed to digitise 600,000 books from its overseas collection, including thousands of in-copyright books – plans which were put on hold after international outcry.’ (my italics) I’m not sure I shall be selling books to the National Library of New Zealand if that’s their view of other people’s copyright. They’re pretty keen about copyright in their own materials, with a warning ‘This item is all rights reserved, which means you'll have to get permission from Alexander Turnbull Library before using it’ against recent materials on their website. Say no more. If you’d like to
read more, visit the
relevant page at the Society of Authors website. BTW, a little digging in
the Open Library and I discovered that I am also the author of ‘The children who
learned to smile’, a children’s book with - strangely - exactly the same cover as my 1999 book
Managing software quality and business risk. Nuff said. |