LibriVox attempts to do for audiobooks what Project Gutenberg has for printed ones. They take public domain works and have volunteers read them. Once the files are assembled (for example, chapters of a book, or multiple readers on a single short poem), they are placed in the public domain in turn.

A while ago, I did my first LibriVox upload, reading Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s (yes, that Bulwer-Lytton) “When Stars Are In The Quiet Skies” as part of their weekly short poem series, where they ask as many readers as possible to do each poem. I was one of 17 readers that week: you can hear the results on Archive.org.

Ars Technica points at MusOpen.com, which is dedicated to public domain classical music. Besides scores, they take bids on performances: when the performance is fully funded, they record the piece and release it into the public domain.

Neat concept, but there are other places like Mutopia, which have much larger collections of sheet music, along with the Lilypond source files, so you can format them any way you want. There are also sites like the Wikimedia Commons, which have their own music libraries. We’ll have to see how this plays out.

In a lawsuit filed by UMG against someone who sold promotional CDs on eBay, the following language can be found:

Alternatively, Augusto testified that “a common way to
dispose of them” is to give unsold promotional CD away, or he may throw them
away. Both are unauthorized distributions.

It’s a violation of copyright to throw something in the trash? TEH STOOPID, IT BURNZZZZZZ….

While browsing the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee’s archive of rejected cases, I came across an interesting discussion. It appears that a fair number of Wikipedians wanted to use the International Symbol of Access (♿) to indicate handicapped accessibility on Wikipedia. However, it’s a copyrighted symbol. While it’s apparently licensed under a free-use/no edit license, Wikipedia prefers outright free licenses, that don’t restrict any future uses that people may come up with. A few users took the case to the ArbCom, hoping they’d rule that as an internationally-recognized symbol, it was an acceptable use on WP: others argued that there was no information conveyed by the symbol that couldn’t be likewise conveyed by non-copyrighted text. The ArbCom declined the case, apparently feeling that it wasn’t their place to override policy in this case.

I post a lot of my digital photos on flickr under the Creative Commons “by-nc-nd” license, meaning that anyone can reuse them for non-commercial purposes, as long as they give me proper attribution and don’t change them.

Some people on flickr who post under a less-restrictive license, “by” only, recently got a surprise: their pictures had been appropriated by the ad agency for Virgin Mobile in Australia, who were using them in an ad campaign, on bus shelters. Some of the people depicted in the photos are rather ticked-off…

Over on Making Light, Teresa summarizes a lot of good sources arguing that copyright is not used properly.

Read it thoroughly, along with the cited materials.

Edit: for example, the first speech cited, which reads, in part:

I will take an example. Dr Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be it is impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the doctor’s servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground. Considered as a reward to him, the difference between a twenty years’ and sixty years’ term of posthumous copyright would have been nothing or next to nothing. But is the difference nothing to us? I can buy Rasselas for sixpence; I might have had to give five shillings for it. I can buy the Dictionary, the entire genuine Dictionary, for two guineas, perhaps for less; I might have had to give five or six guineas for it. Do I grudge this to a man like Dr Johnson? Not at all. Show me that the prospect of this boon roused him to any vigorous effort, or sustained his spirits under depressing circumstances, and I am quite willing to pay the price of such an object, heavy as that price is. But what I do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson’s none the better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a farthing.

When Perfect 10 sued Google, among their claims was that providing HTML that displayed the images from their server was infringement, and that all the people who viewed these images were infringing because their browsers made copies to display them.

Thankfully, they got slapped down nicely.

Some folks used Disney cartoons to come up with the words for a short tutorial on copyright law and fair use.

Ok, I’m definitely never buying a Mark Helprin book.

Once the state has dipped its enormous beak into the stream of your wealth and possessions they are allowed to flow from one generation to the next. Though they may be divided and diminished by inflation, imperfect investment, a proliferation of descendants and the government taking its share, they are not simply expropriated.

That is, unless you own a copyright. Were I tomorrow to write the great American novel (again?), 70 years after my death the rights to it, though taxed at inheritance, would be stripped from my children and grandchildren. To the claim that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the heirs of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts.

Update: Lawrence Lessig’s wiki has a response to the article, setting out the exact reasons it’s a bad idea.

If you can’t get the first one, go for the second.

Really, how long did they think they were going to keep HDDVD from being reverse-engineered, anyhow?

(h/t Digg, by way of Scoble.

Edited: ah, hell, if I’m going to be a rebel, I should do it correctly, right? 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0