There are three major e-book projects that make electronic books available for free to the general public in accessible formats (usually HTML, sometimes “plain text”). One is Project Gutenberg, an American project that does not limit itself to English. I am a volunteer there. The second is Project Laurens Jz Coster, named after the Dutchman … Read More

Brian Flemming reports that the Youtube account of the Rational Response Squad has been deleted in response to false copyright claims by a creationist group called Creation Science Evangelism Ministries. The Rational Response Squad, an activist group of so-called New Atheists, had been posting videos that discussed claims by the creationist group. These videos included … Read More

Here’s a fallacy that in these fast moving times I observe on a regular basis: people on the internet arguing that everything on the internet is wrong. People using free software to argue that free software sucks (a recurring occurrence at Slashdot). Jack Valenti arguing for eternal copyright, yet nobody wants to read his book. … Read More

Copyprof Michael Geist has an excellent article up roughly outlining how the US is blackmailing most of the rest of the world into adopting copyright laws even more ridicous than it already has. Basically the idea is that the US wants to force other countries to buy its wares while offering nothing in return. (The … Read More

It’s a question I have to ask regularly of the direct marketing scum that call me on the phone: “Excuse me, are you calling me to sell me something?” For some reason, the phonetards try to postpone the anti-climax of the conversation as long as possible by trying to obscure the reason for their call. … Read More

At the Teleread blog (where I also blog), Robert Nagle is talking about works that did not enter the public domain in the USA when they should have, thanks to Walt Disney and other publishers buying legislation to shrink the public domain. His series is called The Copyright Ghosts Of…, discusses actual works (today amongst … Read More

A little under a year ago Joost Smiers and Marijke van Schijndel published an article in the International Herald Tribune called Imagine a World Without Copyright. In it they explore what would happen if works were burdened by only a very short copyright (one year, for instance), or no copyright at all. The reactions to … Read More

While reading up on Richard Stallman, the subject of my previous entry, I came across an article he wrote in 2001 for Nature in which he sums up the reasons why science must “push copyright aside”. I was struck by a pragmatic pre-emptive counter-argument to the argument that scientists need income from licensing to off-set … Read More

There are very few people who consistently say smart things about copyright. Actually, I only know one such person, and his name is Richard Stallman. Stallman’s arguments about copyright center on copyright for software. Basically, he doesn’t want it and would like it to go away. Since that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, he … Read More

From an unnamed book currently doing the rounds at Distributed Proofreaders, as quoted by one of the volunteers: And here let us remark, that this German prince, in order to read that work, was obliged to have the German translated into French by his friend Suhm, the Saxon minister at Petersburg. Chasot, who had no … Read More