Quick updates: Useful links for Google Books and the OCLC Policy Change
Many things have happened in the copyright/libraries and games/libraries world since my last post, and I’m not going to comment on them too much just yet. I did want to mention some resources I’ve found very useful when tracking some of the larger controversies.
-Walt Crawford’s March 2009 Cites & Insights has a wonderful summary of various perspectives on the Google Books settlement. I’d add Scrivener’s Error for an additional useful perspective from an author’s attorney. ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy also has a Google Book Settlement blog.
-The Code4Lib Wiki’s OCLC Policy Change article has been very valuable when trying to keep up with that controversy.
I’ve been hired by ALA to write articles related to copyright for their Web site, so I’ll be working on that for a bit. The articles will be available under a Creative Commons license, and I’ll probably make them available here as well. The Copyright Advisory Network group got together in DC this past December, and we’ve been working on developing resources on the revamped librarycopyright.net site since then (and we will continue to do so). In the near future I’m going to address a few issues related to some problems institutions have come across in their digitization projects and also when not to use a Creative Commons license (hint: when you don’t own the copyright in the material). Before that, though, expect a post on the Amazon controversy from the perspective of a Kindle 2 owner (as well as one who’s a bit frustrated with the Kindle 2 experience right now…)
Today’s slightly-off-my-normal-track link was to the Mont Blanc trademark infringement lawsuit against a person who was selling altered pens. Alas, the legal documents have been removed from the places they were publicly available and are only accessible through Pacer at the moment. I’m not a fountain pen user- as a lefty with poor hand writing in general, my penmenship with a fountain pen is a pretty scary thing- but Holly is a dedicated collector, and I’ve been following this situation with some interest.