How The Cookie Crumbles

Regrettably, this is not about an end to data-collecting "cookies".  It's about intellectual property esoterica. 

For Fenwick and West LLP , legal blogger David L. Hayes Esquire  has complied the most comprehensive and fascinating summary of the most newsworthy and influential copyright lawsuits in recent times.

It is titled, "ADVANCED COPYRIGHT ISSUES ON THE INTERNET."
https://www.fenwick.com/insights/publications/advanced-copyright-issues-on-the-internet

Here is the link to the .pdf, all 1020 pages of it.  
https://assets.fenwick.com/documents/Internet-Copyright-Treatise-0920.pdf

It's an absolute treasure trove if you want to know what was really going on with the Dancing Baby (see page 889), or why EBay cannot be touched when its sellers sell copyrighted works at auction (see page 926) , caching, incidental copies of copyrighted works, inducement liability, vicarious liability, innocent storage, acting as a conduit,  and much much more.

Many decisions seem harsh to copyright owners. That's the way the cookie crumbles.

Of great interest is pp 999 - 1001 (First Sales In Electronic Commerce), which goes to the heart of why the Internet Archive's digital lending premise is not permitted under the DMCA. At least, it is of interest, if you read this rather piratical distortion of copyright history by Ryan and LaToya and Maria.

https://wdet.org/posts/2020/10/15/90154-publisher-lawsuit-against-internet-archive-puts-future-of-book-ownership-in-question/

I'm not sure if you can "like" this author's reply to the premise, left in the Comments section of the piece, but the comments about "the future of book ownership" are absolute, opinionated rubbish.

Another somewhat concerning article about a religious institution deciding to opt for piracy instead of donating their library to a University occurred this week.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/10/21/marygrove-college-library-materials-have-been-digitized-and-placed-online-will


For those writers with a book written and ready for competition, entry into the Vivian is free for members of RWA and also for non-members this inaugural year, and will open for entries on November 10th at 11.00 am Central Time.

Visit www.rwa.org/TheVivian for information.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/  

Jolly Rogers And False Flags

Let's start with the falsies.

I know, basically, that is Victoria's Secret.... falsies, that is. However, the piratical falsies are sites that promise to give away every book on Amazon or Goodreads, but what they really are after is the DMCA notice, where an author is so upset to find all her books being given away --apparently-- that she fires off a DMCA and gives the false pirates her name, address, email address, telephone number, signature. If they are lucky, she even tries to download a copy of her books for proof.

Such a site is Inamebooks.
It seems not to be legitimate. If you try to download a book, I hear, allegedly, you might instead receive malware and an entertaining image of a lady who encourages you to find her hole to keep you occupied while the malware does its embedding work.

Don't go there.

If you gave them your email address, watch out for emails and phone calls such as from 1-800-561-6189 purporting to be from Apple about a problem with your cloudflare or storage account. It's not. Don't bite.

The existence of sites like this, and others like it, owes much to the loopholes in the DMCA that holds OSPs and ISPs harmless for what they host.

Cloudflare.com, namecheap.com, safenames.net and amazonaws.com ought to be somewhat responsible but appear not to be.

There might be a remedy about to move at glacial pace through Congress. The legal bloggers Matthew Nigriny and John Gary Maynard III for Hunton Andrews Kurth opine on how much the DMCA favors ISPs and OSPs over copyright owners.
https://www.huntonak.com/images/content/6/7/v2/67187/copyright-office-finds-dcma-tilts-away-from-copyright-owners.pdf

Meanwhile, for more on bad behavior by Amazon:
https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/amazons-anticompetitive-history/

A real jolly roger appears to fly over the Internet Archive.  The brilliant and persistent --and real insight-sharing Victoria--Victoria Strauss covers the issue comprehensively.
https://accrispin.blogspot.com/2020/06/four-major-publishers-sue-internet.html

If your books are still being given away on an "Emergency" basis because the world needs free entertainment while authors do not need to eat and pay the rent during the same emergency, tell your Congressional representative or senator.... although, a little bird told me that Rand Paul and Ron Wyden are not sympathetic to ripped-off authors.

All the best,

Rowena Cherry 

SPACE SNARK™ http://www.spacesnark.com/