Posts Tagged: "eBooks"

The Quixotic Battle Over Controlled Digital Lending Heats Up

In June 2020, a few months into the pandemic, a group of four large publishing houses—Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House (collectively, the Publishers)—sued Internet Archive (IA) in the Southern District of New York for “willful mass copyright infringement.” The spat centers around IA’s Open Library project, which scans millions of physical books and delivers them digitally across the globe for free to anyone with an internet connection. IA proclaims that the “ultimate goal of the Open Library is to make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world,” but it conspicuously fails to mention that its utopian vision doesn’t include getting permission from copyright owners before offering their works on its virtual bookshelves. IA argues before the court that it doesn’t need permission because its actions qualify as fair use under the dubious new theory of controlled digital lending (CDL), which it claims to be “fundamentally the same as traditional library lending” since it “poses no new harm to authors or the publishing industry.”

Publishers Win Preliminary Injunction Against Maryland Law that Requires Licensing Digital Works to Libraries

Publishers scored a win yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland when the court granted their request for a preliminary injunction enjoining enforcement of the Maryland Act, which essentially calls for compulsory licensing of electronic literary works to libraries on “reasonable terms”. The law went into effect on January 1, 2022. The lawsuit was brought by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) against the state of Maryland and charged that the Maryland Act was preempted by the U.S. Copyright Act. The Maryland Act requires publishers to 1) offer to license copyrighted electronic literary products, such as eBooks and digital audiobooks, to public libraries, and (2) to ensure the terms of such licenses are fair. The goal was to avoid up-charging and stringent licensing restrictions on libraries.

State Compulsory eBook and Audiobook Licensing Is Wrong on Law and Policy

The ability of copyright owners to experiment with different marketing strategies is fundamental to copyright law. Indeed, the U.S. Copyright Act promotes the public good by granting exclusive rights to copyright owners that incentivize the creation and dissemination of new works on their own terms. These exclusive rights are the reason why copyright owners invest time, energy, and money into creating new works, and why they have a chance to recoup expenses and perhaps make a profit. The Copyright Act has always celebrated the right and ability of copyright owners to choose whether, how, when, and where their works are distributed to the public. And under our dual system of government, where federal law reigns supreme, it is well-settled that the states are powerless to interfere in ways that conflict with the nationwide scheme established by Congress. Nevertheless, there is an alarming new trend of states pursuing laws that would force publishers, many of whom are also authors, to grant licenses to public libraries for access to their digital works, such as eBooks and audiobooks.

2d Cir. affirms S.D.N.Y. decision in Barnes & Noble copyright case, cloud-based services questions

In early October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2d Cir.) handed down a decision, which almost answered important questions about how cloud-based access to content can affect copyright holders. At issue in the case, Cheryl Smith v. Barnesandnoble.com, LLC, was Barnes & Noble’s activities in providing samples of a text through the cloud to consumers after a licensing agreement on that piece of text was terminated.

IBM patents continues push into virtual worlds, eBooks and more

We found another pair of patents related to digital worlds, an area where IBM has been active of late. A system for ensuring that the highest number of objects contained within a three-dimensional scene are seen by a person navigating the scene is the focus of U.S. Patent No. 8970586. The patent claims a clairvoyance method for a 3D scene by acquiring parameters associated with a clairvoyance camera and a clairvoyance viewport, determining a 3D scene to be rendered according to those parameters, rendering the 3D scene to obtain a 2D image presented in the clairvoyance viewport and composing the 2D image presented in both a clairvoyance viewpoint and a general scene viewport. This system overcomes issues of inconvenient manipulation virtual contentand low efficiency in modifying a 3D scene view to uncover an object.