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The Coalition's mission statement says, "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra." (...) The Guild issued a statement following the protests, explaining its position: "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights." If the guild is trying to gain sympathy, it will have a very difficult time when it pits "economic rights" against civil rights.

Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here. Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this. My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

"The primary function of the RoMEO project was to ascertain all the rights issues relating to the process of self-archiving and to consider ways of addressing them. The following table maps the self-archiving process and the rights questions we identified. "

Fair use is the right, in some circumstances, to quote copyrighted material without asking permission or paying for it. Fair use enables the creation of new culture, and keeps current copyright holders from being private censors. With the Washington College of Law, the Center for Social Media creates tools for creators, teachers, and researchers to better use their fair use rights. Explore your fair use rights by clicking on one of the tabs above.

Cory Doctorow's column on DRM Cory Doctorow is a digital activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. Each fortnight he writes about copy protection, digital rights management (DRM) and the entertainment industry.

I'm working on a story to actually assess the state of development among big-name textbook publishers and will have more soon on that. For right now, though, it's quite clear that we have a very long ways to go. While a lack of content is a major issue, perhaps a bigger issue is the lack of standards via which the content can be disseminated. Obviously, DRM is a serious problem for textbooks. Copyright aside, though, there are currently around 30 formats in which e-books are published. If you're Pearson, into which basket will you be throwing all of your eggs? Frankly, there is only one that I see that makes a lot of sense right now. EPUB, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, is open, XML-based, and can grow as our needs increase. Even this format, though, needs traction with major publishers.

Amazon has announced that it will give authors and publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech function on any or all of their e-books available for the Kindle 2. The Reading Rights Coalition, which represents people who cannot read print, will protest the threatened removal of the text-to-speech function from e-books for the Amazon Kindle 2 outside the Authors Guild headquarters in New York City at 31 East 32nd

This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening. The key point is that reading aloud in private is the same whether done by a person or a machine, and reading aloud in private is never an infringement of copyright. Amazon has taken a step in the right direction by including text-to-speech technology for reading e-books aloud on its new Kindle 2". More details are available on the Forbes website.

Some publishers and agents expressed concern over a new, experimental feature that reads text aloud with a computer-generated voice. "They don't have the right to read a book out loud," said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild. "That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways: instead of being truly open, this new digital library will be controlled by a single company, Google, and a newly created Book Rights Registry consisting of representatives of authors and publishers; it will include millions of so-called "orphan works" that cannot legally be included in any competing digitization and access effort, and it will be available to readers only in the United States. It need not have been this way.

The proposed Google Book Search settlement creates the opportunity for unprecedented access by the public, scholars, libraries and others to a digital library containing millions of books assembled by major research libraries. But the settlement is controversial, in large part because this access is limited in major ways: instead of being truly open, this new digital library will be controlled by a single company, Google, and a newly created Book Rights Registry consisting of representatives of authors and publishers; it will include millions of so-called "orphan works" that cannot legally be included in any competing digitization and access effort, and it will be available to readers only in the United States. It need not have been this way.

"Ning announced repeatedly that it would delete free networks whose creators had not paid for one of its new pricing plans by midnight Aug. 20. On Aug. 21, however, Ning extended this deadline to August 30. Here's the announcement of this extension on its Help page: Deadline for Selecting a Ning Plan Extended to August 30, 2010 A number of Network Creators, particularly those based outside the United States, have requested more time to arrange for payment and make the right decision on a plan for their network. As a result, we have extended the deadline for selecting one of the three new plans (Ning Mini, Plus and Pro) to August 30, 2010. Beginning on this date, we will block access to any free Ning Network that isn't subscribed to one of the three plans. Please let us know if we can help, or if you have questions or comments. Thank you!"

" * Posted by amilla on September 14, 2010 at 2:26pm in Improvements to Ning Creators * View Discussions About the exclusion of the music player in the package "ning plus" I would like to inform the management of Ning that I demand from Ning administration to send me an e-mail with all the tracks that are blocked in order to protect the copyrighted material that now is blocked by the company Ning which has no right to withhold them. For these reasons I ask from Ning to send me the music files that was loaded up until the day that Ning music player was free for uploading for all networks. There is need for appropriate administration of music files with responsibility for all of the musicians members of my network. So I demand from Ning to send me all that music files. I am giving to Ning a period of two months to send me all the songs as attachments in the e-mail amilla.gr@gmail.com. Otherwise I have to inform the official intellectual property protecting organization of Greece for unauthorized restriction of intellectual property from the Ning. The same reasoning applies if the music files are deleted from Ning. Thank you and wait for response from Ning. Best regards The administration of www.amilla.gr"

The blind and other readers have the right for books to be presented to us in the format that is most useful to us, and we are not violating copyright law as long as we use readers, either human or machine, for private rather than public listening.

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education helps educators gain confidence about their rights to use copyrighted materials in developing students' critical thinking and communication skills. Check out these exciting additional resources:

Do we need an international treaty for reading disabled persons? Yes, and today the World Blind Union is seeking international support for a proposed Treaty for Reading Disabled Persons at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The next meeting where this matter could be taken up is at the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights taking place in Geneva, May 25-29, 2009.

So, you build on a BY-NC work and register your copyright. You license your new work also BY-NC. Someone violates the copyright on your work. You sue. You are entitled to statutory damages right? You collect. Are you now guiilty of violating the NC licneses of the works yours built upon?

Chances are that if you're a network operator you know the IP address 4.2.2.2. It's an easy to type and easy to remember address, which since 1998 has been a "beefy" DNS service responding to the public Internet. Since you need DNS before you can use anything other than IP addresses on the Internet, it can come in handy for testing or initial configuration. Before Google started doing public DNS service on 8.8.8.8, and because 4.2.2.2 is typically pretty fast, many people have used it as their standard DNS server. Since the most basic test of Internet connectivity you can do is to ping an IP address (with DNS disabled), a "ping -n 4.2.2.2" can tell you if your networking problem is at a higher level or a lower level right away. Is this just an accident, or was this a deliberate choice? Was it intentionally set up as a public DNS service, or an accident. I've wondered this for years. But just recently I was investigating a networking oddness reported by Kyle who uses this, and I decided to try to dig deep and find out the story behind whatI imagine is one of the most famous IP addresses on the public Internet.

Creative Commons, Open Access, OpenStreetMap? In einer Veranstaltungsreihe im bQm werden Projekte und Initiativen aus dem Bereich der freien Inhalte in gemütlicher Atmosphäre vorgestellt. Creative Commons und FreeBeer - Dienstag, 29. September Was steckt hinter "some rights reserved" und was bringt es? Creative Commons kurz erklärt. Mit FreeBeer wird ein ungewöhnliches Creative Commons Projekt vorgestellt. Von Melanie Bosshart, Digitale Allmend und Pascal Mages, FreeBeer/[project 21]. Open Access - wissenschaftliche Texte und Bilder im Internet - Dienstag, 6. Oktober Worum geht es bei Open Access, wie und warum publiziert eigene Arbeiten man Open Access? Die ETH Bibliothek zeigt verschiedene Wege. Von Arlette Piguet und Nicole Graf, ETH-Bibliothek. OpenStreetMap - die freie Landkarte und Geodatenbank - Dienstag, 13. Oktober Warum OpenStreetMapper mit GPS Empfängern durch die Gegend laufen und die Weltkarte neu zeichnen. Vom Adreas Brauchli, OpenStreetMap. Live Konzert mit restorm.com - Donnerstag, 15. Oktober Du bestimmst wer im bQm rockt! Jetzt probehören und abstimmen auf restorm.com. Die Musik steht natürlich unter einer Creative Commons Lizenz. Beginn 18 Uhr. Die Kurzvorträge beginnen jeweils um 17.15 Uhr. Danach DJ-Set mit Creative Commons lizenzierter Musik.

Welcome to the Public Index, a site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section. Just use the table of contents or the search box at the right to get started. In addition, you can: * Study our reading room of lawsuit documents * Join the conversation in our forums * Draft an amicus brief to the court on the wiki