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Much like the recent lawsuit by Edwin Mellen Press against a librarian who was critical of the company on a blog, OMICS in based in India has also sued a librarian, in this case Jeffrey Beall who runs the Scholarly Open Access blog. I remember seeing and reading his comments on OMICS. What is notable is the extent of the lawsuit, threatening not only civil but criminal charges in India and the US, and demanding from Beall $1 billion dollars, plus $10,000 just for sending the notice of the lawsuit out.

In good news for readers and libraries, Macmillan, the last of five major publishers in an anti-trust lawsuit, have settled with the DOJ. This means that retailers can begin discounting digital titles they have for sale. Apple is the only publisher still outstanding in the lawsuit.

Well, that's an interesting development.

A victory for fair use, with scanned materials that are used in the HathiTrust. The HathiTrust repository use materials scanned from the Google Books but he access is more restrictive, allowing full text searches only with the copyright holder's permission--but does allow full text for readers with print disabilities. A Federal judge ruled this is covered by fair use, while related lawsuits against Google continue.

The Free Library of Philadelphia has a program in which free NOOK Simple Touch e-readers are loaned to patrons over the age of fifty. However, the NOOK is completely inaccessible to patrons who are blind. Library personnel had discouraged two blind patrons from even attempting to check out one of the devices. The library had also been issued letters from the Department of Education regarding the obligation of federally funded institutions to purchase accessible e-book readers and other technologies. It's not clear from the release what steps the library may have taken to remedy the situation or how it escalated to the point of a lawsuit.

Google seems to be in the news again. Article 1 of 2: Thousands of authors can sue Google in a class-action lawsuit over its plan to create the world's largest digital book library, a federal judge ruled on Thursday. U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan also rejected Google's bid to dismiss claims by The Authors Guild and several groups representing photographers and graphic artists, which would have forced their members to sue individually.

This is both bad and good news. Good in that rather than stretching out for years or decades with multiple lawsuits and decisions, that instead there will ultimately be a definite answer about Google's book scanning project. It's bad that as a class action some serious money and power will come into play, and the stakes will be that much higher.

A federal judge ruled that Apple "conspired to raise the retail price of e-books" in a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.

Oracle is suing Google over the use of their Java API's in Android. This should be an interesting case. Google argues that while you can copyright a finished product, you shouldn't be able to copyright the computer language used to build the product - just like a novelist can copyright a book but nobody can copyright English. Oracle disagrees and says that if the language is unique enough, then it should be protected. They cite Klingon as an example. I read through Oracle's filing and it actually looks pretty strong. I didn't bother reading Google's because it's pretty clear that Google is missing the point that Oracle isn't upset that they used Java, but that they bundled all the extra API's. I really feel for the judge and jury having to hear this case. Oracle's brief isn't exactly light on the technical details...

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Here is more info. about Kindle Worlds. I'm surprised authors are ok with this- it seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Though this could turn into a cool library program. . . or at the very least a lively copyright conversation.