Current Trends

The national news outlets have been doing a fair enough job covering the worst of the publishing industry’s most recent news, but in the hullabaloo, so little attention has been paid to the issues that could make or break the future of publishing, especially in relationship to electronic publishing. How exactly are authors being paid for their ebooks? What electronic file type is the best investment for publishers of ebooks? Why doesn’t Fair Use just cover everything? And what in the world is the public domain?

The next few pages are short summaries of the ways publishers are currently using (and may be attempting to anticipate) technology.

Fair Use

The Public Domain

Ebooks: The File-Type Wars

Electronic Rights

Permanent link to this article: http://irfiction.com/views-on-publishing/drm-and-contract-law/current-trends/

Fair Use

According to Richard Stim, author of Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center’s Copyright and Fair Use Overview, fair use is “a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism,” including use within a parody (Chapter 9: Fair Use) Straight-forward …

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The Public Domain

Before 1975, initial copyrights of a work lasted twenty-eight years before the rights-holder either allowed the copyright to lapse or renewed it for another twenty-eight-year term. This standard, set in 1909, was the longest extension allowable in American history: the original Copyright Act of 1790 set a fourteen-year initial term and a fourteen-year renewal period …

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Ebooks: The File-Type Wars

The world looks at the struggle to create marketable e-books and portable reading devices as bad remake of the music industry’s recent battle between the iPod and .mp3s. When Apple’s iPod soared past .mp3 players in popularity, the highly protected .aac file became the industry standard for DRM-protected music with the .mp3 lagging behind as …

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Electronic Rights

To adequately explain his outlook on electronic rights, intellectual property lawyer Lloyd J. Jassim begins an interview with his definition of electronic publishing: “the process of turning two-dimensional works into digital code, and distributing that information electronically to consumers…. For example, interactive educational or entertainment CD-ROM products, DVDs, online databases, electronic books, even game cartridges” …

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