Wow!
So Mr Wells' time machine really did work then?
Documents released as a result of last week's hearing into Google's book-scanning settlement reveal thousands of authors asked to be excluded from the project. There are over 6,000 authors, including literary colossus Jeffrey Archer, on the list prepared by Rust Consulting for Google. Rust set up a call centre to receive opt- …
Did Mr Wells come from the past and file it?? Or was that Mandleson making a false copyright claim?
Mandy's latest changes to the Digital Economy Bill are flawed:
"Similarly appeals must focus on whether the rights holder actually holds the rights mentioned in the infringement notice"
Only Appeals? So the claim isn't determined until you challenge it? Which costs money. So any false claimant can impose a fine on you by simply making the false claim? You then have to pay the appeal costs to simply even challenge a claim that was false?
The fine can't work. Copyright is automatically assigned to the author, so it is often impossible to show that someone claiming copyright doesn't actually have it because there is no paper trail. So a fine for falsely claiming copyright fails at the first hurdle. You would need to prove that 3rd party person doesn't have copyright, rather 4th party person has it, when 4th party person doesn't have any reason to help prove your claim.
"It emphatically points out the copyright holder must show an infringement occurred, and that the subscriber's IP address was infringing at the time it occurred"
They don't even have to prove they own the copyright, so this is meaningless.
Really Mandy is doing rush changes to his bill and it's all over the shot, and he's trying to get it through Parliament without discussion of the detail. It needs to fail, because he's going to make you Labour MPs totally unelectable.
There's also fair use, which remains uncodified. You would be violating by cross coding a free promotional video onto an iPod for viewing. Parliament needs to discuss the full consequences of this before they put themselves out of office forever.
Look at it this way, if they pass this bill, then we are going to discuss the full consequences of it, all the way through the election and they will have to defend Mandleson.
I once had the misfortune to be stuck in a house with only a short stories collection by the Archer fellow. It's title was wrong, it should have been "plots of movies I've seen," as each of them was a half-assed retelling of a story that was familiar. [Well, I can only vouch for the first few, sometimes boredom is preferable over annoyance.]
No Archer, no business case. End of story. He's the author that all the literary greats such as Shakespeare, Plato and Hubbard looked up to. Look, if you can say "thousands of authors asked to be excluded from the project ... Wells, Kipling" etc then I don't see why I can't do the same!
Sigh, I remember when Archer was just the Conservatives' resident buffoon, before he became the man whose glare could turn even Mandy into stone.
I am the author of one modest published novel and many short stories in anthologies, as well as poetry. I opted out because i am so 'under the radar' and also in the UK that Google would have swept me up int heir 'orphan works' clause, and I would ahve been excluded from the digital version of my own works.
While this would be gutting for me, my major concern is the huge public and university libraries int he USA, who joined in thinking they were helping to create the biggest public library in the universe. Sadly, they were lambs to the slaughter: Google prohibits them from having a full reading copy of any digital work, even of those books they have given from their collection for Google to digitise.
Meanwhile, the two 'author associations int he USA have agreed to a dribble of dosh from the Google book coffers in return for rolling over and playing dead. They also rather assumed they represented authors around the globe. I hope the EU keeps fighting on. Funny that we European uathors now cling to the fighting spirit of the Germans for ultimate victory!