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A Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a sequel to Maurice
Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” has run into a problem after the estate of
Maurice Sendak who write the original objected to the new project. The project,
a poem entitled “Back to the Wild,” written by Geoffrey O. Todd with
illustrations by Rich Berner, involves a sentimental journey for Max as he
returns with his daughter, Sophie, to see the “Wild Things” 30 years later.
I have to be brief in this post, as I am off to the Exit Festival in Novi Sad, Serbia, and and the parallel GO Group conference on green events: but this one caught my eye: after our previous reports about the impact of Russia's new copyright laws, it seems that Russia's top social network "VKontakte" is in negotiations to find a way for its users to listen legally to the music from
the world biggest record labels’ catalogues. CEO and founder of
"VKontakte", Pavel Durov, told Vedomosti that the social network was together with Sony Music, Warner Music and Universal Music are looking for
options to accommodate the music industry’s interests "without affecting
the Russian internet users."
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A new research paper by University of Illinois law professor
and Bournemouth University scholar Paul J. Heald titled "How Copyright
Makes Books and Music Disappear (and How Secondary Liability Rules Help
Resurrect Old Songs)" seeks to explain why on Amazon there are three times
more books available from the 1850s than from the 1950s - and the blame reportedly
comes down to the copyright industries -
works in the public domain are more likely to stay in the marketplace than are
works that are owned, or orphan works but in particular copyright owners with
business priorities might not see sufficient value in a given copyright at a
given moment. But if a work is available to all, it's far more likely that
someone, or maybe lots of someones, someone will find it worthwhile, and
potentially profitable, to publish it. As Heald points out, copyright owners
spend a lot of time and money pushing policymakers for longer copyrights tend
to provide the "incentive to create" - But it seems that Heald's
study shows that the incentive to create requires a relatively short copyright
life. Once the big money has been made, copyright ownership is often of only
marginal benefit to the owner. If the margin is deemed too small to invest in
distribution of a work, the public is deprived of that work until the copyright
runs out. You can download the paper here.
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