In April the Canadian Supreme Court made a landmark ruling on copyright. In a 4-3 split it ruled on a rather unusual case involving the transfer an image from paper posters to canvas. What was most important in this case, though, was the comments of majority on copyright. In particular, they stated that 'excessive control by holders of copyrights and other forms of intellectual property may unduly limit the ability of the public domain to incorporate and embellish creative innovation in the long-term interests of society as a whole, or create practical obstacles to proper utilization.' For more about the case point your browser at:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/
printarticle/gam/20020418/TWGEIS

Meanwhile in the US, the Authors Guild is getting flack from its members for its dispute with Amazon over second hand books. The row started when the Guild started to encourage its member to de-link from Amazon over Amazon's policy of displaying used books for sale on the same page as the new books. However, it seems that many authors are quite happy to have second hand copies of their books traded on Amazon, seeing it as a way to cultivate new readers who are able to try out their novels at a lesser price and who will then go on to buy new books by the same author.

Which brings me on to telling you about one of the most important articles on this issue to hit the web for a long time. It been the case for many years that the debate about whether access to free copies of intellectual property (especially books and songs, but to a lesser extent software) has been bedeviled by assertions unsupported by any hard figures. That situation has now changed.

About 18 months ago, science fiction author Eric Flint and publisher Jim Baen set up the Free Library. The Free Library supplies complete books in electronic format for downloading, free of charge and free of copy protection. These are not out of copyright books, but books that are in print on the shelves in the bookshops. Since Eric Flint controlled when he put his books into the Free Library, he could see what the effect was directly by looking at the effect on his royalty statements, and stunning reading it makes too.

What happened was the book originally followed the classic pattern of making most of their sales in the first year of publication, after which the sales dropped right off. At the end of the second year, Eric Flint put the book into the free Library, and the sales started going back up! By the end of the third year it was selling at twice the rate it had been doing at the end of the second year. This pattern was repeated for other books in the library.

You can read about it for yourself by pointing your browser at:

http://www.baen.com/library

(Incidentally I highly recommend the book 'An Oblique Approach', which Eric Flint wrote jointly with David Drake, I really enjoyed it.)

Finally, a note about a patent - and if the date had not been April 9th I would have thought it was an April Fool joke. An extract from the abstract for US patent number 6,368,227:

'Abstract
A method of swing on a swing is disclosed, in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side to side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other.'

Alan Lenton
21 April 2002

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