From DIYbookscanner.org, an inspiring video on the whys of paperbook scanning!
Daniel Reetz – “DIY Book Scanning” from adafruit industries on Vimeo.
Posted by Jesse Willis
Tag: copyfight
TVO: Search Engine: Digital Locks have Nothing to do with Copyright
The latest episode of TVO’s Search Engine, #127, updates us on the latest on Bill C-11. Host Jesse Brown interviews Russell McOrmand, of C11.ca (aka digital-copyright.ca), the hero who is blogging C-11’s progress through legislative committee.
|MP3|
Podcast feed: http://feeds.tvo.org/tvo/searchengine
Posted by Jesse Willis
Small Town by Philip K. Dick is PUBLIC DOMAIN
Philip K. Dick’s short story, Small Town, is PUBLIC DOMAIN. Here’s a |PDF| of it.
Small Town was first published in the May 1954 issue of Amazing Stories. Here is the copyright page from that issue:
The fact that the story was not previously known to be PUBLIC DOMAIN is because there was a bogus copyright renewal claim made in 1983. In order for a claim to be properly renewed the first publication date must be cited in the renewal form. It wasn’t. Instead a false first publication date was swapped in.
RE190631 Page 2 (back) includes Small Town:
As you can see in a scan of the renewal form, pictured above, the renewer has stated that the story was published in the May 1955 issue of Amazing Stories. This is completely false. Here is the table of contents page from Amazing’s May 1955 issue:
Had the renewer, in 1983, noted the actual first publication date of Small Town the renewal wouldn’t have been valid. By 1983 the copyright had lapsed.
The evidence for bad faith in the copyright process doesn’t end there. Indeed, while story was subsequently republished in Amazing Stories – perhaps lending credence to the idea that the renewer had merely mistaken the first publication for the second, the republication wasn’t until the April 1967 issue of that magazine. And of course a notation in that 1967 re-publication cites the story as having been copyrighted in 1954.
Small Town by Philip K. Dick is PUBLIC DOMAIN!
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Influence of RADIO DRAMA on comics and vice versa
There’s a fascinating article by Kurt Kuersteiner HERE titled “OTR: The Evil Influence Behind EC.” In it Kuersteiner maps some of the many stories swiped from radio drama series and turned into EC Comics.
It came to me at the perfect time too. I’ve just been getting into EC comics over the last few months. Having grown up under the censorship of the Comics Code Authority I didn’t really know what I was missing. Now though, reading these pre-code comics, I can now see that my intellectual growth had been greatly stunted.
I’d have been a far smarter person if I’d been able to buy and read comics like these as a kid.
My favourite such tale so far was published in the July/August 1953 issue of Weird Fantasy (issue number 20). It’s called The Automaton. At first it seemed to me like a mashup of a Philip K. Dick’s The Electric Ant, Alfred Bester’s Fondly Fahrenheit and George Orwell’s 1984. But looking at the chronology that can’t be what it is. First off Philip K. Dick was just getting started around then. And while he was a comics reader The Electric Ant wasn’t published until 1969.
And while by 1953 Bester had already been working in comics – he hadn’t yet written Fondly Fahrenheit. So the story is definitely Orwellian and very cool, and certainly like a couple of Dick and Bester tales that were yet to be written. But then again, maybe it was inspired by a radio drama that I’ve not heard yet. Anybody know of one like this?
As it stands The Automaton is set in the futuristic dystopian world of Los Angeles in 2009. Our protagonist is XT-751, a man recounting his story of being sent to a northern labour camp after a suicide attempt. Suicide is illegal in this world because the state owns every person from the cradle to the grave.
I actually have been thinking about The Automaton for months now. And after reading Kuersteiner’s article it somehow gelled into a post. It’s just been something I could’t quite shake. The story is not only extremely thought provoking, and still timely, but also extremely frightening. And maybe a lot of the rest of it is that it is about as far away from superhero comics as you can possibly get. Best of all it’s told in just seven pages – that’s a highly distilled story.
The only credit for The Automaton is for the artist, Joe Orlando, but maybe he wrote it too?
Posted by Jesse Willis
A mystery record from the future as advertized in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine in the 1970s
Lately I’ve been paging through dozens and dozens of magazines from the 1960s and 1970s. Several issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction from the mid-70s include a mysterious ad for a record from the future. Here’s a scan from the Fantasy & Science Fiction March 1975 issue:
Here is the complete text:
RECORDS – TAPES
On February 11, 1969, a record was found on a
New York City elevator. It purports to have
been recorded some 100 to 150 years from now.
Copies may be purchased for $3.00. Send to:
THE RECORD. Box 3011. New York. N.Y. 10008.
I’m wondering … does anybody have a copy of this record from the future? Did you send away for it? I suspect it is public domain, as it hasn’t been created yet therefore it can’t have been copyrighted yet. If you do have a copy of the record, please send me an MP3 of it’s contents along with a scan or photograph of any packaging and labeling. Also, if it turns out that I am the one who recorded it, sometime in the future, I’ll need to start working on my time machine immediately.
Update:
Here’s part of the recording…
And here are some photos of the LP and it’s packaging:
A transcript is available as scanned from a “1973 issue of Radical Software magazine (Vol. II Nr 3) contains a partial (inaccurate and rather poorly comprehended) transcript of a little over half of this recording, as well as a letter from Mr. Gesner declaring this recording to be a part of the public domain”: |PDF|
[Thanks Gregg!]
Posted by Jesse Willis
CBC: The Hour: Michael Geist on Bill C-11
Michael Geist compares Bill C-11 to SOPA in this brief vid that aired on The Hour.
Internet expert and academic Michael Geist outlines the content and implications of Bill C-11, a proposed copyright bill that has been called “Canada’s SOPA”.
Posted by Jesse Willis