Will Tracking Readers Lead to Better Books? (GalleyCat)
The New York Times has a story this week examining the rise of eBook services that track reader behavior.
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Amazon was a Prime shopping source this holiday, gaining 1M more subscribers (GigaOM)
Based on the statistics, maybe selling those Kindle Fire tablets at or below costs isn’t such a bad idea. Although smartphones created more mobile traffic this holiday, tablets generated more overall sales. And Amazon gained a million new Prime members.
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Music publishers claim to own “Silent Night” & Rip Off indie YouTube singer (Boing Boing)
It worked fine until YouTube’s notorious “Content ID” system let some of the biggest music publishers in the world lay claim to the copyright in Adam’s video, on the basis that his rendition of “Silent Night” belonged to them — despite having been composed in 1818 and being firmly in the public domain.
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6 Libraries Loan Out 1 Million eBooks Each in 2013 (GoodeReader)
One of the big bright spots of digital books this year was the massive role libraries have played. The ALA in conjunction with Overdrive has been relentless in their pursuits to convince major publishers that books were not devalued when loaned out for free.
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Kindle Daily Deals: Dennis LeHane Thrillers (and 4 others)
Re, “Music publishers claim to own “Silent Night” & Rip Off indie YouTube singer (Boing Boing)”, the article doesn’t say whether the victim will use the TouTube appellate system or not. Following that would make this a much more interesting story.
As for copyright bots, we’re not surprised that they err on the side of lining their sponsor’s pockets but what could be done to make “public domain” less subject to interpretation?
Even Lawrence Lessig has run into this situation: http://msl1.mit.edu/furdlog/docs/b_globe/2013-08-27_bglobe_lessig_fair_use_fight.pdf
The problem, IMO, is that the DMCA circumvents and neuters the constitutional guarantee of due process (part of the 5th amendment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_Process_Clause).
‘the article doesn’t say whether the victim will use the TouTube appellate system or not.’
If you dig deeper, to the original blog post by the victim, yes he did, and the problem was fixed, only to be flagged again the next day by another copyright bot (or maybe the same one) putting it back in copyright limbo. See:
http://adamthealien.com/2013/12/youtubes-content-id-system-brings-humbug-to-the-holidays/