Category: publishing

“A federal judge has issued a declarative judgment stating that Holmes, Watson, 221B Baker Street, the dastardly Professor Moriarty and other elements included in the 50 Holmes works that Arthur Conan Doyle published before Jan. 1, 1923, are no longer covered by United States copyright law, and can therefore be freely used by others “

“As e-books are stripping down to the bare-bones of what is actually book-like, physical books are growing more sumptuous and fetishistic.”

“The National Science Foundation sent Jynne Dilling Martin to Antarctica this winter (the austral summer) as an artist-in-residence. [Here] are two poems she wrote from there.”

Having previously reversed (on odd grounds) an acquittal of the translator and publisher of Apollinaire’s Exploits of a Young Don Juan, the Turkish High Court of Appeal chose to punt.

“When Nelson Lopéz was preparing the first bilingual translation of Tales of Clay, a landmark short-story collection by the legendary Salvadoran writer known as Salarrué, he turned for inspiration to some unlikely sources: Mark Twain and the Coen brothers.”

“No published works will enter our public domain until 2019. The laws in Canada and the EU are different – thousands of works are entering their public domains on January 1. What books and plays would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles.”

“Non-standard English is linguistically the equal of the standard version – in fact, dialects tend to be more sophisticated grammatically than standard (as in the plural “youse” of many non-standard dialects where standard has just one confusing form). Yet standard continues – even now – to be prized as the “correct” form, and any deviation is considered to be wrong, lazy, corrupt or ignorant.”

“The media has long had its struggles with the truth–that’s nothing new. What is new is that we’re barely even apologizing for increasingly considering the truth optional. In fact, the mistakes, and the falsehoods, and the hoaxes are a big part of a business plan driven by the belief that big traffic absolves all sins, that success is a primary virtue.”

“The alternative press comes at a very specific point in American history, and its demise does, too. People are going to look at it as completely a technological issue, which is totally reductive. By the time the Internet arrives, the alternative press had already given it up. It had lost its mission.”