Feb 6, 2010

Weak Endnotes

by Cliopatria

Robert Darnton,"Google and the New Digital Future," NYRB, 17 December; Paul N. Currant, Anthony Lewis, Theodore Koditschek, et al.,"Google & the Future of Books: An Exchange," NYRB, 14 January; and Roy Blount Jr., Judy Blume, Scott Turow, et al.,"The Google Books Settlement: An Exchange with the Authors Guild," NYRB, 25 February, is an important discussion.

Edward Rothstein,"Unrolled, Unbridled and Unabashed," NYT, 4 February, reviews"Rubbers: The Life, History & Struggle of the Condom," an exhibit at Manhattan's Museum of Sex.

Susan Rubin Suleiman,"French Contentions," NYT, 5 February, reviews Frederick Brown's For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus.

Matthew Kaminski,"Creating a Postwar World," WSJ, 3 February, reviews S. M. Plokhy's Yalta: The Price of Peace.

Charles Peterson,"In the World of Facebook," NYRB, 25 February, reviews Julia Angwin's Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America and Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal.

More Comments:

Andrew D. Todd - 2/8/2010

I found the discussion of Robert Darnton, et. al. at New York Review of Books to be rather disappointing. The unexamined elephant in the room is the notion of perpetual copyright, as achieved by successive copyright term extensions. The cumulative discussion over at Techdirt is much more informative. The constitutional understanding of copyright is that copyright is a kind of social contract, and that there is no right to hold a copyright on a book which is more or less permanently out of print. The book publishing industry has become an essentially passive player, following on the coat-tails of the movie industry.

Here are a couple of pieces I posted on Techdirt

"So Buy Out the Copyrights."

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20090820/0327475945#c872

"Mickey Mouse is a Proxy for Sound Movies."

http://www.techdirt.com/article.php?sid=20090811/0123105835#c347