Campus Copyright

Court Contends Coping Can't Copy Catcher

J.D. Salinger Wins Copyright Battle

NEW YORK, NY (AUTHORLINK NEWS, July 9, 2009)—Literary icon J.D. Salinger won his law suit July 1 against the unauthorized publication of a sequel to his famous novel, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. In an example of a growing court focus on the marketability of a copy protected work, Judge Deborah Batts ruled Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later would damage the market for “sequels and other derivative works” by Salinger. The Judge barred publication of Colting’s book in the U. S. marketplace, but it will go on sale in Europe sometime next week.   

Swedish author Fredrik Colting, age 33, writes under the pen name John David California will file an appeal. Colting contends his work should be protected under parody and fair use laws. But the court disagreed.

CATCHER, the classic coming-of-age story of Holden Caulfield, has sold 35 million copies since it was released in 1951.  Salinger reportedly has two more finished novels which have never been published. Through the years, he has fiercely protects CATCHER, declining TV and film offers, even from Steven Spielberg.

Regional Hamburg Hot on RapidShare Host

 

The Hamburg Regional Court of Germany has ruled against German-owned file hosting website RapidShare this past Tuesday. It found the site guilty of violation of German copyright law and set damages at about €24 million ($33.4 million).

In what could prove a key precedent, the court found Rapidshare, and by extension similar file-sharing sites, bear principle responsibility for ensuring copyright-protected material is not illegally posted on their servers.

The ruling was a major victory for German royalty collection agency GEMA, which had brought the suit against Rapidshare for allowing some 5,000 protected music titles to be posted on their site.

“The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future,” said GEMA. “This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks.”

“The judgment of the Regional Court of Hamburg marks a milestone in GEMA’s efforts to combat the illegal use of music works on the Internet,” said Dr. Harald Heker, CEO of GEMA, in a statement. “GEMA will continue to do everything it can to shield its members from online piracy. We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level.”

Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare AG, played down the significance of the verdict.

“Our experience is that the courts of appeal tend to restrict the scope of the decisions made by the lower courts. For this reason, we think that it would make more sense to work together to provide music fans with the right services at the right price and to open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet.”

RapidShare’s been under assault by copyright holders for a while now, it’s most recent attacker being German book publishers who wanted the site placed on the ISP’s blacklist of blocked sites.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism. Surprising to learn a new less severe definition of plagiarism is emerging which covers a broader spectrum of intellectual curiosity and discipline.  Ignore what the official definition of plagiarism is for a moment and consider a medical student who has the difficulty on quoting an article which cites another study.  The article mentions a single study which supports ABC treatment may be a cure to XYZ.  The student paraphrases the article and states ABC cures XYZ but only cites the article, not the original study which more accurately explains the conclusion.  Under the new interpretation of plagiarism, the student exercised weak scholarship and also weak intellectual curiosity.  The student’s failure to acknowledge the appropriate source and laziness to not accurately describe the meaning derived from the source was seen as inexperience and lack of training on some academic rigor.

Many faculty find students using ‘filler’ material to complete assignments.  Students blame faculty for stated requirements such as, ‘The paper must be five pages in length.’  Conclusion was made that faculty need to take a portion of their instruction to students to make sure they understand about intellectual curiosity, scholarship and caring about what they are writing.  Particularly in required courses, faculty found students often ‘don’t care’.  The extension of the definition of plagiarism is meant to include dedication to the field of selected study, recognizing appropriate sources, stating conclusions accurately from the sources found, and portraying scholarship from the works as originally intended.