in America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are."- Gore Vidal

(He's doing that 'author' thing with the hand on the chin. )


from the third set of Bent Books bookmarks, 2006

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Lawsuit may threaten Hobbit films
Peter Jackson's latest project The Hobbit may be under threat due to a royalties disagreement.
New Zealand film-maker Peter Jackson may have more in common with JRR Tolkien's heirs than he thought - they are also complaining about big studio accounting methods.
Tolkien's family and a British charity they head, the Tolkien Trust, are seeking more than $US220 million ($A276.94 million) in compensation for the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) trilogy Jackson made in New Zealand.
The Tolkien heirs sold movie rights to the LOTR books 40 years ago for 7.5 per cent of future receipts, but say that three films and $US6 billion ($A7.55 billion) later, they have not seen a cent of the proceeds.

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How did NASA end up looking like a bumbling husband taping over his wedding video with the Super Bowl?
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BERLIN (Reuters) – A German who tried to fix his leaky air mattress blew up his apartment instead, the fire brigade in the western city of Duesseldorf said Wednesday

i don't know the provenance of this, and make no claims for its veracity, but it's the kind of yarn we like to chuckle at around here. Thanks to Dan Best who, being a very thorough legal gentleman, attached the following note: "... as a lawyer i think he has a legitimate defence to the breach of contract claim, provided postitution is not illegal in the country of question, in which case the contract would be void in any event." (click to enlarge)

they sicken of the calm, who know the storm" - Dorothy Parker.

CLASH OF THE TIGHTEST!
History's Greatest Drunks square off!
"This month we pit dark horse Dorothy Parker against booze juggernaut Ernest Hemingway.
Round One
Parker orders two Beefeater Gin martinis.
LO: Parker comes out with her tried and true martini jab. They clink glasses and Hem turns on a boyish smile. I do believe he is attempting to charm the lady.
HC: They casually sip and exchange pleasantries. Hem may be onto something, when it comes to attractive men, Parker is known as a pushover.
Round Two
Hemingway orders two Gordon’s Gin and tonics with a splash of bitters.
HC: No surprises from Hem, either. These two have drank together before, in New York, and I don’t think they’re going to need to feel each other out.
LO: I sit here wondering what manner of trick Parker is going to pull. She cannot attack his palette, as she did so effectively with Welles, and she surely cannot outdrink him. I just had a rather odd thought..."(Modern Drunkard magazine)
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Channel 4 tv in Britain: (thanks, Hayley)

Artful Codgers- C4 Thursday 15 May 2008 9pm
"Cutting Edge tells the story of the audacious pensioners from Lancashire who conned the art world with a series of fakes sold to museums, galleries and collectors all over the world. Masterminded by 84-year-old George Greenhalgh, and aided by his mother, Olive, 83, son Shaun, 47, faked paintings, sculptures and ancient artefacts in the garden shed of their shared council house in Bolton. The Artful Codgers uncovers the secret world of the most unlikely art forgers in history, interviewing the police who uncovered them, the experts they deceived and their friends and neighbours in suburban Bolton."

National Post has the Reuters version of the story from January 29:

"the Artful Codgers, one London newspaper calls them. Testifying in court, Mom claimed her work was purely routine, like making calls for Shaun because he's too shy to talk on the telephone...
In 1997, a certain Mrs. Roscoe (that's Mom's maiden name) sold Shaun's The Faun at Sotheby's in London, claiming she had inherited it from Roderick O'Conor, a friend of Gauguin, who had purchased it from the Paris gallery. (She supplied a bill from the gallery, forged by her boy Shaun.) A firm of London dealers bought it, to their delight, for only £20,700, and later sold it to the Chicago Art Institute for US$125,000. Chicago's sculpture curator dated it to 1886, called it probably Gauguin's first ceramic and said it was among the Art Institute's most important acquisitions of recent years. It was included in a show, Van Gogh and Gauguin, which went on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. It remained on exhibit in Chicago until the call from Scotland Yard last October. It would be there yet, and perhaps for centuries more, if Shaun hadn't messed up the cuneiform.
Shaun has been sentenced to four years and eight months in jail. Mom got off with a year's suspended. Dad came to court in a wheelchair, wearing slippers, with a shawl over his legs; he apologized for being partially deaf, due to his Second World War injury... (lots more)"

charles Brownstein, head of the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, interviewed about the win in the Gordon Lee case.
"After a healthy amount of venting, and much analysis, we decided that a misconduct motion should be brought, and that it should cover everything up to and including the mistrial. Cory went to work on it, and filed in December. And it is a work of savage legal beauty. Cory is one of the best legal writers I've ever known, and she really earned her pay on this one."
And in case any one reading has not been following the story, a minor saw the following picture and the resultant lawsuit cost over $100,000 to defend before the judge dismissed the case.


I just found this news item from 2004: Mexico town bans indoor nudity

A council member who opposes the idea says he's not sure how it'll be enforced. But a councilwoman who supports it says she's confident that citizens who catch a glimpse of violators while walking past their windows will report them to police — even though the law also threatens jail for peeping Toms. She describes the law as "zero tolerance" for "a lack of morality."

creator’s Family Reclaims the Rights to Superman -NY TIMES- March 29, 2008 - Time Warner is no longer the sole proprietor of Superman.

A federal judge here on Wednesday ruled that the heirs of Jerome Siegel — who 70 years ago sold the rights to the action hero he created with Joseph Shuster to Detective Comics for $130 — were entitled to claim a share of the United States copyright to the character. The ruling left intact Time Warner’s international rights to the character, which it has long owned through its DC Comics unit.
And it reserved for trial questions over how much the company may owe the Siegel heirs for use of the character since 1999, when their ownership is deemed to have been restored. Also to be resolved is whether the heirs are entitled to payments directly from Time Warner’s film unit, Warner Brothers, which took in $200 million at the domestic box office with “Superman Returns” in 2006, or only from the DC unit’s Superman profits.

(link thanks to Bob Morales)

From Bad Seed to post-punk doctorate - The Australian - March 29, 2008

THIRTY years after dropping out of university as a failed second-year art student more interested in drinking beer at the pub across the road, musician, writer and actor Nick Cave has been embraced by academia and presented with a doctorate. Cave, who quit uni to embark on what would become a seminal career as a young punk singer and later dark and brooding writer and performer, was awarded the honorary degree by the same institution he walked out of in 1978.

(link thanks to michael Evans)
I previously wrote about Cave here, and there's a portrait drawing too.

oh no, here's another:
Tolkien Estate Sues New Line Cinema

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The estate of "Lord of the Rings" creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company hasn't paid it a penny from the estimated $6 billion the films have grossed worldwide. The suit, filed Monday, claims New Line was required to pay 7.5 percent of gross receipts to Tolkien's estate and other plaintiffs, who contend they only received an upfront payment of $62,500 for the three movies before production began.

(Thanks, Mick Evans)

Two pieces of movie news from my pal Lee Slattery:

Fox sues over 'Watchmen (The Hollywood reporter- Feb 12, 2008)

20th Century Fox has initiated a legal battle against Warner Bros. over the rights to develop, produce and distribute a film based on the graphic novel "Watchmen." On Friday, the studio sued Warners, claiming it holds the exclusive copyrights and contract rights to "Watchmen."...

Coens speak 'Yiddish' for Columbia (Variety-feb 11))

For their next collaboration, the "No Country for Old Men" team of Joel and Ethan Coen and producer Scott Rudin will transfer another Pulitzer Prize-winning author's work into a film.
Columbia Pictures has acquired screen rights to the bestselling Michael Chabon novel "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," with the Coens writing, directing and producing with Rudin....

SKIPPY

A bhay Khosla writes a Short Historical Piece about the cartoonist Percy Crosby and his creation, Skippy.- Monday, October 01, 2007. he gives links to online samples of Crosby's artwork, and he finishes: You can find out more about Skippy at the Skippy website. You can also read about the never-ending legal battle between Crosby and the owners of Skippy peanut butter at that website; Crosby's daughter has fought it for more than three decades. You might also enjoy the Filboid Studge blog entry on the topic as it includes examples of Crosby's work (which I would say is quite nice). Of course, Don Markstein's Toonopedia is an invaluable resource. And there's a book out there supposedly-- Jerry Robinson's Skippy and Percy Crosby.
I immediately take down from the shelf my copy of the Robinson book, published by Holt, Rhinehart and Winston in 1978, which I found only recently through excellent book trader Stuart Ng, and find this passage that left me stunned when I first read it:

"I was all alone here on Christmas Eve in 1949-- my first Christmas of confinement, and the hideous aspect of it all is too terrible to relate." Crosby wrote in a memoir. His sudden and stunning ruin left him bewildered and almost smothered his spirit. "I began to take myself apart wondering how everything had gone wrong." But within months he was writing Carolyn of plans for the future. He was eager to resume his career, and most of all to finish several novels. He clearly anticipated a complete recovery and an early release. Soon he found to his dismay that a mental institution was much like communism: "It was easy to get into the place, but getting out was similar to running a race through a briared garden maze." This time the maze had no exit.
Percy Crosby was diagnosed "paranoid schizophrenic." A later report described him as being forever litigious and expressing delusional trends involving high government officials. Crosby's litany of persecutors included President Franklin D Roosevelt, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and J Edgar Hoover, The Internal Revenue Service, Al Capone and other racketeers, and Skippy peanut butter, among others. ("The steal of Skippy peanut butter," as Crosby termed it, became one of his most obsessive complaints. For years he had been in litigation with the manufacturer, claiming infringement of the Skippy trademark, registered by Crosby on march 15, 1923.) Such seemingly wild and bizarre postulations, coupled with his suicide attempt, led to the diagnosis.
Tragic questions remain unanswered about Crosby's years at King's Park. There is reason to believe that today Crosby would either not be committed, or at least would not be confined for sixteen years. In retrospect, there is a question about the correctness of his diagnosis. This involves, in part, a judgment as to the extent that his 'delusions' correspond to reality. An investigation would have established that some of his fears-- surveillance by the FBI, the IRS campaign, Skippy peanut butter, had some substance. In the light of what is known in the 1970s about actions taken by J Edgar Hoover and the FBI in the surveillance, ilegal wiretapping, violation of postal laws, and other measures directed toward what they percieved as 'enemies of the state,' it is not unreasonable to speculate that Crosby's "threats" in the Washington papers might have earned such attention from Hoover. certainly, Crosby's fears would not now be so readily described as paranoia as they were then.

judgement in Wicks case.

I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR THIS, so i'll do an update here so I can post it before my pal Tom Spurgeon gets up in the morning.
Family of Ben Wicks wins back misplaced drawings
Toronto Star- May 31.-4.30 a.m.
Case of 2,800 cartoons left behind by movers sets legal precedent for protection of artists' works
In what is viewed as an important legal precedent for the protection of artists' works, a judge is ordering the return of more than 2,800 Ben Wicks drawings to the family.
In an 11-page decision released yesterday, Superior Court Judge Thomas Lederer ruled the cartoons, depicting political figures back to the late 1960s, are the property of the late political cartoonist and not Richard Harnett, who found the drawings 15 years ago. They had been left by movers, packed in green garbage bags when Wicks' son, Vincent, moved from Keswick to Vancouver in 1992.

If, like me, You'd never heard of the chap before all this, here's a profile
and here's more
Acclaimed cartoonist Ben Wicks was a pint-sized cockney who never lost his accent or his sense of humor.
Wicks make a name for himself in Canada, not only as a cartoonist, but as a journalist, TV personality, author, entrepreneur and humanitarian.

covers- THE EYEBALL KID no.1

Above are two versions of the cover of the first issue of the Dark Horse mini-series from 1992. The first is the color xerox from my files. This is another cover that gave my editor Diana Schutz a hard time. There's no way this will reproduce, she said. Just photograph it and see how it comes out, I insisted. The problem was all this collage I'd stuck on the surface. As I said a few days ago, I was on a collage kick for a couple of years back then. The Kid's suit was made of a shiny material which looks purple on the original and in my copy, but which photographed green, and I thought that was really cool. The rest of the picture is made up of cut out stuff; the eyes are actual photograph-eyes from magazines, except the one which is an apple. There are little diagrams of jockey shirt colors from the racing section of the daily paper. And finally there are all those color stickers from the stamp books of the Billings method of birth control*, which the wife of my bosom was giving a trial back then. Whether the multitude of our progeny is due to some failing in the system or because I and hayley campbell used the calendar-mapping color stickers to make collages, is a question I will leave to my biographer.

* I see that John Billings himself died last month, aged 89. (sciencedaily.com)
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I'm proud to say I was involved with this project as a thesis advisor for one of the students, a young lady named Elizabeth Chasalow, of whom we will be hearing great things in the future:
Center for Cartoon Studies graduates 18--Times-Argus--May 20, 2007
WHITE RIVER JUNCTION – In early 2005, James Sturm looked out the window of his studio in downtown White River Junction and saw opportunity where others saw an ancient, vacant department store.
Two years later, Sturm is graduating a class of 18 from that storefront, which has been since renovated into the Center for Cartoon Studies, a two-year college dedicated to the art of cartooning and graphic novels.
Sturm, the cartoonist behind the graphic novel, "The Golem's Mighty Swing," about a Jewish baseball team in the 1920s, was looking for teaching opportunities, but instead decided to embark on his dream to found a comics college.
Tom Spurgeon shows us the certificate of Completion (soon hopefully to be called a 'diploma'), designed by Ivan Brunetti.
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More about the garbage bags, for those who have been following this important story:
Trial would have upset Ben Wicks -Toronto Star- May 18,
Fight over abandoned drawings takes toll on Wicks' family but, on a lighter note, gives glimpse into life of a sketch artist
Rarely, if ever, has a civil case dwelled so much on the legal ramifications of "garbage" or green garbage bags, the method by which Wicks stored many of his works.
In a more interesting sense, however, the trial revealed stunning insights into the work of a sketch artist, who was incredibly disorganized for all his genius and was even worse at financial management.
Wha? who'd'a thought..?
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Camera phone photography emerges as art--Orange County Register--Monday, May 21,
"When people see my images, they don't believe that I took them with a cell phone," she said. "The depth and clarity of the images are so phenomenal."
The quality was good enough to persuade John Matkowsky, owner of Drkrm, a small gallery showing Elmi's work through May 26, to break from his norm of featuring only traditional silver prints to do his first-ever show of digital prints.
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And in other news:
Woman still likes gorilla
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A 57-year-old Dutch woman who was attacked by a gorilla at a Rotterdam zoo said the ape was still her favorite even though she felt she was going to die when he bit her.

covers- BACCHUS no.6

Colour covers always filled me with a spirit of gleeful liberation. This one features Bacchus with Collage, who had been introduced in the previous issue. She was intended to be ‘The spirit of an instantaneous, chance-embracing new age.’ (I lifted that phrase from somewhere, but Googling it doesn’t give a result.) And whether that job description was different enough from the Eyeball Kid’s, as queried by one critic, I am not sure. The image is based on Grant Wood’s American Gothic, although that is probably not obvious in the finished version. Collage is cast as the old man’s daughter (Wood meant her to be a daughter, but posterity has mistaken her for the man’s wife.) I drew the black and white and Pete Mullins coloured. In the background I asked him to use those markers where when you use the white one last it changes the colours of all the others where it touches. Red changes to yellow, green to red, each one not what the eye expects from a knowledge of mixing pigments. I wanted to confuse anyone who was accustomed to ‘reading’ colour mixes. Then for good measure I stuck a fish on the top.
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I’m hoping the above looks right as Blogger is playing silly buggers again.
Blogger Status Update
Some Safari and Opera users are experiencing difficulties saving or previewing posts and uploading images. We are aware of this problem and currently working on a fix.
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Those damn garbage bags in the Wicks case continue to be a subject of fascination here at Campbell.blogspot:
Judgment reserved in Wicks cartoon case --May 17,
"The final submissions were presented today in the lawsuit by Ben Wicks' family to reclaim a vast collection of cartoons left behind in a move 15 years ago. The Wicks family is seeking the return of more than 2,400 original sketches dating back to the 1960s.
They were left behind by movers in 1992. The cartoons were found in three green garbage bags, some of which were mixed in with kitchen waste. In court today, the defendant's lawyer, Charles Campbell told the judge, "If it was packed like garbage, looked like garbage and smelled like garbage, then it was garbage."
I can easily envision a scenario in which, with me deceased and not there to oversee things, the garbage bag containing my most prized possessions is left by an unthinking clod of a removals man next to the garbage bag containing… well, garbage… perhaps even a dead rat our cat brought in. And then perhaps the discovery of a note to not throw out any garbage bags, that all said garbage bags might then be put aside together in the garage. Maybe even some extra garbage gets tossed in the one containing the prized possessions. Yes, I can see that. It’s in my nighmares every night. Right after the scene where I’m back at school with 36 years of uncompleted assignments.
They should have asked for my affidavit

covers- The BACCHUS COLOR SPECIAL

T he color special was Teddy Kristiansen's idea. It probably started as one of those things you say at conventions; "hey, let's work together sometime!." He proposed it to Dark Horse, it was accepted, so I wrote a script and he painted the whole book. I had never done a whole comic book in color before, only covers, and more often than not I'd make a disaster out of those, but I said I'd do the cover for this one. Since this was going to be a big showpiece, the cover had to something special, so I pulled out the oil paints. This was a little box of cheap Chinese colors I bought back in '91 to do the three covers for 'Doing the Islands with Bacchus'. I had no problems with those, perhaps because they were done on paper, but with this new one I decided it should be done on a grand scale, large and on canvas board. I posed myself and the wife of my bosom by the natural light of a window and took a bunch of photos. I laid down the paint in undercoats and lauyers in the very old traditional manner of oil painting technique. It really is the medium for building up that integration of flesh tints. Now, the only problem was that i couldn't get the damn thing to dry. I even had it hanging out of the oven. Months were trundling by and still it was wet to the touch. It was a good thing Teddy was dragging his heels with the interior art. With regard to that, I had been paid on delivery for the script, so from Teddy's point of view, it wouldn't have looked like he was causing me difficulties, except that from my point of view it was totally necessary to my master plan that the color special come out before I launched my self published series (see yesterday's post).
Teddy was nearly done and things were coming to a close, so I decided to stick a big piece of that clear sticky backed plastic over the whole job (I usually did this with black line art whenever I used smeary pastels, and it always worked there... eg. From Hell chapter 2). Of course that was a stupid thing to do, the last resort of a desperate loony. My editor Diana Schutz received this monster in the mail and phoned.
"We can't photograph this. The light will bounce all over the place. it will be a mess."
"Okay." I replied. "This is what to do. Put it on the floor, put one end under your toes. Get Bob Schreck or somebody to pull the plastic sheet off in one firm tug."
"Are you nuts? I can't do that to your painting!"
"hmm.. let's try it this way then. you send it back here and Ill do it."
In a few days the painting was back with me by fedex. I laid it on the floor and asked the wife of my bosom to put her toes on one end while I firmly dragged the plastic sheet off. 70% of the painting was still on the board and the othr 30% was on the plastic.
In defeat I put the thing in the garden shed and painted another picture, this time in quick drying acrylics. That's the second one you see above. But this was now Dec 1994. The self publishing operation was advancing at full steam. I was probably working on the second issue by then, and My enthusiasm for the color special cover-image had waned. There was only one thing for it. I pulled the defeated picture out of the shed and finished it carefully with the quick drying acrylics. The damage was mostly to the dark areas,so i didn't have to mess around with that figure too much. I sent it in and it was photographed. I included the second picture in the package and that was used on the back cover. The book came out in April 1995, one month before my own launch. I think we got orders for 12,000, which nobody considered very good in those days, except me. For my own launch I got 8,500, which is what I usually got for a no.1 in a black and white mini-series when I was with Dark Horse, and that was great since now all the takings went to campbell Industries, and the US-Australian dollar exchange was all in my favour.
All's well that ends. (as Walt Kelly used to say).


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Wicks trial bogs down-May 17,-Toronto Star
Man must show that cartoonist's family meant to abandon cache of his drawings
"Ben Wicks, who had moved to a condo late in his life, had stored many boxes of cartoons at his children's homes, either in cartons or loosely in green garbage bags.
As I said to Tom Spurgeon by email the other day, we need to be cautious about the word 'garbage bag' in this story. It's only comic book collectors who store art in acid free binders and boxes. We artists keep all or stuff in those black or green bags designed for tossing out the garbage. The dark opacity keeps out first all the light and secondly all the beasties and humidity. I keep all my archives thus, and as you can see from the things I show here, I keep them very well. I also said to Tom that I immediately asked my father-in-law about this story and he said it sounds like 'theft by finding'. Still, the case rages back and forth.
more here
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At Forbidden Planet International my old pal Rian Hughes reminisces about the old days . Most interesting part is a scan of an invoice to Escape magazine for twelve quid. Well, there’s also cool art and a rather interesting photo, but you know me.
FPI : The new comic magazines really seemed aimed at the same audience that might buy music papers like NME or style mags like ‘The Face’ or ‘ID’. Was that the intention? It certainly all got a bit ‘rock and roll’ around then. I remember signings by yourself and Brendan in Dublin and Jaime Hewlitt and Alan Bond in Cardiff that felt a little like rock stars signing in terms of the adulation. Did you feel any of that ‘vibe’ or were you just thinking it looks like there will be a great new comics scene for us all to work in?)
RH : We were young, some of us younger, and so new to all this we simply thought it was just how it was supposed to be. I wasn’t sure what the “old” comic scene had been like, and so had no comparison. As to rock and roll… ask Grant to tell you the story of the chap who prostrated himself and kissed my shoes on stage at the ICA. Looking down, all I could see was his hairy arse poking out the top of his jeans.
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Lionsgate Acquires Film Adaptation Of Graphic Novel "The Spirit"- May 17, 2007
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hayley campbell is tickled by the cunning manipulation of perspective in this photie.

"I'm a very lucky artist. I make my living from it."

The copyright/plagiarism issue has been shuffling along since we last spoke of it here, when I linked to Jonathan Lethem's article in Harper's of January 30.

Writing in the free world : Jonathan Lethem explains why copyright laws stifle creativity and why he's giving away the film rights to his new novel.---Salon.com March 25 (link via Neil Gaiman)
In response to an observation about the meagre $6,000 dollar advance for his first novel: " Sure, but it wasn't strengthening of copyright control that allowed me to make more money after that; it was because I found some readers. Even if my rights were Kryptonite and lasted 1,000 years, if no one read my books, they wouldn't be worth a penny. The economy of human attention is a very precious one, much scarcer than any other. I'm lucky to be in the position of having anyone notice that I've given something away in the first place."
"I'm a very lucky artist. I make my living from it. I didn't know if I ever would. I'm very persuaded by the image that Lewis Hyde offers of an artist who is, by definition, in whatever medium, or whatever level of success or whatever culture, in the practice of culture-making; participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction. And it always will be. The question is how do we affirm and clarify this relationship? Because it's a very weird one -- making commodities that are also gifts.

Lethem already made special reference to Lewis Hyde, and his concept of 'the gift economy' in the Harper's essay. This review (I think nov 2005) by JoAnn Schwartz of Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage Books, 1983) goes a long way to explaining what Hyde was talking about.
"Hyde is deeply interested in the transformative gift: the gift that changes us profoundly, often received in the form of psychological healing or spiritual teachings. An important aspect of a transformative gift is that the transformation is not instantaneous; it requires the recipient to undertake some extensive and often difficult inner work in order to effect the transformation completely. What motivates us to undertake this labor? In general, it is a feeling of love and gratitude toward our teacher or therapist. This can lead to problems in today's market economy, where healing and teaching are frequently sold rather than freely given. After all, even a gifted teacher, therapist, or spiritual guide must eat! It is nonetheless possible for an element of the gift economy to circulate above the cash.

In science, as elsewhere, the circulation of gifts produces and maintains community, whilst the conversion of gifts to commodities fragments or destroys that same community. However, we are now witnessing the commodification of ideas within the scientific community. Universities and industrial laboratories, which used to produce basic research that was released into 'the public domain' now patent and otherwise protect their research. Discoveries emerge not as contributions but as proprietary ideas for which users must pay a fee, a usury. This trend began in the late 1970's and early 1980's with biotechnology, but here and now, at the end of the millennium, it seems to have spread to most fields of scientific inquiry. How does the "group mind" necessary to produce theoretical physics/chemistry/biology survive the free-market?"

Patent Office (UK) wants evidence to justify new copyright exceptions for artists. (again via Neil)
The Open Rights Group (ORG) is corralling information.
contribution from one John Harding, mar 22: "The conventional publishing industry does a valuable job, but only where there is large money to be made to fuel its necessarily ponderous machinery. A few years ago a friend of mine who was running a chamber music summer schools for amateurs wanted to let them play a pleasant little work by, I think, Panufnik, or possibly Penderecki. They contacted the publishers, asking to buy parts, but were told that the parts were not on sale, but could be hired. The cost would be £100. The work lasted perhaps five minutes. It is not a work that any string orchestra would think of scheduling into a programme. The publishers have effectively killed it.
The internet, software, desktop publishing and the existence of people like the founder of Merton Music, have made possible the creation and dissemination of work that would never bring profits to traditional publishers. We are living in exciting times, whose surge of intellectual activity will be seen in retrospect as putting the Renaissance in the shade.
Of course the corporations want to keep a strangle hold on it.
The move towards criminalising copyright violation significantly changes the picture. A single fine at the level sought by corporate lobbyists could ruin someone who would currently be able to achieve amicable settlement of an honest mistake under civil law. There will be people who will no longer dare act on common sense."

Joyce letters court case settled--BBC News Sunday, 25 March 2007
"A US university professor has won the right to quote letters between Irish writer James Joyce and his daughter in a book after settling a court case".

I got the link for that one at Ownit- The creative London Intellectual Property Advice Service where you can find regular updates on such matters as
Will Charwoman take Family Guy to the cleaners?--19 Mar 2007
Disney gets tough with students acting as nuns this week... etc

*****

more on 300, the movie, (via Heidi) Men Gone Wild by David Denby in this week's New Yorker:
"...perhaps the nuttiest film ever to become an enormous box-office hit. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, the movie is a porno-military curiosity—a muscle-magazine fantasy crossed with a video game and an Army recruiting film."

"Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement."

Made in a time of frustration, when Americans are fighting a war that they can neither win nor abandon, “300” feels like the product of a culture slowly and painfully going mad."
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via circulating email of notable quotations.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." --Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback & sports analyst.