Free talks around the country on authors’ rights

Jane C. Ginsburg, of the Columbia University School of Law, will be visiting NZ soon and giving a series of free lectures around the country on universal access to knowledge and universal authors’ rights. See here for times and dates, starting on 16 October.

Professor Ginsburg says:

“In this talk, I will first evoke two utopian goals: universal access to knowledge, and universal authors’ rights. The former implied a curator-custodian, a public institution that would gather, systematize and make available the world’s knowledge. The latter
enforced private prerogative through the international recognition of authors’ property rights that arise from their creativity or are justified by the public benefits those creations bestow. Creators and custodians of knowledge long pursued complementary aims,
despite occasional skirmishes between copyright owners and libraries. That now may be changing. In the last part of this talk, I will address the clash of utopias epitomized by the Google book-scanning program and the legal responses it has inspired, including the
recent decision by the SDNY upholding Google’s fair use defense. Finally, as we query whether, through mass digitization, libraries will replace publishers, or vice-versa, we should not lose sight of the authors, who are both copyright’s raison d’être and the
necessary forebears of libraries, for without works of authorship to stock the collection, there is nothing to curate.”

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