“In perpetuity and throughout the universe”

(References are at the bottom).

“It is almost impossible to exaggerate the ferocity of the copyright laws in America, which are in effect written by the large entertainment conglomerates. The most famous example of this is the Mickey Mouse effect, whereby every time the Mouse is about to come out of copyright, the term of copyright is extended. This has happened 11 times in the past 40 years.”

“There is a clause in US film contracts which awards the producers rights ‘in perpetuity and throughout the universe and for any and all forms of expression whether now existing or hereafter devised’. As far as I can tell, the only loophole in that is if you fell through a crack in the space-time fabric of the universe into a parallel one.”

“The idea of copyright began as an argument over books; and it is over books, both as intellectual property and as physical entities, that change and contention now looms.”

“A library is a machine for storing and retrieving information.”

“Google is digitising as much of the out-of-copyright sections of the collection as it can manage. That, in practice, means the 19th century.”

“Google never gives out figures about anything, but I was told that the Book Search programme already includes more than a million books; and the number is growing daily. Only the world's very biggest libraries are bigger than that.”

“80% of everything that has ever been published is still in copyright; 10% of that is still in print.”

“Nobody even knows how many books there are. The best guess seems to be about 32m.”

“Sceptics point to a contrast between Google's attitude to everyone else's information, which it wants to make available free, and its attitude to its own proprietary information — the company is famous for its close-mouthedness; it won't even say anything about how or where it scans the books.”

Last Saturday John Lanchester wrote in “The guardian” a great article entitled “It's a steal”. In a previous post we learnt what a “newspaper of record” is. Today I think Zugaldía may be delighted to read about “copyright libraries”.