Pirate Bay Hoists the Lawsuit Flag

I don’t know if I’m more bemused by the role-reversal or the pure-D ballsiness. A Wired Blog notes that Peter Sunde, a co-founder of torrent site the Pirate Bay, is accusing a group of Swedish book publishers of illegal scraping, and is threatening a lawsuit, saying Pirate Bay owns the copyright to its database of torrents which the publishers violated.

Once you get past the surrealism, there’s a pretty astonishing statistic you might want to make note of. The book publishers, who were doing all this scraping for a study, noted that 85 percent of the best-selling books in Sweden are available on the Pirate Bay. And Sunde is quoted by TorrentFreak that he’s “a bit sad that it’s not 100%.”

OCLC and Its Copyright Evidence Registry

Information Today has a great article on the OCLC’s Copyright Evidence Registry, which is available at http://www.worldcat.org/copyrightevidence. The idea is to create a spot where librarians can pool information about attempts to get copyright and, one assumes, rights owners data. In order to get the details on copyright once you’ve done a search, you’ll need a WorldCat or other OCLC-related account.