Duke University Press Log

Lucas Hilderbrand in the Independent Weekly

Lucas Hilderbrand's Inherent Vice was reviewed in yesterday's Independent Weekly. Reviewer Gerry Canavan sees Hilderbrand's book as "a sort of love song to the VCR—one much needed in this age of YouTube." He also writes, "Hilderbrand presents a strong case that personal recording technologies (in both analog and digital forms) represent a crucial site for both political struggle and public action, even civil disobedience—implicitly warning that fair use is something that needs to be fought for or else it will be subsumed by copy-protection schemes and corporate enclosure."

Rebecca N. Hill on "Law and Disorder"

Rebecca N. Hill, author of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History, will be appearing on "Law and Disorder" today with Michael Ratner. The interview can be heard on NYC's WBAI 99.5 FM at 10 am (EST). To listen to the podcast or read notes from the interview, click here.

Bound by Law? Reviewed in Silicon Valley Metro

Bound by Law?, our comic book take on fair use is reviewed in the Silicon Valley Metro. Reviewer Richard von Busack writes, "The bewildering field of intellectual property is cleared nicely in this book, which includes boiled-down accounts of how some very rich companies took people to court to prove they were having their logos stolen."

Indigenous Ecuadorians Continue Fight Against Chevron

Poor indigenous Ecuadorians have been waging a legal battle against U.S. oil giant Chevron for over ten years and a verdict in the case is expected early next year, reports the Los Angeles Times. For background on the case, you'll want to read Suzanna Sawyer's Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador. Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous opposition. You might also want to check out The Ecuador Reader (due out early next year) to learn more about this fascinating country.

Bound by Law on Boing Boing

Boing Boing announces the publication of our new edition of Bound by Law: Tales from the Public Domain. The new expanded edition includes an introduction by Boing Boing's own Cory Doctorow and a foreword by documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim. It's available now in a handsome (and cheap!) bound edition as well as a free download.

Bound by Law Available as Free Download

Bound by Law: Tales from the Public Domain, a comic book about fair use by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins, is now available as a free download on our website. We hope the free preview of this fascinating exploration of copyright law and fair use will encourage readers to buy a hard copy, too.

DJ Girl Talk Explores Fair Use

Today's New York Times has an interesting piece on D.J. Girl Talk, whose album Feed the Animals consists of dance songs made up of very short snippets of other artists' songs. Reporter Robert Levine says that Girl Talk "doesn’t get the permission of the composers to use these samples, as United States copyright law mostly requires, because he maintains that the brief snippets he works with are covered by copyright law’s “fair use” principle (and perhaps because doing so would be prohibitively expensive)." Next month Duke Press will be publishing Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain, a new expanded edition of a popular comic book that explores the issue of fair use as it pertains to documentary filmmaking in particular. Levine writes, "Fair use has become important to the thinking of legal scholars, sometimes called the 'copyleft,' who argue that copyright law has grown so restrictive that it impedes creativity." Authors Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins would certainly agree.