“The National Portrait Gallery has threatened legal proceedings for breach of copyright against a man who downloaded thousands of high-resolution images from its website, and placed them in an archive of free-to-use images on Wikipedia. There has been no formal response from the internet encyclopedia but Derrick Coetzee, who downloaded the images, promptly uploaded the letter from the London lawyers Farrar and Co, ‘to enable public discourse on the issue’.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Australia Proposes Ending Controls On Imported Books, And Australian Authors Cry Foul
Prime minister Paul Rudd’s government wants to change a law which bans Australian booksellers from importing a given title if a domestic publisher is to release that title within 30 days of its publication elsewhere. The Australian Society of Authors responds that “[r]emoving the territorial copyright of books will simply destroy our hard-won literary culture.”
Shepard Fairey To Publish Art For Obama Coffee-Table Book
The 176-page volume, whose full title is Art for Obama: Designing for Manifest Hope and the Campaign for Change, “will feature 150 full-color illustrations of art work that depicts or was inspired by Barack Obama and the 2008 presidential election. Some of the artists featured in the book are Ron English, David Choe, Kwaku Alston, Maya Hayuk, Justin Hampton, and Shel Starkman – and of course, work by Fairey.”
Will Outdoor Video Replace The Met’s Opera In The Parks?
Time was, a Met concert performance of Rigoletto or Bohème could attract 35,000 people to Central Park. But this week’s three-singer-and-piano recital there only drew about 4,300 listeners, even with Tony-winning heartthrob Paulo Szot as the headliner. Will next month’s Summer HD Festival – outdoor re-screenings of past live hi-def broadcasts – be the future of the Met’s summer programming?
Lost Graham Greene Novel To Be Serialized In The Strand
“A newly discovered but unfinished novel by Graham Greene … is being serialized in The Strand magazine beginning this week and will appear in four more quarterly installments. The magazine hopes to commission someone to write an ending for the novel, a murder mystery called The Empty Chair that Greene began in 1926 and then apparently abandoned.”
Music Can Aid Recovery From Surgery: Studies
“The research papers, which describe a pilot study of cardiac surgery patients and an experiment featuring older adults undergoing hip or knee surgery, are both published in the inaugural issue of the journal Music and Medicine. Together, they suggest the much-discussed healing power of music can play a valuable role in the postoperative healing process.”
Underground Art Star Dash Snow Dead At 27
“Hard-living, cop-dodging New York collage artist, photographer, and graffiti writer Dash Snow has died of a drug overdose at 27.” According to his grandmother, art collector Christophe de Menil, Snow had been in rehab this spring and had only recently slipped back into heroin use.
No More Journalists Voting For Tonys
“[T]he Tony Management Committee announced Tuesday evening that about 100 theater critics and journalists – about one-eighth of all Tony voters – will no longer be eligible to vote in the competition for Broadway’s most prestigious honor.”
NY Times Sells Classical Radio Station WQXR In Three-Way Deal
Spanish-language media company Univision will pay $33.5 million to exchange its license for 105.9 FM for the existing WQXR frequency at 96.3 FM; public radio powerhouse WNYC will then pay $11.5 million for the WQXR call letters and website as well as the former Univision frequency, where WQXR will broadcast beginning in October. The New York Times Co. will use the $45 million in purchase proceeds to pay down debt.
Now We Can All Write In The Margins Of One Big Virtual Book
“BookGlutton.com, a Web site that permits readers to chat about books as they read, may be transforming a lone activity into a communal one. The site was born out of co-founder Travis Alber’s desire to talk about books with friends who had moved away. Her solution? A Web site that allows multiple users to write in the margins of an online book.”