Sarah Palin's tweet complaining about pre-publication Internet leaks of her new book before its Nov. 23 publication date asked, "Isn't that illegal?" Her publisher asked the same question in federal court Friday by filing a lawsuit against one of the leakers, the website Gawker, which published 24 scanned pages of the book. The complaint, not yet posted, reportedly asked for the return of the source material, for financial damages, and for an injunction against "further copyright infringement." The lawyers for Harper Collins first sent a demand letter, to which Gawker responded by posting links to Wikipedia's fair use entry and Stanford's copyright and fair use information. Update: according to Politico, U.S. district judge Thomas P. Griesa issued a two-page order today temporarily restrained Gawker from continuing to distribute, publish or otherwise transmit pages of the book.
If you're reading this post primarily because you're interested in copyright law rather than Sarah Palin, you may also be interested in this Volokh Conspiracy post on the DJ/artist Gregg Gillis, aka "Girl Talk", whose album, “All Day”, available for free download at www.illegal-art.net, consists of entirely of mixes and layerings of other artists work, i.e. "mashups". And if you're just interested in mashup artists and not copyright law, then check out this NPR music review of Girl Talk, mashed up with Josh Grogan.
And speaking of mashups, here's a post, courtesy of Kathryn Lopez at NRO Online from last February, linking up Groban to Palin:
Rain is on it’s way…big vocal session today…lyrics all ready on my hand…feeling hopey changey that today is gonna be a good one.
