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Law Professor Makes Digital Copyright Book Open for All

Internet Archive Blogs: “After spending years researching the history of U.S. copyright law, Jessica Litman says she wants to make it easy for others to find her work. The law professor’s book, Digital Copyright, first published in 2001 by Prometheus Books, is available free online (read now). After it went out of print in 2015, University of Michigan Press agreed to publish an open access edition of the book. Litman updated all the footnotes (some of which were broken links to web pages only available through preservation on Internet Archive) and made the updated book available under a CC-BY-ND license in 2017. “I wanted the book to continue to be useful,” Litman said. “Free copies on the web make it easy to read.” Geared for a general audience, the book chronicles how copyright laws were drafted, written, lobbied and enacted in Congress over time. Litman researched the legislative history of copyright law, including development of the 1976 Copyright Act, and spent two years in Washington, D.C., observing Congress leading up to the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998…”

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