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Anime Encyclopedia's McCarthy Decries Book's Copying

Helen McCarthy, co-author of The Anime Encyclopedia and author of The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga, posted on her blog her reaction to the online copying of The Anime Encyclopedia. McCarthy co-wrote this 850-page tome about the first nine decades of anime with Jonathan Clements, and Stone Bridge Press published a revised and expanded edition in 2006.

McCarthy expressed her anger over the unauthorized copying, saying, "my publisher, co-author, and I should decide if giving The Anime Encyclopedia away free is OK, not some unknown person hiding behind an Internet alias."

McCarthy explained the difficulties that she has as an author with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 — specifically, the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA). OCILLA limits the liability of Internet service providers for items posted through their services, if they remove or block access to any infringing material when notified. However, McCarthy adds that this notification process requires specific forms that must be filled out, and filling out and processing these forms take time, during which the copied materials can spread online to other websites. According to McCarthy, only certain people or companies are allowed to make the request.

McCarthy then added that "creators already have a perfectly good mechanism for making work available for free download. It's called a Creative Commons License, a wonderfully simple and flexible instrument that enables the maker of any kind of work to choose exactly what level of access to allow and what rights to give away."

Thanks to Gilles Poitras for the news tip.