Reconstructing copyright exhaustion in the online world

According to the principle of copyright exhaustion, once a copy of a work is placed on the market, the right holder’s control over further distribution of that copy is exhausted. Unlike the distribution of hard copies of copyright works, however, the electronic dissemination of content is not subject to the exhaustion principle. This means that second-hand markets of digital goods cannot exist. Traditionally, exhaustion is premised on four assumptions that cannot be safely assumed in the online context: it applies to tangible copies only; it covers goods and not services; the goods should be sold but not licensed; and the property entitlement should be alienated upon transfer. After long jurisprudential silence, courts at worldwide level have revisited these normative impediments to affirm that exhaustion can apply online in specific instances. The article discusses the doctrinal norms that underpin exhaustion and determines the conditions under which online copyright exhaustion can apply.

The Rilke of Ruth Speirs: new poems, Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus & others

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is universally recognized as among the most important twentieth-century German-language poets. Here, for the first time, are all the surviving translations of his poetry made by Ruth Speirs (1916-2000), a Latvian exile who joined the British literary community in Cairo during World War Two, becoming a close friend of Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Though described as ‘excellent’ and ‘the best’ by J. M. Cohen on the basis of magazine and anthology appearances, copyright restrictions meant that during her lifetime, with the exception of a Cairo-published Selected Poems (1942), Speirs was never to see her work gathered between covers and in print. This volume, edited by John Pilling and Peter Robinson, brings Speirs’ translations the belated recognition they deserve. Her much-revised and considered versions are a key document in the history of Rilke’s Anglophone dissemination. Rhythmically alive and carefully faithful, they give a uniquely mid-century English accent to the poet’s extraordinary German, and continue to bear comparison with current efforts to render his tenderly taxing voice.