international book day

One wonders – well, this one does – who decides which “days” are to be allocated to what worthy purpose and which are to be publicised and celebrated. Wikipedia gives a list of international observance, but these things seem to be fairly hit and miss.

April 23rd: a great day for dying

Today, the day when Shakespeare, Cervantes and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died in 1616, is officially designated World Book and Copyright Day by UNESCO.

However, although yesterday the Google site was displaying a re-designed logo for Earth Day, today there is nothing special about the google.com logo, and on the google.co.uk site the reference is to St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s Birthday. (In fact, the birthday is only deduced from the fact he was baptised on the 26th.)

taxing my patience

Buying blank cds to back up my ever-growing collection of photographs, I am reminded of university days when I studied Adam’s Smiths canons of taxation.

Just a few of many

Every blank cd sold in Spain is subject to el canon – popularly referred to as “un impuesto por si acaso“. That pretty much describes it: a “just-in-case tax”.

rights and royalties

When I wrote the previous post and thought about ‘tags’ for it, I included the Spanish expression derechos de autor. For non-Spanish speakers, it’s possibly worth pointing out the ambiguity of that phrase.

Literally, it looks like “author’s rights”, but in fact it can translate as both “copyright” and “royalties”. This can be confusing, but probably makes some kind of sense.

copyrights and wrongs

Some years ago in Spain there was a clamp down on illegal photocopying.

At the copy shop at the end of our road, they had always been amenable to making multiple copies of whole books – very useful for penniless English teachers who had managed to filch a single text book from their last employer and were now using this to go it alone with private classes. But suddenly the shop changed hands and it was rumoured