Links of the week May 19 2025 (21)

Dear ‘Jude',

The last place Renee Salt saw her father alive was on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.‘An army of heavily armed Gestapo and SS men with lunging, barking German Shepherd dogs were waiting on the platform shouting orders. It's impossible to describe the chaos,' Renee told me about her dawn arrival at the largest of the Third Reich's extermination camps. ‘They shouted: "Raus! (Be quick.) Leave the luggage." My father jumped off first and I jumped after him. But by then he had disappeared into thin air, without a kiss or a goodbye

‘I never saw my father again. I believed he had died in the gas chambers. A terrible sickly-sweet foul smell filled the air and a thick noxious smoke hung over everything.'

This was almost one of the first things the frail 95-year-old told me when I visited her in her sheltered housing apartment in London. Then she broke down, her hands shaking, her eyes growing wide with fear and I realised, "she isn't remembering this. She is reliving it!".

This was the beginning of an intense twelve-month process to research, write and give a platform for an elderly Holocaust survivor to bear witness. She was the survivor. I was the writer, tasked with bringing her story to the page before it was too late.

Jonathan Barnett, professor at the University of Southern California's Gould School of Law and author of The Big Steal: Ideology, Interest, and the Undoing of Intellectual Property, warned that publishers and other IP businesses need to learn from the lessons of the past-namely, the losses they suffered when Google successfully bet that it could scrape all content available on the internet for free in developing Google Books, a move that a court determined was protected by the fair use doctrine. He called Google's action the greatest case of mass infringement in U.S. history for which the tech giant suffered no consequences, and one which was supported by fair use protection that "is far broader than it has ever been."