Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: OpenOffice, SuitSat, Google Books
Sutor says "no way" to VNUnet OpenOffice story. Andy Updegrove writes "Earlier today a story by Tom Sanders at Vnunet.com covered by Slashdot didn't make sense to me, as it ran counter to the joint determination of Sun and IBM to make ODF succeed. In part, the story relied on an email exchange with Bob Sutor, IBM's Vice President of Standards and Open Source, so I asked Bob whether the story got it wrong. The answer? Sutor said: 'To be more clear, and on the record, IBM and Sun are working together happily and effectively on the OpenDocument Format. I think we've made a terrific amount of progress in the last year and that's because of the broad cooperation by the community. I'm not sure why we were dragged into the referenced story, but it was certainly nothing we initiated.'"
Google forgives BMW after delisting. dbucowboy writes "According to Matt Cutts, Google has re-included BMW.de in the Google index due to their willingness to cease supposed blackhat SEO practices." From the article: "I appreciate BMW's quick response on removing JavaScript-redirecting pages from BMW properties. The webspam team at Google has been in contact with BMW, and Google has reincluded bmw.de in our index. Likewise, ricoh.de has also removed similar doorway pages and has been reincluded in Google's index."
SunComm vows to make right their DRM debacle. Rinisari writes "SunnComm, creators of the highly controversial MediaMax DRM implementation on a number of Sony BMG and indie CDs have issued a statement through the EFF that they are committed to notifying consumers and issuing updates/patches to fix security holes caused by the software. MediaMax is one of the two copy protection schemes about which Sony is being sued class-action style."
SuitSat-1 weak but not dead. zark22 writes "Suitsat, the amateur radio transmitter stuffed inside a surplus Russian spacesuit and chucked out the International Space station is alive and well, if somewhat weak and staticky. Users can still follow its progress at the Suitsat webpage."
UMich President defends Google book search. eaj writes "University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman defended the legality and ethics [PDF] of the Google Book Search project to a meeting of the Association of American Publishers on Monday. The AAP is suing Google over the book scanning involved in the project. From the article: '[We] believe this is a legal, ethical, and noble endeavor that will transform our society. Legal because we believe copyright law allows us the fair use of millions of books that are being digitized. Ethical because the preservation and protection of knowledge is critically important to the betterment of humankind. And noble because this enterprise is right for the time, right for the future, right for the world of publishing, right for all of us.' CNet news also has a video."
Yes, I too agree that for too long now, libraries have been giving free access to books, periodicals, and music recordings that their patrons would otherwise have to pay for. Authors and recording artists are going broke and starving just so that children have a chance to learn unencumbered.
I recommend picketing your nearest public library at once.
dom
Google is only putting part of the books online.. The whole book is searchable but you can't download it. That is well within both the spirit and the meaning of fair use law. In fact if anything it will lead to more request to get the book both from libraries and to purchase it; both of which will ultimately increase sales of these books. Given that some of these books are not in print, it is also of great benefit to society.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Cracking CSS was one thing, someone had physical control of the media and a player to work with, software and a debugger.. It was just a matter of time. Google could put MANY roadblocks and switchbacks in any such interface to increase the time to source an entire work.
But when the effort of doing so exceeds the reasonable effort of walking into the library and scanning the entirety of said literary work, I would contend that Google has met it's burden (though I am sympathetic of the rights-holders desires). If you make the argument that it's a rare and unique book, then I think that the rights-holders arguments fall apart. I think in that case, those are the books most deserving of digital preservation.
A case could be made that someone could garner this same information from the Library of Congress by sitting there for hours on end. One thing that Google print brings is the possibility that a book will gain more exposure, and therefore potentially more revenue for it's owner.
"Some fundamental rights should not be assumed to be given up until they actually are, and intellectual property is one of them."
nom it is not a 'fundamental' right. It is a privilage granted by congress, which is a representation of the people.
Read the constitution.
Nice strawman you threw in there. Illegal search and seazure is written into the constitution.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Tell me this: What's the difference between browsing a book on Google and walking into a bookstore and reading the book on the shelf?
The point of either is to get you to buy the book. The publishers should be praising Google for making their books searchable.
I personally have bought several books based on text I have searched for using Google Book search.
My blog
This is probably the reason why she (and many other people and institutions) believe that Google is in the right on this issue, and why the publishers are trying to use allegations issued in the press, rather than the courts to fight against it.
If the publishers had a reasonably strong case in court for this issue, they probably wouldn't be trying their "ham-handed appeals" in their press releases and in the popular press.
Unfortunately, Google is proposing to do something which would be of great benefit to all of mankind, and it might have a negative impact on some publisher's profits, and they are fighting claw, tooth, and nail to avoid that!
I'm both an author and a publisher, but I welcome this change -- I'd love to see my work reach wider audiences and I'm not too worried about losing a few percentage points of profits. In fact, it might be that if more people could easily find my work on Google, more of them would go out of their way to purchase it!
I see people from my town (VE7xxx) are tracking the suitsat. Cool.
I also see there's noone with WTF in their callsign tracking it. Bummer.
The earlier story talked about control of OpenOffice, while this new article (along with the comments from IBM) talks almost solely about ODF. Those two things are not even remotely the same, and if these tech writers can't figure out that they're different, then God help the state of Massachusetts.
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
--KC0QBP
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
http://books.google.ca/intl/en/googlebooks/help.ht ml
# Why can't I read the entire book?
We respect copyright law and the tremendous creative effort authors put into their work. So, unless any given book's publisher has given us permission to show sample pages, you'll only be able to see the Snippet View which, like a card catalog, shows information about the book plus a few snippets - a few sentences of your search term in context. If the book isn't under copyright at all, you can browse the entire book in the Full Book View, but the aim of Google Book Search is to help you discover books and learn where to buy or borrow them, not read them from start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing - with a Google twist.
Google pitched BMW out an air lock, it's fortunate for BMW that they were let back in from the cold.
I wonder if Google's mercenary tactics to fight BMW's mercenary tactics were justified? Did they give BMW a day to remove the doorway page?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I agree. I'm not opposed to the technology; not at all. It seems ingeneous and useful. But it seems patently obvious to me that the program should be opt-in, not opt-out. You wouldn't want an arbitrary commercial company -- a publicly-traded corporation, no less -- having access to your health records, or your business records, just because that corporation and some uninvolved, third-party academics said it was "for the public good." Why on earth should a publishing company be forced to turn over all the fruits of its labors -- remember its sole business is publishing -- because Google feels like it?
Fair use, my ass. The only reason Google wants this program to be opt-out is because that makes it better for Google. Google plans to use the fact that it has access to all this material as a way to market Google's products and services. If it only has a partial database, those products and services instantly become less valuable. But I ask again, why should a publishing company be made to market Google's products and services, for no benefit to the publishing company?
Ah -- you say there's a marketing benefit to the publisher. Fine. Then Google should do some market research to figure out what that benefit is, in dollar amount, and charge the publisher for it. Sounds like a great business opportunity for Google to me. But of course, that wouldn't work, because it would give companies the opportunity to opt out by not paying, and Google doesn't want that.
Suppose Google wanted to put my likeness up on its Web site. Should I have to write and ask them to take it down? Isn't it reasonable to assume that Google doesn't have the right to do that without my permission? So why is it any different for my words?
I repeat: Fair use, my ass. "Public commons," my ass! This isn't "public." This isn't "us." This is Google and Google alone. This isn't for the posterity of society. It's for Google's posterity, and longterm financial gain, at the expense of other businesses.
Promoting the good of society is the role of the government. If the world needs an electronic index of books, then let the federal government pass a law mandating it, provide budget for it, and let it be managed as a project of the Library of Congress. If, on the other hand, a commercial company like Google wants to spend its own money to do the same, then more power to them. But since it's not Congress, Google shouldn't be able to force anybody in this country to comply with its business goals -- in fact, you might think it would have the good grace to ask first, if it's really dedicated to "not being evil."
(And re: "not being evil" -- am I to presume Google is hiring philosophy PhDs as well as computer science ones?)
Breakfast served all day!
Google forgives BMW after delisting
So I guess if your site has been delisted, all you have to do is remove it, email Google, and watch it be re-listed. Right? More likely, if you are anyone other than a Fortune 500 company, you're email will never be answered. Or unless you pay some cash.
Google owns their search engine of course, but I think it's just a little evil to essentially make an entire company disappear from teh interwebs. If they weren't so pervasive then this would be a non-issue, but when I see these stories I get a little worried. Hopefully they won't expand their definition of "cheating" to include things we might think are OK.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Google has no right to index all the books it wants and throw them online for anyone to browse.
[sarcasm] Yeah, and libraries have no right to purchase books and throw them on shelves for anyone to check out for free. Heaven forbid someone quote a book in a scholarly paper! Those writings are the work of the author, and shouldn't be stolen by those wanting to piggy-back off their labors! [/sarcasm]
It's called "fair use". So, the debate is (or at least should be) whether Google's project consitutes fair use or not. To state point-blank that they have no right to do it based on the idea of copyright is to ignore precedent, which says reasonable exceptions can (and should) be made. The right not to have your book quoted, for example, is something you don't have unless you specifically reserve it (can you even do that? I assume so...).
No matter how much they redact irrelavent text or try to keep users from gaining full access to the book, someone will.
I could argue that libraries make it easier for someone to get their hands on a book (for free) long enough to scan and possibly OCR it, then share it online via P2P. Just because something can be abused doesn't mean it should be forbidden. You have to weigh the costs and benefits.
Copyright is not property. The books are the property of whoever owns the individual books. The right to copy those books are something entirely different.
No - privacy concerns and Governmental checks-and-balance have nothing to do with this issue; not even remotely. The interesting thing here is while Copyright is very useful, it also takes AWAY the public's rights. This is why people are so concerned about Copyright being truely limited. And this is also why there exists Fair Use within the very laws that establish Copyright. It might also be worth stressing that while much of our law is based on property, Copyright is not property - even with the use of snazy memes like "intelectual property".
Indeed. The easy access you're describing is called... a book. The access is already there in the form of book stores, public libraries, and personal libraries. If keeping something from being copied is your concern, don't publish.
Time to burn some karma. How the holy fuck does this nonsense get moderated insightful. This topic has been discussed repeatedly on /. Flogged to death in a rather ham fisted manner, one might say, if one were inclined to mix metaphors. And each and every time some number of posters need to be reminded, as does the parent here, that Google is not offering up entire copyrighted works for browsing, but rather just snippets. So, I ask, again: why does factually inaccurate nonsense get moderated as insightful? Anybody?
Like many people I've been booted out of Adsense without Google giving a reason. If they're willing to forgive BMW for a deliberate act will they forgive me for something I didn't do? Of course they won't.
Copying the contents of all those books into a database for search purposes, on the other hand, is a different matter.
Here are some alternative options:
On the other hand, Google seems to be choosing option #5 -- just copy the information into a database and offer it to the public without getting permission. Unfortunatley, under copyright law option #5 doesn't exist.
Breakfast served all day!
Indeed! But let us not stop at public libraries. Used bookstores are actually reselling copies of books! These books are the property of the publishers, right? Surely authors are being robed of income by these sales - none of which include payment to the author or, more importantly, the publishers.
I can understand why this action may not have much appeal. After all, public libraries and used bookstores hardly have Google-sized wallets. But then... Amazon and eBay sell used books too.
...But when the effort of doing so exceeds the reasonable effort of walking into the library and scanning the entirety of said literary work, I would contend that Google has met it's burden...
... I just do what any script kiddie does best. Now some kind of argument could be made about Google's due diligence to quickly find and close such holes once they are opened... I'm just saying that the issue isn't as simple as your comparison might make it seem.
The analogy breaks down when someone goes to copy a second book. Presumably, a second trip to the copy machine at the library will take just as long as the first. OTOH, once a hole is discovered in Google's book protection, it could be scripted/otherwise automated such that downloading their entire catalog takes only a single click. When I want to crack the CSS on a DVD, I don't have to reinvent the wheel
BTW, I'm completely in support of Google Print, just playing devil's advocate here.
I'm on my way down to the local public library right now, with my Powerbook and a page scanner. I'm going to scan books in, and put them on my own website for others to search. I won't put the whole book online, of course, just the index. I'll start with "The Google Story"; I'm sure authors David Vise and Mark Malseed won't object -- I'm just following the example of their favorite company, after all. If the librarian objects, I'll simply refer her to Mary Sue Coleman.
Then I remembered Google's book search, which came up with at least five or six solid hits that actually helped - the books were in my local library, and their titles/subjects had absolutely nothing to do with what I was looking for, but the info was there. Without Google book search, I'd still be looking through stacks at the library. There's a time and a place for reading every available book tangentially related to a subject, but there are other times when an indexing service simply speeds up research.
I should point out that most of the pages I needed to read were blocked by Google; they only allow you to look at random pages out of certain books. But they index the entire book & tell you on exactly what pages you can find word references. A very, very useful tool, one that I will use in the years to come. I hate to sound like a shill for Google, but for what it's worth, this has been my experience with the service, and for this very specific and uncommon topic, it was very helpful.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
You're forgetting a very simple fact:
The library purchased all of the books it loans.
Google did not.
I guess it's interesting, in a historic kind of way, that it is a Russian satellite that is beaming signals for anyone on the ground whilst on a self-destructive trajectory, given that it is - in many ways - a re-enactment of Sputnik. The biggest difference seems to be that this one was launched from space rather than from the ground, but the intended signal and audience seem to be essentially the same.
I wonder if it'll have the same impact, though.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I don't suppose there's any online sites for predicting a pass over a given location?t ml
http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/Amateur.h
Actually, you, me, and everyone else on this planet has what are termed Fair Use Rights . Some examples of Fair Use Rights are that you can quote brief sections of a copyrighted work for the purposes of literary review or criticism.
Conceptually, Google makes two copies of the book in order to offer it for searching - an entire copy of the book stored on its servers, and snippets of that copy offered for public consumption.
I contend that neither copy meets requirements for fair use. In the first copy, Google is making an entire copy of the work. The copy deprives the publisher of a sale (Google didn't buy the book), copies the entire work, and intends to use that copy for commercial purposes (offering snippets from it on a public web site). There's no review or criticism at that stage, because the public doesn't see it...it's just being downloaded into a database.
The second copy (from the database to the end-user) doesn't feel like Fair Use either. I don't see any literary review or criticism attached to Google Book Search...just sentences from the book offered without question, on-demand, at the request of searchers. It's not a matter of offering the same snippet to everybody, as a typical fair-use case would; instead, they propose to offer separate snippets based on what the user asks for. Again, this service is inherently commercial - its goal is solely to get people to visit Google so they can benefit from the increased exposure and hopefully sell an ad or two.
This is probably the reason why she (and many other people and institutions) believe that Google is in the right on this issue, and why the publishers are trying to use allegations issued in the press, rather than the courts to fight against it.
If the publishers had a reasonably strong case in court for this issue, they probably wouldn't be trying their "ham-handed appeals" in their press releases and in the popular press.
The publishers are using the court to fight this, and Google is also fighting this in the popular press - or did you miss Google's own press page and Eric Schmidt's "'ham-handed appeal'" in the Wall Street Journal?
Unfortunately, Google is proposing to do something which would be of great benefit to all of mankind, and it might have a negative impact on some publisher's profits, and they are fighting claw, tooth, and nail to avoid that!
I'm both an author and a publisher, but I welcome this change -- I'd love to see my work reach wider audiences and I'm not too worried about losing a few percentage points of profits. In fact, it might be that if more people could easily find my work on Google, more of them would go out of their way to purchase it!
I actually agree with you. I think the publishers that are fighting this are short-sighted, just like I think the recording industry should find a way to co-exist with peer-to-peer networks. I don't think anybody is denying that the program itself would be a benefit for publishers and authors.
What I am personally worried about is requiring publishers to opt-out, not opt-in, to Book Search. I think the legal situation is clear, and Google needs to do the "non-evil" thing and ask for permission before including these books. You'd give permission, right? If I was in the publishing business, I would too, and I can't believe we're the only two people with an ounce of common sense.
Amazon.com has been running Search Inside the Book far longer than Google, and nobody complains because they're doing the right thing and asking the publishers to participate, not forcing them to opt-out. Google's opt-out program is especially egregious, because not only do they want publishers to opt-out, they want them to opt-out every title, and won't accept a blanket opt-out from the company.
That's wrong, and I think Google should be ashamed of themselves. The way to get people to like you is not to force yourself on them. It's not the way the Old Google did things.
But here again you are wrong. I am allowed under copyright law, and owner of a work to make copies of that work for my own use. If I buy a book I can certainly make millions of copies of that work and distribute them all over my own property. (The problems of course come when you give them to other people).
YET! We have a great deal of legal precedence that says taking snippets of already published books, and including them into an "index" is perfectly legal. This was done for centuries before the internet hit it big, and was a useful tool for researchers who wanted to know where every occurance of the word "god" appeared in Moby Dick (since the author didn't include an index).
So the question I ask is how in gods name is what the author of that index did (and has been legal for centuries) different from what google is about to do. Google is creating a service that says "here is where in a book the information you're looking for lies". It's up to anyone else to go track down the book and find it.
Besides let us not forget that the only really questionable chunk of books (to you) should be those books that are in copyright but out of print. These are the only books google isn't asking permision to include snippets for and the only group of books that anyone seems to be contesting googles stance on. All books out of copyright, clearly google can do whatever it wants. All books in copyright and in print, the solution is easy... ask the publisher. But we're talking about a group of books, and information where finding someone to ask permission is often times flat out impossible, and in these times google includes a modest snippet... and index if you will.
~ Anders
In the United States, authors are nearly always obliged to sign over control to their publishers. The authors might retain some kind of copyright, but the publishers retain sole publishing rights. This is why many authors get frustrated when their books go out of print and the publisher still shows no interest in giving back publishing rights so said author can go elsewhere.
http://heavens-above.com/ carries suitsat data.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Google does respect robots.txt.
/*
They won't touch content that you tell them they can't index.
Every book published whould include in the preface.
robots.txt
Disallow:
problem solved
I found the post about using Google Scholar to research soul-catchers interesting. My initial reaction was one of dismisal as anyone with access to a decent set of library databases (MLA, Wilson, J-Store, MUSE) could have found that information much faster with full text to boot. But what if you're a HS student at East HogWaller High, or an adult doing some independent research. If you don't have access to a substantial library with all the latest tools, Google Scholar allows you a level of access to scholarly materials you may not have otherwise enjoyed.
Still pissed about the China page, though.
The answer to this is to fix the copyright laws, not give Google a free pass to break copyright. Copyright should require maintenance, so that abandoned works get put into the public domain. I also think something like 10 years should be the extent of copyright, not the insane amount of time it is now.