Slashback: OpenOffice, SuitSat, Google Books

Slashback tonight brings some corrections, clarifications, and updates to previous Slashdot stories, including Sutor's response to OpenOffice control, Google forgives BMW, SunComm vows to make right their DRM debacle, SuitSat-1 still transmitting, and Defense of Google Book Search -- Read on for details.

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."

Comments

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[hhawk]

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.

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[ckaminski]

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.

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[Haydn]

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.

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!

OpenOffice, OpenDocument, who cares?

[75th Trombone]

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.

Suit Sat

[MBCook]

I got up REAL early to listen for Suit Sat last Sunday but didn't hear a thing. I've since heard that they've turn on the ISS's cross-band repeater which boosts the power from under 1/2 Watt to 10 Watts. Still, I don't think I'd be able to pick it up with my equipment. I've got a Yaesu VX-7R and a 18" ducky antenna. If I wasn't so busy right now I'd build a little Yagi and try to use that to pick the thing up.

--KC0QBP

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[Badluck]

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.

Too much power

[dedazo]

Anyone else feel Google has way too much power already? I mean, who needs domain names anymore? I just type what I'm looking for into Google and up comes the right answer. Right? Well sometimes.

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.

Re:Too much power

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I do think there should be a penalty for page rank spamming, willful or not. Maybe it was a little harsh, and Google's systems need a method to remove spam ranks.

I say you might as well use the competing search engines if it is too bothersome, because the power that you think they have too much of was power given to them by users.

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[_Sprocket_]

Google has no right to index all the books it wants and throw them online for anyone to browse. They are the property of the rightful owner, not Google.

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.

Their policy of having publishers request to not have their books scanned would be similar to the government forcing one to request not to have their phone tapped. Some fundamental rights should not be assumed to be given up until they actually are, and intellectual property is one of them.

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".

No matter how much they redact irrelavent text or try to keep users from gaining full access to the book, someone will. The Slashdot community, of all, should recognize this. Time and time again encryption schemes are hacked (DeCSS being the simplest example to point to).

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.

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[Apparition-X]

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?

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[_Sprocket_]

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.

If google can do it, then we all can do it!

[mbeckman]

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.

Re:If google can do it, then we all can do it!

[TubeSteak]

That's kinda the direction my mind was going when I heard that argument.

The way I see it is: If Google allows you to search in books and provides snippets of the work, that is fair use.

What I do not think falls within the perview of fair use, is the wholesale scanning of libraries.

I realize you can't have the one without first engaging in the other... but the Copyright owner may NOT want to give Google permission to do this.

Google's book scanning shouldn't be an Opt-Out kind of deal. Copyright laws specifically make it an Opt-In issue. Like anyone else, Google can use a portion of the material for fair use.

Google is violating the publishers'/authors' copyright by doing what they're doing. From a legal standpoint, what they intend to do shouldn't be relevant. They are copying the whole book, and AFAIK, fair use doesn't allow for that. I fail to see why they should get any special exemption(s).

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[Txiasaeia]

You can't imagine how useful Google's book search is useful for research projects until you actually experience it. I'm working on my MA thesis about possession in William Gibson's sprawl trilogy & needed to find some information about the "soulcatcher." I was able to discover through Google that it was a tool used by Native Northwest shamans, but Google was fairly useless for anything else. Amazon.com was also fairly useless, simply because they haven't yet indexed any books that contain scholarly info on the subject. Subject headings at the university library didn't turn up anything, and randomly searching books related to various tribes who used the soulcatcher (Tlingit, Bella Bella, Haida, and Tsimshiam) also was fruitless, as many of these books either had no index or didn't index this particular item.

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.

Re:I'm tired of these ham-handed appeals to morali

[aliscool]

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