Slashdot Mirror
Google Accused of Violating Copyright In China
angry tapir writes "The Chinese Authors Society has demanded that Google present a resolution plan by the end of the year and quickly handle compensation for Chinese authors whose books the US company has scanned without permission as part of its Book Search program. A local copyright protection group, co-founded by the authors group, has said it found at least 17,000 Chinese works included in Google's scanning plan."
Two wongs don't make a right....
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
In other news, Baidu implement a website to download MP3s
http://mp3.baidu.com/
But two Wrights made an airplane.
Is this really about copyright? Or is it an excuse for the Chinese Government to have greater control over books written in Chinese (some of which may be potentially critical of the government)?
Unity in Diversity
I'll tell you what I think and it is in the public domain for anyone to use. If your nation is too backwards to allow a public domain then I grant you an unlimited license to use in any manner you see fit with or without attribution.
I'm a privateer. I decided to become one recently. What sparked this decision is the fact that content industries are stealing from me. When copyright was first introduced it was for a period of fourteen years which allowed the creator time to make a profit off of their work even with primitive dissemination systems of the time. After that period it expired and entered the public domain where it would join other works in a rich mosaic for future works to draw from. This is dead. Over the years copyright terms have been extended to the point where there effectively is no public domain anymore. The content industry plays lip-service to the issue, they insist that there is a public domain but when every work is at least life of author plus seventy-five years or so there is in reality no public domain from my life's point of view. I will never see Alien (1979) enter the public domain. I will never see a new original movie based off that setting and characters. I will never see the iron grip of control loosened and in fact I'm sure content is planning more extensions to the terms. Government is complicit in this, politicians have accepted bribes, er.. campaign donations, in exchange for listening to these idiotic and greedy lobbies and passing the appropriate legislation right on cue like their training taught them. Even if magically there are no more extensions to copyright by the time current terms expire the works in question will be irrelevant. No one will be interested in them any more as their times have passed. This gutting of the copyright agreement between publishers and citizens has resulted in copyright not being copyright anymore: it is now a form of property and you will pay for every single last use. In response to this wholesale theft from me I have decided to liberate what I see fit. Go to hell content. I will take whatever I like as you are raping and pillaging through my cultural tapestry. The day I stop will be the day there is an actual agreement restored. I would be willing to settle for twenty years for a copyright term which is even more generous than the original fourteen. With a twenty year period I would also like to see as a punishment for twisting our heritage that only copyrights younger than ten years would be protected from the start. In another ten you'd be up to your twenty. Bite me content you're a parasite and you are stealing from me directly. Anything 1989 and older is a moral right to me and until you stop reneging on the social contract everything newer is as well.
Shh.
On one hand, lose a chance at the biggest market available?
Or the other, bend over to all of China's whims?
Such a hard decision for companies...
/trollish mode on
Slashdot americanism knee-jerk on anything about China is just amazing.
/trollish mode off
This is not news. It was on local TV news several days ago. Basically, the Author's Society (a "guild"-like organization) said to Google something like this: "We know the benefits of scanned-and-indexed books and we want digital libraries, but why you're not paying for the copyrighted content?" So far the parties are negotiating a plan that is supposed to achieve mutual benefit.
BTW, I think Google was doing a right thing simply putting those books on-line and negotiate later. In the words of Admiral Grace Hopper, "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." The books acquired without negotiating copyright serves as a good corpus of OCR calibration or "training" material. While the legal dept are doing the talking, the techies can take the time sharpen the tech.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
*Whoosh!* There goes the point right over your head. Big content is stealing from you.
They're taking your history and your heritage. Imagine a ludicrous extreme, such as the hospital you were born in saying that you can no longer use the name that you were given at birth unless you pay for it because it happened on their premises, therefore they own the rights to it. Or if you are in immigrant, imagine someone telling you that you can no longer describe where you're from, because that information is "owned" by the country from which you came. (God forbid you draw a map!)
Similarly, the music that was on the radio when I was a child? I'm prohibited by law from sharing that with my friends. Movies that have become so deeply ingrained in our culture that we constantly refer to them... "May the force be with you." "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas any more." "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." "Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!" Yeah, in spite of them being part of the very fabric of our culture, you're legally prohibited from sharing them with your kids without paying your pound of flesh to people who did something great decades ago (or in some cases, to estates of long dead people).
Look, I'm all for compensating artists justly for what they do. In 1962, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr released a clever little song called Love Me Do. It was a bona fide hit, and they made a lot of money off of it. So be it, they deserve it. But now it's 47 years later. Do you really contend that the song was so unbelievably great, so untouchably amazing, that Paul, Ringo, and the estates of George and John should STILL be making money when a radio plays it?
Or let's look at it another way. Don't you think that's being way too overgenerous to artists? I mean, these past few years, I've been doing some of the greatest work in my professional life in a computer datacenter. I've gotten consistently great reviews, and I feel like I've made a real positive difference for the company where I'm employed. They've paid me well, I'm not complaining. But if I walked out tomorrow, wouldn't you agree that it's kind of silly to expect them to STILL keep paying me because they're enjoying the fruits of my labor while I worked there? 50 years after I'm dead, should they STILL be paying my estate because my contributions in the first decade of the 2000's contributed to the history of the company being great?
When I retire, I'm going to be living off of money I've saved up during my lifetime specifically because I don't expect my former employers to still be paying for my work 70 years after I die. Why is it that an artist who writes a hit song, a writer who writes a best-seller, an actor who turns in an Oscar-winning performance, gets that luxury? My opinion is that if you want to continue making money off of your work, get out there and work like the rest of us do. No one should get a lifetime + 70 years of resting on their laurels because they did something great. Like the rest of us, if they want to retire in comfort, they should set aside some of the money they make during the height of their popularity so they'll have it after the limited time that copyright is supposed to be valid.
Not quite... They own $1 trillion of our virtual currency
In exchange we got a lot of their material goods
If they abruptly ended the relationship one day and called in our debt, we would just default and they'd be left with nothing.
What option would they be left with? Go to war? Fat chance -- wars nowadays are fought with technology, not numbers of soldiers... and we spend almost as much as the rest of the world *combined* on defense (we spend $600 billion a year on military, whereas China is the 2nd highest with under $90 billion a year)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures#Stockholm_International_Peace_Research_Institute_figures
In the meantime, we would still have their manufactured items, and we'd just take our IP (read: engineering designs) to Malaysia or some other place (e.g. Mexico) for our manufacturing needs.
They don't "own us" -- it's a mutually beneficial relationship that requires both parties to take part.
Every country that plays the "globalization" game gets the benefits from and the dependency on every other player. As it stands now, they depend on us just like we depend on them. That could change, but it'd likely be a gradual change, or else a painful change for *both* sides.
They fucking own us. Literally and figuratively.
If you owe the bank $100,000 they own you, but if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000,000 you own them.
China's fate is just as wrapped up in the value of that debt as our own is.