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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/
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.
/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.
Is this really about copyright?
Absolutely. The way the world works is, when you are the underdog you "steal" the IP of all the countries around you until you achieve some level of economic parity, and then you hypocritically pull the ladder up behind you to try and prevent anyone else from doing the same.
America did it. South Korea did it. Now, China is doing it. It's about preserving economic hegemony, nothing more.
You clearly don't know your 18th century American or European history.
America built its textile industry, and indeed its prominence in the Industrial Revolution, only by flagrantly violating the patents of established European countries, especially those of Britain (and Scotland, the Silicon Valley of the day). In fact, the blatant colonial-day flouting of patent law and the use of "industrial espionage" (i.e. brain drain) against Britain was actually a significant pain point in the years leading into America's Revolutionary War, and tangentially figured into Britain's enthusiasm for the War of 1812.
(Copyrights were violated as well, but weren't considered as important at the time. Copyright itself was still crawling out of the cradle and unfamiliar to many — the first modern copyright law, the Statute of Anne, was passed only at the start of that century in 1709. At that point in time, copyright wasn't considered an economic engine, the way that patents were.)
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