Google Books Can Proceed As Supreme Court Rejects Authors Guild Appeal (bbc.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to Google's online book library -- Google Books -- from authors who complained that the project makes it harder for them to market their work. The Authors Guild and other writers had claimed that Google's scanning of their books should be deemed as copyright infringement and not fair use. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers' claims. The decision today means Google Books won't have to close up shop or ask publishers for permission to scan.The ruling, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the authors group, said, "misunderstood the importance of emerging online markets for books and book excerpts. It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision. The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."

Comments

And old "research" was lower quality for it

[dlenmn]

For people born before 1990, there was this thing called "research" which took more than 5 seconds to do, thus its need to be described as an actual activity.

The high time cost of "research" before everything was electronic meant that research was often lower quality. (By research, I mean "looking up sources" -- not "doing science" in general.) I'm a physicist, and it's very interesting to look back at old papers (which I do often because it's easy thanks to the internet). Old papers tended to cite few other papers, probably because looking up references was time consuming, and there are only so many hours in a day. E.g. the paper I'm working on cites over 100 other works. Many older papers don't even cite 20 other works.

For example, I was interested in a specific topic (a finite-difference time-domain solution to the Schroedinger equation), so I started digging. It turns out that the technique was "introduced" no less than four times -- basically once a decade since the 1950s. Each paper which "introduced" the technique did not cite previous work on the technique. That's both a dick move and a waste of time and effort. People should have been refining the technique instead of wasting time by rediscovering it. You also see this in even older work. E.g. the "Fokker–Planck equation" is also known as the "Kolmogorov forward equation" because Kolmogorov didn't know that the equation had already been developed.

I wouldn't have been able to learn about the history of the technique if not for electronic records. This research still doesn't take 5 seconds to do. I spend days doing it and discover much more than anyone in 1990 could.