Web browsers and PDF readers are not really good 'book readers', it's nice to 'page' rather than 'scroll'.
Cell phones seem to make fine eBook readers, mainly because you are already carrying one. I've not found _Harry Potter_ but you can get free PD and CCL books at http://www.booksinmyphone.com/.
Does anyone have any real idea of the cost breakdown of supplyinng eBooks? Lets ignore the reader and associated development costs and worry just about providing the books in some formats. There would be some costs that were not 'per book', but it seems like they should not be huge.
I had read somewhere that the authors might get around $1.50 per book. It must cost at most $0.01 to distribute the the book itself. Where does the other $8.48 go? Is it 'pure profit'? licensing for DRM schemes / formats?....
A law that is generally violated and not generally enforced is ripe for use to persecute particular people for reasons unrelated to that law. You want to silence / extort some particular political voice... perhaps they could be prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement - you don't bother in general but it's a useful tool for troublemakers.
Why not use this kind of eInk tech as 'paint' on objects? This would play to it's main advantages (reflective => use in full sun, no power draw except to change color) and it main problem (refresh rates) would not be a problem. Pimp your ride at the touch of a button. A doll you can put eraseable makeup on. 'Wallpaper' for the outside of your phone....
kudos to Gutenberg for hosting the material. It's good that we can shelter the content under their legal umbrella, but having content migrate to a few mega-sites like Gutenberg or the Internet Archive is not really good enough somehow.
We want a world where anyone who has some content can cheaply and easily share it - where it is legal to do so. 'Where it is legal to do so' is where all the trouble starts. Any little guy who wants to share his collection of PD banjo scores or what ever has to deal with ALL the legal issues. That has a real 'chilling effect'. It is a gross waste of every one's time to go though the same discovery and technical steps to address the issues.
It's probably getting worse not better, the copyrighteous are getting bolder, more aggressive, and more tech savvy. It's all very well to say 'the Internet routes around damage', but it doesn't route around law. When you are faced with re-mortgaging your house to pay to convince a judge that the banjo scores are in fact PD likely you will just fold.
I see the following kinds of problems:
Gutenberg and InternetArchive are US based so can only defensibly host US PD material - this leaves a lot of material out of the umbrella.
The Gutenberg position that 'we can serve any USA PD material to anywhere in the world' may not in fact be legally defensible. IANAL but if you read some cases around libel and such I get the feeling the copyrighteous will get around to Gutenberg at some point.
If it turns out that one has to geo filter then:
worst case one needs to know for each work: all the authors/editors/translators/contributors, and the death dates, and the publishing date, and which edition of the printed work the text came from. Gutenberg and others are often 'pretty light' on this sort of meta data - it's not significant under the USA 1923 rule.
then for each jurisdiction one needs to model the copyright laws and the treatment of anon etc work. True enough they fall into 'families' like 'life+50' but you have to know that there are no quirks to be safe - right? and they are likely written in languages you don't understand, and they change so you have to keep monitoring them.
one has to get a good geo IP scheme running. Ignoring the 'proxy hole' as far as I know GEOIP DBs are either crippled or 'too expensive' for a hobbyist and for some reason RIPE and such don't seem to have a nice API to query country from an IP.
put together work,country,law to decide if a file can be served to that IP address.
Whew, It's all do-able, but really to we want to make everyone with something to share have to go through all that? Is Gutenberg going to go through all that so they can serve the world?
We need an architecture for open pervasive legitimate sharing.
At least some:
open easily accessible legal guidance in this area - use case, faqs, what ifs, safe harbour procedures, etc.
open free geoIP DBs.
open free codification of copyright laws in a form easy to write programs against.
open free work/creators/contributors data to justify PD per jurisdiction per work.
people who are happy to host those parts of the sharable corpus that they legally able to do.
Lawyers, lots of lawyers. IANAL but maybe one can structure things so that any legal hurt can only be directed at a few bodies that are equipped to deal with it rather than the (hopefully) myriad small niche sharing sites.
The copyright holding cabal sure don't want people to get the idea that there is anything of value that comes from anyone but them. They are succeeding, many people have no idea Dickens is PD You can see the copyrighteous will be pursuing every effort to balkanize, ghettoise, and marginalize, and eventually extinguish even legitimate sharing.
Sorry but I guess the law is all about nit-picking
The iBrief says there are four kinds of safe harbour. The one it thinks there is a problem with is Transitory Communications Safe Harbor. TCSH seems to me to be focused on protecting things like routers and proxies, but iBrief's obsession with 'users' seems to indicate that the law's intention is broader than that. If Usenet could qualify as a TCSH then they don't have to worry about 'takedown' notices or someone getting a subpoena for 'subscriber names'. It kind of spooky how the whole argument hangs on the interpretation of 'anticipated'; is it some 'general expectation that someone/anyone will download a posting' or that 'the particular person X will download it within seconds'.
Is Usenet more like a distributed store and forward system? Maybe the Network Storage Safe Harbor is more applicable, like youtube (=> takedowns & subpoenas). Maybe its Transitory as it peers and Network Storage at the edges? Does it have any nodes that are not edges?
How effectively would TCSF provisions shield p2p sharing? Are all these legal actions driving design of next gen p2p schemes? Bittorrent is technically and legally vulnerable because the peers talk to each other directly and are not in any safe harbour. Darknets have the same weakness except they rely on some 'trust' scheme to limit damage, but you'd have to expect under litigation that feature would collapse. NZB - sounds like how we used to hide rogue from uni sysadmins - didn't work out in the loing run.
Is it just me or does it seem like the effort people are putting into 'making sure they get paid' actually much greater than the effor they are putting into 'making something to get paid for'. I'm sure many people spend more time/money trying to figure out if they can be sued than they do actually making a product.
ePaper etc always seem 'just around the corner' - until then a cell phone works great as a book reader. The screen is 'not perfect' but the ubiquity sure is.
I think I recall a Philip K Dick short story involving someone thrying to preserve music over very long time spans by encoding it in DNA inserted into the genomes of various species. The idea was that it would be a great distributed, fault tolerant, etc etc medium - within the living body of every rabbit (say - I cannot recall the animal).
I really don't understand how the idea as stated here can be patentable - there seems like many many cases of prior art.
It seems like the real world economics of the MMORPGs require grind to pace the players and keep the $/player up. Without something to slow them down players would exhaust their interest in the content more quickly and stop their subscriptions.
I was thinking about annotated texts and the need for richer encodings of the works (that could be 'rendered' as plain text PG style files). I had looked at hgw but it seemed like there was not any recent activity (a 2001 story as recent news on the news page), and it seemed they were using html as an encoding of presentation.
It would be great to host a cleaned up structural representation of the book (author, edition, publisher, chapters, para, etc) and then allow people to layer annotations over it via some kind of wiki capability. Then support tagging of sets of annotations so that one could render/generate/export a version appropriate for a lit scholar or a different version appropriate for a 'casual' reader or a reader interested in how events in the authors life found their way into the book (say). It would be nice to allow groups of annotators to 'own' their sets, both to avoid edit wars and to allows a variety of consistent note sets. And of course you'd want to be able to render/export/generate to a number of representations html/pdf/ebook reader etc.
I could not find anything close to that capability does anyone have any pointers to something like that?
Slashdot Mirror
Web browsers and PDF readers are not really good 'book readers', it's nice to 'page' rather than 'scroll'.
Cell phones seem to make fine eBook readers, mainly because you are already carrying one. I've not found _Harry Potter_ but you can get free PD and CCL books at http://www.booksinmyphone.com/.
Does anyone have any real idea of the cost breakdown of supplyinng eBooks? Lets ignore the reader and associated development costs and worry just about providing the books in some formats. There would be some costs that were not 'per book', but it seems like they should not be huge.
I had read somewhere that the authors might get around $1.50 per book. It must cost at most $0.01 to distribute the the book itself. Where does the other $8.48 go? Is it 'pure profit'? licensing for DRM schemes / formats? ....
A law that is generally violated and not generally enforced is ripe for use to persecute particular people for reasons unrelated to that law. You want to silence / extort some particular political voice ... perhaps they could be prosecuted for criminal copyright infringement - you don't bother in general but it's a useful tool for troublemakers.
Selective enforcement is a tool of totalitarianism.
Maybe it's a 'good start', but ultimately the law has to be either changed of enforced.
Why not use this kind of eInk tech as 'paint' on objects? This would play to it's main advantages (reflective => use in full sun, no power draw except to change color) and it main problem (refresh rates) would not be a problem. Pimp your ride at the touch of a button. A doll you can put eraseable makeup on. 'Wallpaper' for the outside of your phone. ...
kudos to Gutenberg for hosting the material. It's good that we can shelter the content under their legal umbrella, but having content migrate to a few mega-sites like Gutenberg or the Internet Archive is not really good enough somehow.
We want a world where anyone who has some content can cheaply and easily share it - where it is legal to do so. 'Where it is legal to do so' is where all the trouble starts. Any little guy who wants to share his collection of PD banjo scores or what ever has to deal with ALL the legal issues. That has a real 'chilling effect'. It is a gross waste of every one's time to go though the same discovery and technical steps to address the issues.
It's probably getting worse not better, the copyrighteous are getting bolder, more aggressive, and more tech savvy. It's all very well to say 'the Internet routes around damage', but it doesn't route around law. When you are faced with re-mortgaging your house to pay to convince a judge that the banjo scores are in fact PD likely you will just fold.
I see the following kinds of problems:- worst case one needs to know for each work: all the authors/editors/translators/contributors, and the death dates, and the publishing date, and which edition of the printed work the text came from. Gutenberg and others are often 'pretty light' on this sort of meta data - it's not significant under the USA 1923 rule.
- then for each jurisdiction one needs to model the copyright laws and the treatment of anon etc work. True enough they fall into 'families' like 'life+50' but you have to know that there are no quirks to be safe - right? and they are likely written in languages you don't understand, and they change so you have to keep monitoring them.
- one has to get a good geo IP scheme running. Ignoring the 'proxy hole' as far as I know GEOIP DBs are either crippled or 'too expensive' for a hobbyist and for some reason RIPE and such don't seem to have a nice API to query country from an IP.
- put together work,country,law to decide if a file can be served to that IP address.
Whew, It's all do-able, but really to we want to make everyone with something to share have to go through all that? Is Gutenberg going to go through all that so they can serve the world?We need an architecture for open pervasive legitimate sharing.
The copyright holding cabal sure don't want people to get the idea that there is anything of value that comes from anyone but them. They are succeeding, many people have no idea Dickens is PD You can see the copyrighteous will be pursuing every effort to balkanize, ghettoise, and marginalize, and eventually extinguish even legitimate sharing.
P2P sharing IS distributing for which we see they can obtain stupidly large punitive damages - or at least ruin your life.
Sorry but I guess the law is all about nit-picking
The iBrief says there are four kinds of safe harbour. The one it thinks there is a problem with is Transitory Communications Safe Harbor. TCSH seems to me to be focused on protecting things like routers and proxies, but iBrief's obsession with 'users' seems to indicate that the law's intention is broader than that. If Usenet could qualify as a TCSH then they don't have to worry about 'takedown' notices or someone getting a subpoena for 'subscriber names'. It kind of spooky how the whole argument hangs on the interpretation of 'anticipated'; is it some 'general expectation that someone/anyone will download a posting' or that 'the particular person X will download it within seconds'.
Is Usenet more like a distributed store and forward system? Maybe the Network Storage Safe Harbor is more applicable, like youtube (=> takedowns & subpoenas). Maybe its Transitory as it peers and Network Storage at the edges? Does it have any nodes that are not edges?
How effectively would TCSF provisions shield p2p sharing? Are all these legal actions driving design of next gen p2p schemes? Bittorrent is technically and legally vulnerable because the peers talk to each other directly and are not in any safe harbour. Darknets have the same weakness except they rely on some 'trust' scheme to limit damage, but you'd have to expect under litigation that feature would collapse. NZB - sounds like how we used to hide rogue from uni sysadmins - didn't work out in the loing run.
Is it just me or does it seem like the effort people are putting into 'making sure they get paid' actually much greater than the effor they are putting into 'making something to get paid for'. I'm sure many people spend more time/money trying to figure out if they can be sued than they do actually making a product.
ePaper etc always seem 'just around the corner' - until then a cell phone works great as a book reader. The screen is 'not perfect' but the ubiquity sure is.
I think I recall a Philip K Dick short story involving someone thrying to preserve music over very long time spans by encoding it in DNA inserted into the genomes of various species. The idea was that it would be a great distributed, fault tolerant, etc etc medium - within the living body of every rabbit (say - I cannot recall the animal). I really don't understand how the idea as stated here can be patentable - there seems like many many cases of prior art.
It seems like the real world economics of the MMORPGs require grind to pace the players and keep the $/player up. Without something to slow them down players would exhaust their interest in the content more quickly and stop their subscriptions.
I was thinking about annotated texts and the need for richer encodings of the works (that could be 'rendered' as plain text PG style files). I had looked at hgw but it seemed like there was not any recent activity (a 2001 story as recent news on the news page), and it seemed they were using html as an encoding of presentation.
It would be great to host a cleaned up structural representation of the book (author, edition, publisher, chapters, para, etc) and then allow people to layer annotations over it via some kind of wiki capability. Then support tagging of sets of annotations so that one could render/generate/export a version appropriate for a lit scholar or a different version appropriate for a 'casual' reader or a reader interested in how events in the authors life found their way into the book (say). It would be nice to allow groups of annotators to 'own' their sets, both to avoid edit wars and to allows a variety of consistent note sets. And of course you'd want to be able to render/export/generate to a number of representations html/pdf/ebook reader etc.
I could not find anything close to that capability does anyone have any pointers to something like that?