The fact that XS4All actually investigated whether they felt the complaint was founded makes them one of the three bad actors in this story, together with Ifast and the Dutch parliament. By investigating the merit of the complaint and then acting on it, XS4All played both judge and jury, something they have no right to do.
The right thing to do would have been to question the procedure, not the allegedly infringing content.
Unfortunately, BoF seems to see things differently; their choice of words seems to indicate now and again that they agree with XS4All's actions. They shouldn't, because it diminishes their point: that bad law induces ISPs to play judge and jury (and that this is wrong).
The weird thing is (IANAL), I seem to remember that book stores and the such were already liable for contributory copyright infringement in the Netherlands (and presumably the rest of Europe). So why did a new law have to be written to say what the old law already said? It seems like the E.U. is desperate to send out the message that the internet is full of desperados and they're not going to stand for it. A strange message now most of Europe is online...
"There's no mention of Texas in the.pdf document."
Yes, there is. Page 6, first sentence under the heading "Conclusion": "It only takes a Hotmail account to bring a website down, and freedom of speech stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice."
It's Latin, it means "I have suffered much". His most famous work is Max Havelaar, a fictionalized autobiography that had to serve as an indictment of the mistreatment of natives in the Dutch colony of Indonesia, where Multatuli (pseud. of E.D. Dekker) was a minor official.
Re:The long tail is already here
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 1
"I worked at a used CD store in Colorado for a while, and the owner there understood the long tail even though he didn't understand it as such. When people were selling us CDs he would just look at the titles and be able to tell you what it was worth without even looking it up on the computer."
I think you missed the point. The long tail is made up of all the CDs your former boss refused to buy, because they lacked commercial viability.
Although dealing with the heat from re-entry is hard, I don't think it is undoable. How many people believed before SpaceShipOne that a private company could bring a man to the edge of space, and pay no more than 25 million US$ for the privilige?
RKK Energia have designed a space ship that, like SpaceShipOne, glides into the atmosphere, albeit from an orbital position: Kliper. Cost of development estimated to be 60 million US$, IIRC.
If you prove there's a god, then you know there's a god. You cannot believe in that god's existence anymore, even when the god requests you do so (as the Christian god seems to do), because you know he or she exists.
"An encyclopedia is [...] a presentation of facts using the neutral point of view (POV)."
No, it is not. An encyclopaedia is a presentation of opinions of editors who sometimes claim to be authorities. The only encyclopaedia that tries to present a Neutral Point Of View is Wikipedia. In Wikipedia's case, this means presenting all dominant opinions; or, as you would word it, presenting the argument.
"Presenting an argument is not part of the Wikipedia approach."
This too is wrong (see above).
There is a reason why presenting the argument is the only way Wikipedia can work: because it recognizes that there is no such thing as 'authority' in a collaborative project like this. Since there is no voice from above to tell us the truth, the only thing we can do is present facts about opinions, that is, to present these opinions. The truth may well be the same as the majority opinion, but that would just be a lucky break.
We're producing Scientific Americans, and maths books. Basically, anything is welcome, although for science stuff we often need to produce TeX, which only a subset of our proofers can handle.
I would like to apologize to TPTB (The Powers That Be) at Distributed Proofreaders for messing up by posting this story to Slashdot.
The 5000th Posted celebrations were supposed to be internal. There is a discrepancy between works posted and books posted: sometimes a book gets split up. The big celebrations were intended for 5000 actual books posted.
I am afraid I got a little carried away, and hope Slashdot will still carry the real story of 5000 books posted to Project Gutenberg.
Of the authors I got to know through Project Gutenberg, Stephen Leacock and Theodor Storm stick out in my mind the most. Oh, and Hendrik Conscience turned out to be less boring than I thought after proofing the first of his books to go through DP (but so far he's only available in Dutch).
Project Gutenberg posts texts in formats that are offered by the volunteers and that the gatekeeping volunteers know how to check.
If a volunteer feels comfortable with MS Word, then by all means they should try and commit a book in that format. The only demand Project Gutenberg makes, is that the etext is also submitted in 'plain vanilla text' format, so that anybody can read the text, anywhere and anytime.
"However, I am curious as to just how accurate the proofreading is."
That's very hard to tell, as there is no gold standard for accuracy. There are two sometimes conflicting goals in regards to accuracy that we have; one is to preserve the author's intent, the other to preserve the actual printed text. At some points these two conflict, for instance, when we would like to normalize spelling to increase readability.
There is currently some talk going on at the DP forums as to which system would be best to eliminate common errors, that everybody tends to overlook.
We already have several systems in place to help us with these. For instance, we use a specially modified font that helps to highlight differences between letters. It's dog ugly, but that's intentional; because it grates, you see errors much more quickly.
What sort of stuff do you like? Scary? Romantic? Adventurous? Scientific? Weird?
Some of the famous literature that is in the public domain: Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, Wuthering Heights, the Bible, anything Shakespeare, Aesop's fables, Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Ulysses (both Homer's and Joyce's versions), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, Treasure Island, The Jungle Books, et cetera, et cetera.
"Does DP take on new versions of existing PG books?"
Yes, but I don't know if there are any conditions attached.
Better would be to next time keep notes of all the errors you encounter, and send them to Project Gutenberg, where volunteers will use them to correct the book.
The Project Gutenberg FAQ tells you what to send where, and how.
The fact that Big Copyright have declared themselves fierce opponents to any law that would reintroduce registration and renewal in the US, has made some people remark that their ultimate motive is control.
It's not about the money, it's about the effort. Most people won't be willing to renew most works. As a result, these works become public domain (and verifiably so).
This creates several benificial situations:
1. If you want to use a work that the author lost interest in, you can.
2. If you want to use a work that the author still is interested in, you now have a way to find out who the author is and how he can be contacted.
(When I say 'use' I mean 'use in a way that would be prohibited by copyright law, such as copying and distributing'.)
There are several weaknesses in this system as far as I can see:
a. Big Copyright can abuse this system to 'claim' copyrights on works they do not really own. Somebody looking for a licence will approach the wrong entity. As a result, that somebody may break the law when using the work, even though he thinks he licenced it correctly.
Therefore, this new system would have to be accompagnied by a law that states you are not allowed to falsely claim copyright on something you did not make.
b. A lot of the interest lies in derivative works; if I create a popular cartoon character called Dickey Dog, I would want to be able to control what happens to Dickey. However, at one point I might lose sight of all the Dickey works out there. I might forget to register a postcard one of my interns drew of Dickey Dog a long time ago (come on folks, we're artists, not accountants!), and as a result, Dickey would become public domain.
Of course, if Dickey were that succesful, I could (and probably should) trademark him, but will a court allow double protection? (In Europe, courts and law-makers frown upon double protection; if something was once under copyright, you cannot try and extend that copyright through the backdoor of trademark law--well, at least in theory you cannot, in practice judges are people too, with faults and everything.)
The thing is, copyright was never intended to cover derivative works, but now it does, it forms an extra and powerful incentive to invest in derivative works.
I got a bit carried away. This 5000th project was organized so that as much proofreaders as possible would work on it. (Although any book going through DP runs a chance of being proofread by many separate people, usually proofreaders stick with a certain book for a while, so that the work has only been seen by 50 or so.) I was so glad we pulled it off, that I sent a story to Slashdot without thinking.
You can easily find out who I am by searching for my real name. And the country I live in can also be found from my email address. Whether we mailed or not, I don't know.
Perhaps you are both from the land on the IJzer, where neonazis gather every year at the monument for the fallen of the First World War.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that XS4All actually investigated whether they felt the complaint was founded makes them one of the three bad actors in this story, together with Ifast and the Dutch parliament. By investigating the merit of the complaint and then acting on it, XS4All played both judge and jury, something they have no right to do.
The right thing to do would have been to question the procedure, not the allegedly infringing content.
Unfortunately, BoF seems to see things differently; their choice of words seems to indicate now and again that they agree with XS4All's actions. They shouldn't, because it diminishes their point: that bad law induces ISPs to play judge and jury (and that this is wrong).
The weird thing is (IANAL), I seem to remember that book stores and the such were already liable for contributory copyright infringement in the Netherlands (and presumably the rest of Europe). So why did a new law have to be written to say what the old law already said? It seems like the E.U. is desperate to send out the message that the internet is full of desperados and they're not going to stand for it. A strange message now most of Europe is online...
"There's no mention of Texas in the .pdf document."
Yes, there is. Page 6, first sentence under the heading "Conclusion": "It only takes a Hotmail account to bring a website down, and freedom of speech stands no chance in front of the Texan-style private ISP justice."
OK, so they sold their share in 2002, that's why I said "I believe". Had to look it up.
I believe they are part Microsoft owned, why should they listen to spam complaints or take-down notices?
It's Latin, it means "I have suffered much". His most famous work is Max Havelaar, a fictionalized autobiography that had to serve as an indictment of the mistreatment of natives in the Dutch colony of Indonesia, where Multatuli (pseud. of E.D. Dekker) was a minor official.
Why? Did Ireland quit the E.U.?
"I worked at a used CD store in Colorado for a while, and the owner there understood the long tail even though he didn't understand it as such. When people were selling us CDs he would just look at the titles and be able to tell you what it was worth without even looking it up on the computer."
I think you missed the point. The long tail is made up of all the CDs your former boss refused to buy, because they lacked commercial viability.
Although dealing with the heat from re-entry is hard, I don't think it is undoable. How many people believed before SpaceShipOne that a private company could bring a man to the edge of space, and pay no more than 25 million US$ for the privilige?
RKK Energia have designed a space ship that, like SpaceShipOne, glides into the atmosphere, albeit from an orbital position: Kliper. Cost of development estimated to be 60 million US$, IIRC.
If you prove there's a god, then you know there's a god. You cannot believe in that god's existence anymore, even when the god requests you do so (as the Christian god seems to do), because you know he or she exists.
I think my particular type of atheism can be summed up with the four following words: I Do Not Care (what's outside the box).
(Ironically, that might make me, the atheist, a better Christian than all the Christians who know there is a God. Proof denies faith.)
"The scientific view of religion is not atheism."
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
(Or: you sound like a wanker, but I cannot be sure.)
"An encyclopedia is [...] a presentation of facts using the neutral point of view (POV)."
No, it is not. An encyclopaedia is a presentation of opinions of editors who sometimes claim to be authorities. The only encyclopaedia that tries to present a Neutral Point Of View is Wikipedia. In Wikipedia's case, this means presenting all dominant opinions; or, as you would word it, presenting the argument.
"Presenting an argument is not part of the Wikipedia approach."
This too is wrong (see above).
There is a reason why presenting the argument is the only way Wikipedia can work: because it recognizes that there is no such thing as 'authority' in a collaborative project like this. Since there is no voice from above to tell us the truth, the only thing we can do is present facts about opinions, that is, to present these opinions. The truth may well be the same as the majority opinion, but that would just be a lucky break.
You cannot tell people that! You'll take away their security blanket! :-)
We're producing Scientific Americans, and maths books. Basically, anything is welcome, although for science stuff we often need to produce TeX, which only a subset of our proofers can handle.
I would like to apologize to TPTB (The Powers That Be) at Distributed Proofreaders for messing up by posting this story to Slashdot.
The 5000th Posted celebrations were supposed to be internal. There is a discrepancy between works posted and books posted: sometimes a book gets split up. The big celebrations were intended for 5000 actual books posted.
I am afraid I got a little carried away, and hope Slashdot will still carry the real story of 5000 books posted to Project Gutenberg.
There are several websites that offer free ebooks, and that allow people to review them.
Of the authors I got to know through Project Gutenberg, Stephen Leacock and Theodor Storm stick out in my mind the most. Oh, and Hendrik Conscience turned out to be less boring than I thought after proofing the first of his books to go through DP (but so far he's only available in Dutch).
Project Gutenberg posts texts in formats that are offered by the volunteers and that the gatekeeping volunteers know how to check.
If a volunteer feels comfortable with MS Word, then by all means they should try and commit a book in that format. The only demand Project Gutenberg makes, is that the etext is also submitted in 'plain vanilla text' format, so that anybody can read the text, anywhere and anytime.
"However, I am curious as to just how accurate the proofreading is."
That's very hard to tell, as there is no gold standard for accuracy. There are two sometimes conflicting goals in regards to accuracy that we have; one is to preserve the author's intent, the other to preserve the actual printed text. At some points these two conflict, for instance, when we would like to normalize spelling to increase readability.
There is currently some talk going on at the DP forums as to which system would be best to eliminate common errors, that everybody tends to overlook.
We already have several systems in place to help us with these. For instance, we use a specially modified font that helps to highlight differences between letters. It's dog ugly, but that's intentional; because it grates, you see errors much more quickly.
Also, once common errors are identified as such, we write software that can help us find such errors.
Finally, we use these new-found methods to look at books we posted to Project Gutenberg in the past, to measure the increase in accuracy.
"if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text"
The sort of scholar that would make such unqualified statements about the need for mark-up has no place in academia.
Project Gutenberg has excellent reasons to stay with plain text as the most basic distribution format, reasons that have proven themselves over time.
Smart scholars have many uses for plain Gutenberg texts.
What sort of stuff do you like? Scary? Romantic? Adventurous? Scientific? Weird?
Some of the famous literature that is in the public domain: Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, Wuthering Heights, the Bible, anything Shakespeare, Aesop's fables, Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Ulysses (both Homer's and Joyce's versions), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, Treasure Island, The Jungle Books, et cetera, et cetera.
"Does DP take on new versions of existing PG books?"
Yes, but I don't know if there are any conditions attached.
Better would be to next time keep notes of all the errors you encounter, and send them to Project Gutenberg, where volunteers will use them to correct the book.
The Project Gutenberg FAQ tells you what to send where, and how.
"Heck, Disney should want this."
Very much so.
The fact that Big Copyright have declared themselves fierce opponents to any law that would reintroduce registration and renewal in the US, has made some people remark that their ultimate motive is control.
"And $1 is arguably a bit little."
It's not about the money, it's about the effort. Most people won't be willing to renew most works. As a result, these works become public domain (and verifiably so).
This creates several benificial situations:
1. If you want to use a work that the author lost interest in, you can.
2. If you want to use a work that the author still is interested in, you now have a way to find out who the author is and how he can be contacted.
(When I say 'use' I mean 'use in a way that would be prohibited by copyright law, such as copying and distributing'.)
There are several weaknesses in this system as far as I can see:
a. Big Copyright can abuse this system to 'claim' copyrights on works they do not really own. Somebody looking for a licence will approach the wrong entity. As a result, that somebody may break the law when using the work, even though he thinks he licenced it correctly.
Therefore, this new system would have to be accompagnied by a law that states you are not allowed to falsely claim copyright on something you did not make.
b. A lot of the interest lies in derivative works; if I create a popular cartoon character called Dickey Dog, I would want to be able to control what happens to Dickey. However, at one point I might lose sight of all the Dickey works out there. I might forget to register a postcard one of my interns drew of Dickey Dog a long time ago (come on folks, we're artists, not accountants!), and as a result, Dickey would become public domain.
Of course, if Dickey were that succesful, I could (and probably should) trademark him, but will a court allow double protection? (In Europe, courts and law-makers frown upon double protection; if something was once under copyright, you cannot try and extend that copyright through the backdoor of trademark law--well, at least in theory you cannot, in practice judges are people too, with faults and everything.)
The thing is, copyright was never intended to cover derivative works, but now it does, it forms an extra and powerful incentive to invest in derivative works.
This is all my fault! :-(
I got a bit carried away. This 5000th project was organized so that as much proofreaders as possible would work on it. (Although any book going through DP runs a chance of being proofread by many separate people, usually proofreaders stick with a certain book for a while, so that the work has only been seen by 50 or so.) I was so glad we pulled it off, that I sent a story to Slashdot without thinking.
Perhaps you are both from the land on the IJzer, where neonazis gather every year at the monument for the fallen of the First World War.