It's not about the files. It's about the bizarre undocumented file structure that the files have to be stored in in order to be playable. If you don't want to use iTunes, iPods are useless.
Really? Even with just running a single copy out of a laser printer, 3-hole punching it, sticking it in a binder, calling it a book, and locking it in the warehouse?
Yes. Even if publishers could get away with doing this, they wouldn't, because printing a short run of real books that they might be able to sell would usually only be 2-3 times as expensive. But I think to qualify as a printing, the book would have to be offered for sale through at least one of the standard book distributors (the contract will specify more detail), and none of those would touch such a book.
You've not been reading what I said: the end result is all that matters in determining what is fair use. Internal copying that happens solely for the purpose of performing an otherwise legal use of the material is considered legal, as long as the copy has no intrinsic value in and of itself -- this is a general principle of copyright law. As google are not providing complete copies, the copy on their database is such a copy; what has value is the service that is provided using that copy.
If this is true of print, why can't it be true of recorded music as well?
It could be, except that the RIAA/BPI/etc recording companies operate as a cartel: none of them allow their artists to retain copyright. Book publishers, in general, don't work like that.
To be fair to the recording industry, there are a few reasons why it works better like that for them. Specifically, the cost of producing recorded music is higher than the cost of writing a book, because specialised equipment and people with the skill to operate it effectively are required. In most cases, this is paid for by the label, rather than the artist, whereas the cost of writing a book is generally paid for entirely by the author, often without a firm contract for publication.
My suggestion was designed to prevent the publisher from keeping its exclusive license alive by printing one token copy every 36 months and locking it in the company vault until the copyright expires or until Earth is destroyed (whichever comes first).
I can see the potential problem, but one thing to consider is that with current technology it costs the publishers little more to print a run of 1,000 books than it does to print a single copy. And once they're printed, they may as well be marketed...
Until the cost of print-on-demand printing comes down to something similar to traditional methods, there's nothing to worry about here. Although there is some controversy over whether offering e-books for download is adequate to keep a book under license, and many publishers have been trying to get terms that state it is.
That is only true for fiction. A relatively small section of your local library or book store. Hardly the "vast majority" of cases.
It's also true for a lot of non-fiction. Picking up the first 3 non-fiction books that come to hand:
An Author's Guide to Publishing, Michael Legat (Hale) - Author holds copyright Oxford Manual of Style (Oxford University Press) - Publisher holds copyright Assembly Language Step-by-step, Jeff Duntemann (J Wiley & Sons) - Author holds copyright
So an informal study suggests about 2/3rds of non-fiction is also held by the author. I suspect that the general situation is that textbooks and reference works (a small proportion of non-fiction, but a niche that sells particularly well) are generally publisher copyright, and in the world of fiction, media tie-ins are also often publisher copyright, but everything else is most frequently author copyright. I'd suspect somewhere over 80% of all titles published the copyright is held by the author... but by number of copies sold it may be closer to 50%.
It's a fact that Google is making a profit off of the reproduction without explicit consent.
No it isn't. Google is making a profit off giving out small excerpts that almost certainly fall under fair use. The reproduction is merely a necessary step taken to enable them to select excerpts to give to their users.
Lets consider a more familiar analogy, a TV program that reviews movies. Lots of case law backs up the fact that they are allowed to use excerpts from the movies they review as a fair use of copyright. They make a profit from doing so. During the production of the program, they almost certainly scan the entire movie into a format they can use for editing and then select the excerpts they wish to use. Yet nobody thinks there is anything wrong with this. What's the difference between this and what Google are doing?
it's how they got the data to begin with that is troublesome; that's "the wrong way". The end does not justify the means.
In copyright law they do. If what Google does with the data is a fair use, then they are allowed to make whatever copies are necessary in order to make that use.
And you don't seem to understand that the end does not justify the means.
Actually, in terms of copyright law and fair use, they pretty much do. Look up some case history, if you don't believe me. People are allowed to make complete copies of copyright works in many situations that would otherwise be prevented by the law because a court thought that the reason they had for making them was a reasonable way of using the work. If a court thinks that Google's use of these books is reasonable, then what they're doing is legal.
Right. Just like your online bank information is completely secure.
If I could bank with Google, I'd trust it to be secure.
As it is, I'm confident that there are much more serious threats to my security than the possibility of somebody obtaining access to my internet banking account. I'm much more likely to be mugged in the street and have my credit cards stolen, for instance.
Web postings can be considered public information; copyrighted works are another thing...
The copyright laws that protect books are exactly the same as the copyright laws that protect web pages. There is no difference between the two, legally speaking.
Like it or not, Google *is* violating their copyrights.
Is it? The argument that this is fair use is an interesting one, and might just succeed.
If it doesn't, we can kiss goodbye to Internet search engines, because I see no difference at all, at least from a legal standpoint, between what they are doing with books and what they have been doing with web sites all along.
So what do the publishers have against letting an author negotiate an exclusive license that, after x years or after fewer than y copies are sold to the public in a 3 month period, reverts to a non-exclusive license for the life of the copyright? Why does it always have to be an outright assignment or work-for-hire scenario?
It doesn't. In fact, that's exactly how most publishers work[1]. The GP poster didn't know what he was talking about.
[1] OK - it tends to be if no additional copies are printed over 3 years, rather than copies sold in 3 months, but the theory's the same. And generally, it doesn't revert to non-exclusive, it terminates.
If an author wants to retain rights to their work then they should self publish instead of "selling out" to a publisher. Otherwise they are nothing more than work for hire.
This isn't true. Publishers do not, in the vast majority of cases, control copyright of the books they publish -- the Authors write the books without a firm offer to buy them, then sell the rights to publish them to the publisher. This is not the same as transferrign the copyright. Pull a random book off your bookshelf and look at the copyright notice: odds are good that the author's name will appear there, not the publisher.
If Google's product is such a godsend to the publishing industry, they should have no problem getting permission to make copies of books from the rights holders.
Hah! Do you know how difficult that would be? How do you even begin to track down the rights holders? The publishing industry isn't as manipulative as the music industry you know... most books' copyright is held by their authors, not by the publisher.
3. How much of the work is being used? From what I understand, Google is scanning the entire book, cover to cover. Strike three, and a big one.
This is where your reasoning breaks down: while Google are scanning the entire books, they are not doing so on behalf of a single end user. Each user of their system only gets to see a few pages of each book.
Also, Google scans the entirity of web sites, and nobody has held that they have to obtain permission to do that... what's the difference?
You see, many, many years ago, wise people invented something called "directory structure". It can match the band/album/song hierarchy exactly, while still giving you the option to omit a field without having everything lumped together into a single broken cathegory.
You misunderstand my point; keeping all the media in a single location doesn't preclude using subdirectories of that location... it just means you don't have to search the computer for media, they're all already there, layed out, and you can just reference the directory if you want (e.g. with winamp's "add all files in this directory to playlist" option), or work with subdirectories of it or individual files if you prefer. The idea I find strange is the one of searching throughout your entire computer for media files scattered in lots of different directories all over it and building up a big list of them (which is something WMP does, I know).
Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...
Because the Java standard library is incredibly bloated and has ridiculous interdependencies that mean huge portions of it have to be initialised at startup of just about any application.
For me, a casual.doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution.
If you only want to display MSOffice documents, MS have a free download of a viewer program on their web site. It's lighter and faster than OO.o, and probably opens a larger percentage of docs correctly.
After using OO for nearly 6 months, I wonder why anyone is still using MS Office?
* Word 97 starts much faster than OO.o 1.1. Don't know about other versions though. * OO.o 1.1 cannot load a lot of Word documents correctly. * OO.o 1.1 cannot load WordPerfect documents at all.
Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?
Simply put, the reason is this:
Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here, start a new page for everything from this point on', etc.) and print it to a page.
PDF takes similar layout-oriented information and displays it on screen, and gives you an option to print.
OpenDocument, like most other word processor formats, uses structural information (e.g. 'these words are grouped into a paragraph, this paragraph has a box around it, these paragraphs should be on the same page as each other'), not layout information.
The picturs I saw in that link looked like an app that was designed to run full screen and only ever full screen. Maybe it's just that skin that works that way, I don't know.
They're making an application to suit as many people as possible. If it doesn't suit you, don't use it.
The problem is, that they're a monopoly that is very good at making content providers use technologies that are tied to their products. When you get a media file that can only be played by Windows Media Player, you have no choice but to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not about the files. It's about the bizarre undocumented file structure that the files have to be stored in in order to be playable. If you don't want to use iTunes, iPods are useless.
Really? Even with just running a single copy out of a laser printer, 3-hole punching it, sticking it in a binder, calling it a book, and locking it in the warehouse?
Yes. Even if publishers could get away with doing this, they wouldn't, because printing a short run of real books that they might be able to sell would usually only be 2-3 times as expensive. But I think to qualify as a printing, the book would have to be offered for sale through at least one of the standard book distributors (the contract will specify more detail), and none of those would touch such a book.
You've not been reading what I said: the end result is all that matters in determining what is fair use. Internal copying that happens solely for the purpose of performing an otherwise legal use of the material is considered legal, as long as the copy has no intrinsic value in and of itself -- this is a general principle of copyright law. As google are not providing complete copies, the copy on their database is such a copy; what has value is the service that is provided using that copy.
If this is true of print, why can't it be true of recorded music as well?
It could be, except that the RIAA/BPI/etc recording companies operate as a cartel: none of them allow their artists to retain copyright. Book publishers, in general, don't work like that.
To be fair to the recording industry, there are a few reasons why it works better like that for them. Specifically, the cost of producing recorded music is higher than the cost of writing a book, because specialised equipment and people with the skill to operate it effectively are required. In most cases, this is paid for by the label, rather than the artist, whereas the cost of writing a book is generally paid for entirely by the author, often without a firm contract for publication.
My suggestion was designed to prevent the publisher from keeping its exclusive license alive by printing one token copy every 36 months and locking it in the company vault until the copyright expires or until Earth is destroyed (whichever comes first).
I can see the potential problem, but one thing to consider is that with current technology it costs the publishers little more to print a run of 1,000 books than it does to print a single copy. And once they're printed, they may as well be marketed...
Until the cost of print-on-demand printing comes down to something similar to traditional methods, there's nothing to worry about here. Although there is some controversy over whether offering e-books for download is adequate to keep a book under license, and many publishers have been trying to get terms that state it is.
That is only true for fiction. A relatively small section of your local library or book store. Hardly the "vast majority" of cases.
It's also true for a lot of non-fiction. Picking up the first 3 non-fiction books that come to hand:
An Author's Guide to Publishing, Michael Legat (Hale) - Author holds copyright
Oxford Manual of Style (Oxford University Press) - Publisher holds copyright
Assembly Language Step-by-step, Jeff Duntemann (J Wiley & Sons) - Author holds copyright
So an informal study suggests about 2/3rds of non-fiction is also held by the author. I suspect that the general situation is that textbooks and reference works (a small proportion of non-fiction, but a niche that sells particularly well) are generally publisher copyright, and in the world of fiction, media tie-ins are also often publisher copyright, but everything else is most frequently author copyright. I'd suspect somewhere over 80% of all titles published the copyright is held by the author... but by number of copies sold it may be closer to 50%.
It's a fact that Google is making a profit off of the reproduction without explicit consent.
No it isn't. Google is making a profit off giving out small excerpts that almost certainly fall under fair use. The reproduction is merely a necessary step taken to enable them to select excerpts to give to their users.
Lets consider a more familiar analogy, a TV program that reviews movies. Lots of case law backs up the fact that they are allowed to use excerpts from the movies they review as a fair use of copyright. They make a profit from doing so. During the production of the program, they almost certainly scan the entire movie into a format they can use for editing and then select the excerpts they wish to use. Yet nobody thinks there is anything wrong with this. What's the difference between this and what Google are doing?
it's how they got the data to begin with that is troublesome; that's "the wrong way". The end does not justify the means.
In copyright law they do. If what Google does with the data is a fair use, then they are allowed to make whatever copies are necessary in order to make that use.
And you don't seem to understand that the end does not justify the means.
Actually, in terms of copyright law and fair use, they pretty much do. Look up some case history, if you don't believe me. People are allowed to make complete copies of copyright works in many situations that would otherwise be prevented by the law because a court thought that the reason they had for making them was a reasonable way of using the work. If a court thinks that Google's use of these books is reasonable, then what they're doing is legal.
Right. Just like your online bank information is completely secure.
If I could bank with Google, I'd trust it to be secure.
As it is, I'm confident that there are much more serious threats to my security than the possibility of somebody obtaining access to my internet banking account. I'm much more likely to be mugged in the street and have my credit cards stolen, for instance.
Web postings can be considered public information; copyrighted works are another thing...
The copyright laws that protect books are exactly the same as the copyright laws that protect web pages. There is no difference between the two, legally speaking.
Like it or not, Google *is* violating their copyrights.
Is it? The argument that this is fair use is an interesting one, and might just succeed.
If it doesn't, we can kiss goodbye to Internet search engines, because I see no difference at all, at least from a legal standpoint, between what they are doing with books and what they have been doing with web sites all along.
So what do the publishers have against letting an author negotiate an exclusive license that, after x years or after fewer than y copies are sold to the public in a 3 month period, reverts to a non-exclusive license for the life of the copyright? Why does it always have to be an outright assignment or work-for-hire scenario?
It doesn't. In fact, that's exactly how most publishers work[1]. The GP poster didn't know what he was talking about.
[1] OK - it tends to be if no additional copies are printed over 3 years, rather than copies sold in 3 months, but the theory's the same. And generally, it doesn't revert to non-exclusive, it terminates.
If an author wants to retain rights to their work then they should self publish instead of "selling out" to a publisher. Otherwise they are nothing more than work for hire.
This isn't true. Publishers do not, in the vast majority of cases, control copyright of the books they publish -- the Authors write the books without a firm offer to buy them, then sell the rights to publish them to the publisher. This is not the same as transferrign the copyright. Pull a random book off your bookshelf and look at the copyright notice: odds are good that the author's name will appear there, not the publisher.
If Google's product is such a godsend to the publishing industry, they should have no problem getting permission to make copies of books from the rights holders.
Hah! Do you know how difficult that would be? How do you even begin to track down the rights holders? The publishing industry isn't as manipulative as the music industry you know... most books' copyright is held by their authors, not by the publisher.
3. How much of the work is being used? From what I understand, Google is scanning the entire book, cover to cover. Strike three, and a big one.
This is where your reasoning breaks down: while Google are scanning the entire books, they are not doing so on behalf of a single end user. Each user of their system only gets to see a few pages of each book.
Also, Google scans the entirity of web sites, and nobody has held that they have to obtain permission to do that... what's the difference?
You see, many, many years ago, wise people invented something called "directory structure". It can match the band/album/song hierarchy exactly, while still giving you the option to omit a field without having everything lumped together into a single broken cathegory.
You misunderstand my point; keeping all the media in a single location doesn't preclude using subdirectories of that location... it just means you don't have to search the computer for media, they're all already there, layed out, and you can just reference the directory if you want (e.g. with winamp's "add all files in this directory to playlist" option), or work with subdirectories of it or individual files if you prefer. The idea I find strange is the one of searching throughout your entire computer for media files scattered in lots of different directories all over it and building up a big list of them (which is something WMP does, I know).
Yeah, pretty much like that. One of the many reasons I don't like iPods.
Hell, yeah. And we all use GMT all of the time, cause it's the only thing that makes sense. And we've metricated time...
Hang on a kilosecond.
Maybe not.
Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...
Because the Java standard library is incredibly bloated and has ridiculous interdependencies that mean huge portions of it have to be initialised at startup of just about any application.
[...] it's noticably slower than Word 2003. However, that probably has something to do with my aging Duron 1200+.
Hah! I've been using it on my PII-400. 1200! I should be so lucky.
For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution.
If you only want to display MSOffice documents, MS have a free download of a viewer program on their web site. It's lighter and faster than OO.o, and probably opens a larger percentage of docs correctly.
After using OO for nearly 6 months, I wonder why anyone is still using MS Office?
:)
* Word 97 starts much faster than OO.o 1.1. Don't know about other versions though.
* OO.o 1.1 cannot load a lot of Word documents correctly.
* OO.o 1.1 cannot load WordPerfect documents at all.
I'm hoping the above have been fixed for 2.0.
Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th.
;)
Probably an American. They'd look at that date and say "tenth of the twentieth month? WTF?"
(Just like I keep wondering why everyone's going on about the 9th of November...)
Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?
Simply put, the reason is this:
Printers take layout-oriented information (e.g. 'this character goes at this precise position, a line is drawn from here to here, start a new page for everything from this point on', etc.) and print it to a page.
PDF takes similar layout-oriented information and displays it on screen, and gives you an option to print.
OpenDocument, like most other word processor formats, uses structural information (e.g. 'these words are grouped into a paragraph, this paragraph has a box around it, these paragraphs should be on the same page as each other'), not layout information.
The picturs I saw in that link looked like an app that was designed to run full screen and only ever full screen. Maybe it's just that skin that works that way, I don't know.
Jesus. Just what I want, a media player that runs full screen and wastes half of the space for fancy background images.
And what the hell is with the explorer screenshots? Why is the toolbar above the menu? That's fucked up!
They're making an application to suit as many people as possible. If it doesn't suit you, don't use it.
The problem is, that they're a monopoly that is very good at making content providers use technologies that are tied to their products. When you get a media file that can only be played by Windows Media Player, you have no choice but to use it.