It is well-established that innocent intent does not constitute a defense against a finding of infringement, although it can be used to argue for lesser damages. To copy and distribute copyrighted content is infringement, unless it is fair use, which this is not by any stretch of the imagination or the law.
Google might have a viable defense under the DMCA's "safe haven" clause for ISPs.
Copying is infringement, unless it is fair use. In the U.S., the determination of fair use rests upon a "four factors" test, and it is not at all obvious that Google can pass that test.
1. The nature of the copyrighted work. Not all creative works are equally creative. A novel is more creative than a world almanac. Google has copies all kinds of works, some of them highly creative.
2. The amount taken. While Google shows users only a few pages at a time, it has made a copy of the entire work.
3. The effect upon the market for the copyrighted work. Google can probably show that they have not harmed, and have even increased in some cases, sales of the copied works. But this alone is not a defense against infringement.
4. The purpose and character of the use. How "transformative" is the use. This will probably be the factor on which any lawsuit that makes it to trial stands or falls. Artistic criticism, satire, etc. are all protected as fair use because they are transformative: the copied material is placed in a new creative context, and therefore has meaning not present in the copied work. Now from one point of view, aggregating all the copied works into a searchable database is highly transformative because it enables the copied works to be used in ways that they could not be used before. A court could come down on Google's side with this argument. It would, however, be a relatively novel argument because traditionally, "transformative" has related to the use's creative content: the addition of search is useful, but not in an artistically creative way. Google's copying was verbatim copying. Google has added to the utility, but not the creative content of the work, and a more traditional interpretation of precedent would come down against Google on this factor, usually the most important part of a fair use defence.
No. Even by the metric energy per distance per mass moved, birds travel more efficiently than almost any terrestrial animal. There is less friction in the air.
While air travel is to date a fuel hog, there is no inherent reason why this must be so. In the animal kingdom, birds get better "gas mileage" than almost any terrestrial animal.
You can have a secret ballot, or you can have a (mostly) fraud-proof ballotting system. If anyone knows a way to have both, I'd love to hear the details.
And this is what I want next: I want a handheld barcode scanner in my kitchen. I want to be able to scan the groceries as I put them away, and scan the empty packaging as I throw it away, and then let software auto-generate the shopping list and do price comparison for me.
And if item-level RFID ever happens, I wouldn't have to even scan things individually.
While every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way, any given unhappy family tends to be unhappy in a consistent fashion. While personal security is no doubt a major factor in Mini's decision, another factor may well be that after a few years, there is nothing new to write about: if the corporate culture still does the same stupid things, it is no longer news, and you've already said what you have to say on the matter. Best to quit before you start to sound like a parody of yourself.
We do have metamaterials for microwave wavelengths. If the air force is funding you, this is good enough, because if you can make it work, you have planes that are invisible to radar.
The copyright enforcement organizations will find it hard to push around public universities, without a direct federal court order: the states, and by extension state agencies, cannot be sued in federal court for money damages without their own permission.
There has to be more to this story than just "restrictions," because for one thing, the U.S. Dept. of Energy is funding research into optical implants for the blind. I saw a video of a man using a very rudimentary prototype (resolution 4 x 4 pixels, which surprisingly was enough for him to recognize common objects like a plate, a mug, etc.)
In the case of the CC Licenses, the usual objections to click-thru licensing don't apply. In the absence of the license, what you could do with the work would be limited by copyright law. The license lets you do things you couldn't do without it, but it doesn't restrict you from doing any things you could do without it. So, if you don't agree to the license, or don't know it exists, fine. Just obey copyright law, and you can't possibly run afoul of the license.
Google is in the home. Many people would trust Google with their personal information. The trillion-dollar question is, would enough people trust Google to know what they purchase, on a person-by-person, item-by-item basis. Because if the answer is yes, the entire future of the retail sector depends on it.
Retailing is based on an information crisis: consumers don't know what exactly they want until they see it displayed nice and pretty on the self. What people have purchased is a good predictor of what they will purchase, and so retail managers do know what consumers want, but only it aggregate. But if any single concern can know a what a sufficient fraction of which consumers will want which goods, before the consumers themselves do, it is self-evidently more efficient to deliver the goods from citywide sorting centers to the consumers' door on neighborhood distribution routes (think postal service or trash pickup here), than for each household to send a representative to retail outlets to ponder the goods on the shelf, taking up parking space, aisle space, and their own precious time all the while.
The trillion-dollar question is not, can Google take on Microsoft, but, can Google take on WalMart?
I think the proper term of copyright can be determined through a back-of-the envelope accounting calculation.
The expiration of a copyright involves the transfer of something that has value (the copyright) from the rights-holder to the public. This is a fair trade if the public has compensated the rights-holder with something of equal value, which they will have done through granting the copyright in the first place, if the term of copyright was long enough.
Put another way, the "fair" term of copyright is the term at the end of which, the present value of monopoly rents already extracted from the copyright is equal to the present value of all future monopoly rents that could be extracted from the copyright if it were extended into perpetuity. Or even more straightforwardly, a copyright of "fair" term has exactly half the value of a perpetual copyright.
Reducing this to a concrete policy recommedation requires making some assumptions about the sales curve of a typical work, and the interest rate at which future income should be discounted to a present value, but just as a reference point, if we use a "flat" sales curve (generous, since most works decline in sales over time), and a 2% interest rate, the "fair" length of copyright is 35 years.
If Kansas consults its lawyers, they may as well go right on ahead until ordered to desist by a federal judge, and maybe not even then. The extent to which the states and their agencies can be held liable for violation of copyright law is very limited, as the 11th amendment prevents 3rd parties from suing the states in federal court for money damages.
Well, yes, U.S. Copyright law is different, especially when it comes to libraries. See section 108 if you're interested. In particular, U.S. libraries don't pay photocopying royalties, because libraries suffer no liability for their patrons' use or misuse of library photocopiers, provided the library posts a copyright notice on or near the photocopier. All liability for the use of library photocopiers rests with the library patron.
Except that Google did not buy the books, but borrowed them, and so they have no right of first sale.
Their fair use defense is weak, because
(1) They copied the entire book. (2) They did so for a commercial purpose. (3) Many of the works copied were creative works. (3) Their use of the book is not transformative (in the sense that criticism, scholarly research, parody... the traditional contours of fair use, are transformative.)
I will be very surprised if Google can wrest a legal victory here.
That says only that they are not redistributing the whole thing, not that it isn't in the database. I rather think that it is in the database, only flagged as unavailable, awaiting the expiration of the book's copyright.
It's common in evaluating fair use defenses these days to apply the "four purposes" test:
(1) Effect on the market value of the work. Google can probably effectively argue that their use of the works does not adversely affect their sales. Only one sale was lost (selling the book to Google, since they borrowed and copied it rather than copying books they already owned copies of), and if anything, having the work indexed will increase the number of people exposed to the work's existence.
(2) Amount and substantiability of the work used. Google could get in trouble here, because even if they only reveal there copy a few words at a time, they copied the whole thing, and are redistributing the whole thing, if a few words at a time. There was nothing in the work that Google did not copy.
(3) Nature of the copyrighted work. The more creative a work, the smaller the range of uses considered fair use. A mere database is inelligible for copyright, and a reference work that conveys primarily factual information is easier to use fairly than a work of creative fiction. This could get hairy. One the one hand, many of the works Google proposes to copy are purely creative works. On the other, they are using them not for their creative content, but purely as data. If they can convince the court that because they have used the works as a database, and not as creative works, they have used them fairly, they have a chance. If the court sees the works principally as creative works though, this is a strike against Google.
(4) Nature of the use. Google is using the works commercially, even if they aren't getting paid. This is a strike against Google, though probably not an overriding one. However, to really win on this point, they need to make the case that putting all these books together in a big database is "transformative," and this is a hard point for them to make. While the books in the database can be used in a fashion they couldn't be used while not in the database, their appearance in that database is not transformative insofar as seeing the quote from the database adds little context to the work. It is not transformative in the sense that parody, criticism, scholarly research, etc., are transformative.
In my opinion, Google has a good fair use defense only if they can convince the court to distinguish the content of the works as creative works from the content as data, and then say they copied only the data, without infringing the creative work. It is not at all certain to me that the court would agree with such an interpretation of the law. If this makes it to trial, it is my opinion that Google faces an uphill battle.
Libraries are now allowed to make copies of books when
(1) The book is in its last 20 years of copyright protection; and
(2) The copyright owner is no longer exploiting the copyright.
Google Print may well be able to claim this safe harbor, but only for a limited domain of works. As for the rest, they have nothing but the fair use defense, and that defense is always far from certain.
If they can use item-level RFIDs to do inventory management, then so can you.
Think of being able to quickly determine a "household manifest" of your consumables, compare that against a desired manifest of what you would like to have when the household is fully stocked, and generate a grocery list instantly.
What has really held back the would-be Amazons of the grocery business is that the consumer doesn't know what they want until they see it on the shelf, and sometimes not even then. The supermarket managers do know what the consumer wants, but only in aggregate. So there's this big information crisis between the wholesale level and the items on your shelves, and this information crisis is why the markup at the retail level is a signifcant fraction of the final consumer cost: it pays for people to nicely array the items on shelves, for the parking lots and big wide aisles where your car and you have to sit while you make up your mind as to whether you want something or not, all because there is no better way to determine whether you want something than having you look at it and make the decision.
When the price of RFID technology gets down to the point of practicability for this, the smart entrepreneur is going to give away the scanner, becasue the cost and convenience advantages of being automatically inventory your house and order replacements will be self-evident. Heck, when the adoption rate gets high enough, it is self-apparently more efficient for a delivery vehicle to go through neighborhoods than for each household to send a representative to a centralized location.
Seriously, the ancient learning was in decline well before Christianity took over Rome. The 2nd century B.C. marks the height of Hellenistic science. The Roman takeover of the ancient Mediterranean did nothing to foster learning and much to discourage it, and notwithstanding a brief resurgence in the 2nd century A.D., both learning, and the political order, were dead on their feet by the time Christianity became a legal religion in the 4th century.
Ironically, one of the best legislatures out there, from the point of view of not wasting the taxpayers' money, is that of New Hampshire. N.H. also boasts the most legislators per capita, with a House of 400 service a populace of 1.2 million. Now, they only pay the legislators $100 each, plus travel perks.
Maybe the key to more accountable government is increasing the number that govern.
Microsoft's decision to no longer patch pirated installations has a few unintended consequences. There is now a base of unpatched machines that any new worm will likely be able to exploit. If a greater fraction of machines are unpatched, a greater fraction of infection attempts will succeed, and the worm will spread faster. A faster-spreading infection means a more legitimate Windows users will be infected before they patch (although the auto-updating feature of Service Patch 2 will help with this).
And of course, that population of never-patched machines affects everyone who uses the internet, regardless of their operating system.
Slashdot Mirror
It is well-established that innocent intent does not constitute a defense against a finding of infringement, although it can be used to argue for lesser damages. To copy and distribute copyrighted content is infringement, unless it is fair use, which this is not by any stretch of the imagination or the law.
Google might have a viable defense under the DMCA's "safe haven" clause for ISPs.
Copying is infringement, unless it is fair use. In the U.S., the determination of fair use rests upon a "four factors" test, and it is not at all obvious that Google can pass that test.
1. The nature of the copyrighted work. Not all creative works are equally creative. A novel is more creative than a world almanac. Google has copies all kinds of works, some of them highly creative.
2. The amount taken. While Google shows users only a few pages at a time, it has made a copy of the entire work.
3. The effect upon the market for the copyrighted work. Google can probably show that they have not harmed, and have even increased in some cases, sales of the copied works. But this alone is not a defense against infringement.
4. The purpose and character of the use. How "transformative" is the use. This will probably be the factor on which any lawsuit that makes it to trial stands or falls. Artistic criticism, satire, etc. are all protected as fair use because they are transformative: the copied material is placed in a new creative context, and therefore has meaning not present in the copied work. Now from one point of view, aggregating all the copied works into a searchable database is highly transformative because it enables the copied works to be used in ways that they could not be used before. A court could come down on Google's side with this argument. It would, however, be a relatively novel argument because traditionally, "transformative" has related to the use's creative content: the addition of search is useful, but not in an artistically creative way. Google's copying was verbatim copying. Google has added to the utility, but not the creative content of the work, and a more traditional interpretation of precedent would come down against Google on this factor, usually the most important part of a fair use defence.
No. Even by the metric energy per distance per mass moved, birds travel more efficiently than almost any terrestrial animal. There is less friction in the air.
While air travel is to date a fuel hog, there is no inherent reason why this must be so. In the animal kingdom, birds get better "gas mileage" than almost any terrestrial animal.
You can have a secret ballot, or you can have a (mostly) fraud-proof ballotting system. If anyone knows a way to have both, I'd love to hear the details.
And this is what I want next: I want a handheld barcode scanner in my kitchen. I want to be able to scan the groceries as I put them away, and scan the empty packaging as I throw it away, and then let software auto-generate the shopping list and do price comparison for me. And if item-level RFID ever happens, I wouldn't have to even scan things individually.
This is serving the customer. Clearly, someone who is at Google, and is looking for another search engine, is not well-served by a link to Google.
While every unhappy family is unhappy in a different way, any given unhappy family tends to be unhappy in a consistent fashion. While personal security is no doubt a major factor in Mini's decision, another factor may well be that after a few years, there is nothing new to write about: if the corporate culture still does the same stupid things, it is no longer news, and you've already said what you have to say on the matter. Best to quit before you start to sound like a parody of yourself.
We do have metamaterials for microwave wavelengths. If the air force is funding you, this is good enough, because if you can make it work, you have planes that are invisible to radar.
The copyright enforcement organizations will find it hard to push around public universities, without a direct federal court order: the states, and by extension state agencies, cannot be sued in federal court for money damages without their own permission.
There has to be more to this story than just "restrictions," because for one thing, the U.S. Dept. of Energy is funding research into optical implants for the blind. I saw a video of a man using a very rudimentary prototype (resolution 4 x 4 pixels, which surprisingly was enough for him to recognize common objects like a plate, a mug, etc.)
Outside the context of an auction, immediate purchase is unremarkable. If the genus is unpatentable, the species ought to be.
In the case of the CC Licenses, the usual objections to click-thru licensing don't apply. In the absence of the license, what you could do with the work would be limited by copyright law. The license lets you do things you couldn't do without it, but it doesn't restrict you from doing any things you could do without it. So, if you don't agree to the license, or don't know it exists, fine. Just obey copyright law, and you can't possibly run afoul of the license.
Google is in the home. Many people would trust Google with their personal information. The trillion-dollar question is, would enough people trust Google to know what they purchase, on a person-by-person, item-by-item basis. Because if the answer is yes, the entire future of the retail sector depends on it.
Retailing is based on an information crisis: consumers don't know what exactly they want until they see it displayed nice and pretty on the self. What people have purchased is a good predictor of what they will purchase, and so retail managers do know what consumers want, but only it aggregate. But if any single concern can know a what a sufficient fraction of which consumers will want which goods, before the consumers themselves do, it is self-evidently more efficient to deliver the goods from citywide sorting centers to the consumers' door on neighborhood distribution routes (think postal service or trash pickup here), than for each household to send a representative to retail outlets to ponder the goods on the shelf, taking up parking space, aisle space, and their own precious time all the while.
The trillion-dollar question is not, can Google take on Microsoft, but, can Google take on WalMart?
I think the proper term of copyright can be determined through a back-of-the envelope accounting calculation.
The expiration of a copyright involves the transfer of something that has value (the copyright) from the rights-holder to the public. This is a fair trade if the public has compensated the rights-holder with something of equal value, which they will have done through granting the copyright in the first place, if the term of copyright was long enough.
Put another way, the "fair" term of copyright is the term at the end of which, the present value of monopoly rents already extracted from the copyright is equal to the present value of all future monopoly rents that could be extracted from the copyright if it were extended into perpetuity. Or even more straightforwardly, a copyright of "fair" term has exactly half the value of a perpetual copyright.
Reducing this to a concrete policy recommedation requires making some assumptions about the sales curve of a typical work, and the interest rate at which future income should be discounted to a present value, but just as a reference point, if we use a "flat" sales curve (generous, since most works decline in sales over time), and a 2% interest rate, the "fair" length of copyright is 35 years.
If Kansas consults its lawyers, they may as well go right on ahead until ordered to desist by a federal judge, and maybe not even then. The extent to which the states and their agencies can be held liable for violation of copyright law is very limited, as the 11th amendment prevents 3rd parties from suing the states in federal court for money damages.
Well, yes, U.S. Copyright law is different, especially when it comes to libraries. See section 108 if you're interested. In particular, U.S. libraries don't pay photocopying royalties, because libraries suffer no liability for their patrons' use or misuse of library photocopiers, provided the library posts a copyright notice on or near the photocopier. All liability for the use of library photocopiers rests with the library patron.
Except that Google did not buy the books, but borrowed them, and so they have no right of first sale.
... the traditional contours of fair use, are transformative.)
Their fair use defense is weak, because
(1) They copied the entire book.
(2) They did so for a commercial purpose.
(3) Many of the works copied were creative works.
(3) Their use of the book is not transformative (in the sense that criticism, scholarly research, parody
I will be very surprised if Google can wrest a legal victory here.
That says only that they are not redistributing the whole thing, not that it isn't in the database. I rather think that it is in the database, only flagged as unavailable, awaiting the expiration of the book's copyright.
It's common in evaluating fair use defenses these days to apply the "four purposes" test:
(1) Effect on the market value of the work. Google can probably effectively argue that their use of the works does not adversely affect their sales. Only one sale was lost (selling the book to Google, since they borrowed and copied it rather than copying books they already owned copies of), and if anything, having the work indexed will increase the number of people exposed to the work's existence.
(2) Amount and substantiability of the work used. Google could get in trouble here, because even if they only reveal there copy a few words at a time, they copied the whole thing, and are redistributing the whole thing, if a few words at a time. There was nothing in the work that Google did not copy.
(3) Nature of the copyrighted work. The more creative a work, the smaller the range of uses considered fair use. A mere database is inelligible for copyright, and a reference work that conveys primarily factual information is easier to use fairly than a work of creative fiction. This could get hairy. One the one hand, many of the works Google proposes to copy are purely creative works. On the other, they are using them not for their creative content, but purely as data. If they can convince the court that because they have used the works as a database, and not as creative works, they have used them fairly, they have a chance. If the court sees the works principally as creative works though, this is a strike against Google.
(4) Nature of the use. Google is using the works commercially, even if they aren't getting paid. This is a strike against Google, though probably not an overriding one. However, to really win on this point, they need to make the case that putting all these books together in a big database is "transformative," and this is a hard point for them to make. While the books in the database can be used in a fashion they couldn't be used while not in the database, their appearance in that database is not transformative insofar as seeing the quote from the database adds little context to the work. It is not transformative in the sense that parody, criticism, scholarly research, etc., are transformative.
In my opinion, Google has a good fair use defense only if they can convince the court to distinguish the content of the works as creative works from the content as data, and then say they copied only the data, without infringing the creative work. It is not at all certain to me that the court would agree with such an interpretation of the law. If this makes it to trial, it is my opinion that Google faces an uphill battle.
Libraries are now allowed to make copies of books when (1) The book is in its last 20 years of copyright protection; and (2) The copyright owner is no longer exploiting the copyright. Google Print may well be able to claim this safe harbor, but only for a limited domain of works. As for the rest, they have nothing but the fair use defense, and that defense is always far from certain.
If they can use item-level RFIDs to do inventory management, then so can you. Think of being able to quickly determine a "household manifest" of your consumables, compare that against a desired manifest of what you would like to have when the household is fully stocked, and generate a grocery list instantly. What has really held back the would-be Amazons of the grocery business is that the consumer doesn't know what they want until they see it on the shelf, and sometimes not even then. The supermarket managers do know what the consumer wants, but only in aggregate. So there's this big information crisis between the wholesale level and the items on your shelves, and this information crisis is why the markup at the retail level is a signifcant fraction of the final consumer cost: it pays for people to nicely array the items on shelves, for the parking lots and big wide aisles where your car and you have to sit while you make up your mind as to whether you want something or not, all because there is no better way to determine whether you want something than having you look at it and make the decision. When the price of RFID technology gets down to the point of practicability for this, the smart entrepreneur is going to give away the scanner, becasue the cost and convenience advantages of being automatically inventory your house and order replacements will be self-evident. Heck, when the adoption rate gets high enough, it is self-apparently more efficient for a delivery vehicle to go through neighborhoods than for each household to send a representative to a centralized location.
Seriously, the ancient learning was in decline well before Christianity took over Rome. The 2nd century B.C. marks the height of Hellenistic science. The Roman takeover of the ancient Mediterranean did nothing to foster learning and much to discourage it, and notwithstanding a brief resurgence in the 2nd century A.D., both learning, and the political order, were dead on their feet by the time Christianity became a legal religion in the 4th century.
Ironically, one of the best legislatures out there, from the point of view of not wasting the taxpayers' money, is that of New Hampshire. N.H. also boasts the most legislators per capita, with a House of 400 service a populace of 1.2 million. Now, they only pay the legislators $100 each, plus travel perks.
Maybe the key to more accountable government is increasing the number that govern.
Microsoft's decision to no longer patch pirated installations has a few unintended consequences. There is now a base of unpatched machines that any new worm will likely be able to exploit. If a greater fraction of machines are unpatched, a greater fraction of infection attempts will succeed, and the worm will spread faster. A faster-spreading infection means a more legitimate Windows users will be infected before they patch (although the auto-updating feature of Service Patch 2 will help with this).
And of course, that population of never-patched machines affects everyone who uses the internet, regardless of their operating system.