Most libraries run software that clears cache and stored completion strings each time that the browser is closed, so that the next person using the computer doesn't see the previous person's history. So unless someone gets to the computer ASAP, the likelihood of some recoverable data still being on the disk is fairly low.
The most likely source of information about use of a library computer would be a local proxy server, if the library runs one. But of course it would show the aggregate of searches from all library machines, so you'd have to be able to figure out what machine that person was at.
Libraries that use paper signup sheets are advised to shred them at the end of the day. The signup software that is commonly used removes data either at the end of the day or at the end of 24 hours. No fancy wiping of the disk, so getting at that day after some passage of time is probably just a matter of how much $$ you want to throw at it.
(I always hate talking about this, because the logical conclusion, from the law enforcement point of view, is to require libraries to keep this data.)
I hope you're not asking this question of those of us who live in a country where the recent vote was clearly a majority voice against a certain unpopular war, yet the tyr... uh democratic leader is deciding to "stay the course." Whatever democracy is, it sure isn't a matter of laws or of voting.
I can tell you that librarians hate the photocopiers and printers that are out in the public area -- they always need paper added or to be unjammed. I assume that these machines would not be "self serve." It makes more sense to me to put them in copy stores, like Kinko's, where it's peoples' job to make machines run smoothly and collect money for copies. Libraries aren't good at either. My second choice would be bookstores. Libraries are good at lending, lousy at selling. It just doesn't seem to be the right model.
In a large library, only a small percentage of books get checked out at all within a year, and many never get checked out over a period of decades.
That's true for academic libraries, but some public libraries have incredible circulation rates -- 4-6 times their total collection per year. Some of the books don't circulate at all, and some rarely spend time on the shelf.
That said, the books circulating the most are not generally the public domain books. They are the current bestsellers, which this POD service probably will not be allowed to print. Even if they were to kick back the royalties, the middlemen (warehousers, jobbers, retailers) are too powerful to let the business pass them by.
You're probably thinking about Brewster Kahle and his bookmobile. He drove around Africa demonstrating how he could download public domain books via satellite and print them out in the back of his van. He also does this in the U.S.
Because the publishers 1) didn't use any particular standard for their digital files 2) and they didn't keep the digital files once the book was published. The folks doing e-books for the publishers were horrified in the early part of this decade to discover that publishers had considered the digital files discardable. Today, most publishers send the book to the printers in PDF, so there is at least that file, but if you want to do any reformatting you're going to be working with a Quark file with formatting of the publisher's own devising. Yes, better than scanning, but only just.
Most libraries' collections are very similar to most other libraries' collections, and the greatest overlap occurs with the books that are the most important.
Because the original Google 5 libraries have their holdings entered into WorldCat, a statistical study was done that showed that those five libraries would account for 33% of the 32 million books in that database. It also showed that 61% of the books held by the Google 5 are uniquely held by only one library. Essentially, the holdings of libraries follows a common pattern of a short high followed by a very long tail. If, even with their long tails, these 5 major libraries account for only 1/3 of books that libraries have entered into WorldCat, imagine how many libraries it will take to find and digitize the long tail of that one bibliographic database.
Less ephemeral works (the kind typically preserved in library collections a century later) generally all had their copyrights renewed in the U.S
The rate of copyright renewal was very low. According to Lessig ("Free Culture" p. 135) "In 1973, more than 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright." I've seen estimates that about 90% of the books published between 1923 and 1978, when renewal was abolished, were never renewed. That means that there are MANY public domain books in that time frame, only we can't easily know which ones they are. You can look them up in the renewal database, but my impression is that the database is not considered to be complete, and therefore not entirely reliable. If you find the book in the database, it was renewed. If not...
Interesting figure. I wonder how much of it is influenced by China -- where the "one child" policy has resulted in a great increase in the number of males. China gets 'Total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2006 est.)' while the US gets 'total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2006 est.)' and Finland gets 'total population: 0.96 male(s)/female (2006 est.)'. India, another country where females are considered a burden (because of dowry requirements) has the same ratio as China: 'total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2006 est.)' I've read articles about the "millions of missing girls" based on figures coming out of Southeast Asia. It would take a fair amount of research to show the why of these figures, but the differences are pretty interesting.
If they were looking for who had the greatest impact this year I'd have to at least nominate the collective of spammers. They affected us more than the members of MySpace and Wikipedia and other sites. You have to go to Wikipedia for it to have an affect on you -- but spammers come to you, and come to you, and come to you. And it's not just that they fill your mailbox with total crap, but they misspell it all to boot. How many penises do we have to enlarge before they have nothing else to sell? Could we just give them our passwords so they could quite phishing for them? What does it take?
There's been great controversy in libraries about the privacy implications of tagging books. The San Francisco Public Library board nixed the library's idea to switch from barcodes to RFID, even though the latter makes library circulation more accurate. Berkeley essentially fired its library director for implementing RFID tagging of books. Studies show that there are potential threats to privacy either by setting up a scanner outside of the library to see what people are taking out, or by targeting certain "hot button" titles and scanning to see who exits the library with them. These threats seem to be pretty outlandish to me since there are generally easier ways to monitor people's reading, like just following them around the library to see what book they take off the shelf. But some people are very worked up about this.
Yet the library use of RFID is much less likely to result in a loss of privacy because the RFID tag will contain only an accession code, not the title of the book nor the ISBN. This is because libraries use a true item-level number for circulation, since they can have more than one copy of the same book. One would have to access the staff module of the library system to make the connection between the code and the book. With bookstore tagging of items, my guess is that at least part of the code on the tag will be the ISBN, which reveals the book title. It will be interesting to see if the same people get worked up about the bookstore's use of RFID if it ever hits the US. Right now, it's still considered too expensive to tag individual books.
If every flawed, even totally error-ridden, non-fiction book were moved to the fiction section the non-fiction section would be virtually empty. Well, that would depend on the library. In some parts of Kansas the non-fiction section would only contain the Bible; in Berkeley, it would only contain Che's Bolivian Diary and Kerouac's On the Road; in Maine it would only contain the Angler's Almanac. Sheeesh!
Probably not, but you CAN conclude that men are the ones making most of the lists.
I worked on one of the first major library systems available for open access on the Internet. Three-quarter of the technical staff was female, but the boss was always one of the guys. When I would tell people that the system was created by and implemented by women, then followed up with the facts, their jaws would drop. Women in technology tend to be invisible, but they are definitely there and doing a lot of the interesting work.
So I know we always advise everyone to RTFA, but in this case... if you want to view the images of the patent, you are out of luck, unless you can run Quicktime for the Mac. The PTO puts up the images in TIFF, and openly acknowledges that almost no one can read them!
Published Application Full-Page Images
The Patent Application Pre-Grant Publication Full-Text Database now contains hyperlinks from the full-text document display to the full-page images of each page of each published application in the database. Our goal is to make new full-page images available each issue day (Thursday).
These full-page images are not directly viewable using most Web browsers.They are in 300 d.p.i. Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). However, there are many variants -- or "flavors" -- of TIFF, including different ways of compressing the image data within the TIFF file. The TIFF flavor used by PTO and other countries' intellectual property offices is international standard ITU T.6 or CCITT Group 4 (G4) compression. Displaying them requires either a TIFF G4 plug-in for your browser, or a properly installed and configured application to which your browser sends G4 TIFF images for display. Note that relatively few image viewers and plug-ins handle G4 compression.
That's what I call user service! The good news:
New! For the Apple Macintosh®, Apple's freely distributed Quicktime version 4.1 works with our images. It is linked from our "Document Formats" Web page.
So if you care about patents, better get a Mac, folks. (To see the whole PTO message, click on the "Images" button at the top of the patent, then try to see the images, then... ask for help.)
The Fictionwise e-books use a variety of secure formats, including the Microsoft secure reader, secure PDF, MobiPocket, etc. Each of these uses the "trick" of tying itself to your particular hardware. So part of the purchase negotiation on Fictionwise is that you have registered your reading device (or the individual software copy) with Fictionwise. If you copy the file to any other device, it will not open.
Interestingly, I purchased an audio book recently from an Italian company and it arrived as a simple MP3, presumably with no technical protection. It's quite unusual to find unprotected files being sold commercially, however.
No, section 108 of the copyright law only allows libraries to make copies of works that are damaged or deteriorating and that cannot be re-purchased reasonably either new or used. The allowances for libraries are pretty tightly circumscribed. What it comes down to is that owning a copy of a book doesn't really give you any rights to make other copies. You only have the right to do what you want to that copy: lend, sell, destroy.
Google is also creating digital page images, and is returning a copy of those page images to the libraries -- or at least to the Michigan library, whose license agreement with Google reads:
2.5 U of M Digital Copy. Google agrees to provide to U of M a copy of all Digitized Selected Content that has been "Successfully Processed" with thirty (30) days after the Selected Content is Digitized... the U of M Digital Copy will consist of a set of image and OCR files and associated information indicating at a minimum (1) bibliographic information... (2) which image files correspond to that Digitized work, and (3) the logical order of those image files.
So Google is giving the library a digital copy that is not just an index -- it is a full copy of the original, probably PDF or TIFF images of pages plus the OCR. Were Google discarding this copy rather than making a copy for the library, then the "it's only an index" argument might hold. As it stands, it doesn't.
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article, nor so far here on/., is that OCR does not produce a digital copy of the text -- at least, not without a great deal of editing. When Google and various libraries announced their Google Print deal, they specified that the searching would be on "uncorrected OCR" of the text. I also suspect that Amazon is using uncorrected OCR, just for cost reasons. OCR also means that things like images, their captions, and any data in tables are not searchable. So although the images aren't as useful as text, the text that they produce is not equivalent to the original publication either. In this sense, Bezos is correct when he says he is not creating ebooks, but just a search mechanism.
Not true. I have commented before to the Copyright Office, and once testified at a hearing they held. They DO pay attention to comments. Unfortunately, they don't look beyond the comments -- they tend to be a very literal bunch -- so if 50 big shot lawyers write comments for large firms, and only 5 individual citizens write comments, the Office concludes that it isn't of interest to the general public. They don't hear what we don't say.
I don't see why you dismiss the fair use possibility. Fair use is when you know that something is under copyright, or you cannot prove that is is not under copyright. You still make use of it because you determine, based on the criteria in copyright law, that your use is "fair." Fair use doesn't mean that you are ignorant of copyright, it's a judgment that you make with full knowledge of copyright law and its meaning. You could indeed take an mp3 and post it online and claim that your use is fair (based on the famous four factors in the copyright law, see link above). If you are wrong about your judgment, and the use isn't fair, the owner of the copyright can take you to court. That's why fair use is always a risk. You know that the risk is high if you are making copies of a hit song issued by a major recording studio; your risk is low if you are making use of an unnamed, unsigned, undated photograph that appears to be from the early 1900's and came from the library's archive.
Slashdot Mirror
Most libraries run software that clears cache and stored completion strings each time that the browser is closed, so that the next person using the computer doesn't see the previous person's history. So unless someone gets to the computer ASAP, the likelihood of some recoverable data still being on the disk is fairly low.
The most likely source of information about use of a library computer would be a local proxy server, if the library runs one. But of course it would show the aggregate of searches from all library machines, so you'd have to be able to figure out what machine that person was at.
Libraries that use paper signup sheets are advised to shred them at the end of the day. The signup software that is commonly used removes data either at the end of the day or at the end of 24 hours. No fancy wiping of the disk, so getting at that day after some passage of time is probably just a matter of how much $$ you want to throw at it.
(I always hate talking about this, because the logical conclusion, from the law enforcement point of view, is to require libraries to keep this data.)
Can you say "soccer riot?"
I hope you're not asking this question of those of us who live in a country where the recent vote was clearly a majority voice against a certain unpopular war, yet the tyr... uh democratic leader is deciding to "stay the course." Whatever democracy is, it sure isn't a matter of laws or of voting.
Online Desktop Environment = ODE. Surely someone can make marketing hay with THAT one.
I can tell you that librarians hate the photocopiers and printers that are out in the public area -- they always need paper added or to be unjammed. I assume that these machines would not be "self serve." It makes more sense to me to put them in copy stores, like Kinko's, where it's peoples' job to make machines run smoothly and collect money for copies. Libraries aren't good at either. My second choice would be bookstores. Libraries are good at lending, lousy at selling. It just doesn't seem to be the right model.
That said, the books circulating the most are not generally the public domain books. They are the current bestsellers, which this POD service probably will not be allowed to print. Even if they were to kick back the royalties, the middlemen (warehousers, jobbers, retailers) are too powerful to let the business pass them by.
You're probably thinking about Brewster Kahle and his bookmobile. He drove around Africa demonstrating how he could download public domain books via satellite and print them out in the back of his van. He also does this in the U.S.
Because the publishers 1) didn't use any particular standard for their digital files 2) and they didn't keep the digital files once the book was published. The folks doing e-books for the publishers were horrified in the early part of this decade to discover that publishers had considered the digital files discardable. Today, most publishers send the book to the printers in PDF, so there is at least that file, but if you want to do any reformatting you're going to be working with a Quark file with formatting of the publisher's own devising. Yes, better than scanning, but only just.
Because the original Google 5 libraries have their holdings entered into WorldCat, a statistical study was done that showed that those five libraries would account for 33% of the 32 million books in that database. It also showed that 61% of the books held by the Google 5 are uniquely held by only one library. Essentially, the holdings of libraries follows a common pattern of a short high followed by a very long tail. If, even with their long tails, these 5 major libraries account for only 1/3 of books that libraries have entered into WorldCat, imagine how many libraries it will take to find and digitize the long tail of that one bibliographic database.
The rate of copyright renewal was very low. According to Lessig ("Free Culture" p. 135) "In 1973, more than 85 percent of copyright owners failed to renew their copyright." I've seen estimates that about 90% of the books published between 1923 and 1978, when renewal was abolished, were never renewed. That means that there are MANY public domain books in that time frame, only we can't easily know which ones they are. You can look them up in the renewal database, but my impression is that the database is not considered to be complete, and therefore not entirely reliable. If you find the book in the database, it was renewed. If not...
It's called "Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe" and it's even got standards and software.
Interesting figure. I wonder how much of it is influenced by China -- where the "one child" policy has resulted in a great increase in the number of males. China gets 'Total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2006 est.)' while the US gets 'total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2006 est.)' and Finland gets 'total population: 0.96 male(s)/female (2006 est.)'. India, another country where females are considered a burden (because of dowry requirements) has the same ratio as China: 'total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2006 est.)' I've read articles about the "millions of missing girls" based on figures coming out of Southeast Asia. It would take a fair amount of research to show the why of these figures, but the differences are pretty interesting.
Actually, I think the implication is that "some of us is them."
If they were looking for who had the greatest impact this year I'd have to at least nominate the collective of spammers. They affected us more than the members of MySpace and Wikipedia and other sites. You have to go to Wikipedia for it to have an affect on you -- but spammers come to you, and come to you, and come to you. And it's not just that they fill your mailbox with total crap, but they misspell it all to boot. How many penises do we have to enlarge before they have nothing else to sell? Could we just give them our passwords so they could quite phishing for them? What does it take?
Don't forget the other 52% of the population!
There's been great controversy in libraries about the privacy implications of tagging books. The San Francisco Public Library board nixed the library's idea to switch from barcodes to RFID, even though the latter makes library circulation more accurate. Berkeley essentially fired its library director for implementing RFID tagging of books. Studies show that there are potential threats to privacy either by setting up a scanner outside of the library to see what people are taking out, or by targeting certain "hot button" titles and scanning to see who exits the library with them. These threats seem to be pretty outlandish to me since there are generally easier ways to monitor people's reading, like just following them around the library to see what book they take off the shelf. But some people are very worked up about this. Yet the library use of RFID is much less likely to result in a loss of privacy because the RFID tag will contain only an accession code, not the title of the book nor the ISBN. This is because libraries use a true item-level number for circulation, since they can have more than one copy of the same book. One would have to access the staff module of the library system to make the connection between the code and the book. With bookstore tagging of items, my guess is that at least part of the code on the tag will be the ISBN, which reveals the book title. It will be interesting to see if the same people get worked up about the bookstore's use of RFID if it ever hits the US. Right now, it's still considered too expensive to tag individual books.
I came up Socialist, so there are at least four answers. Anyone turn out to be Communist?
If every flawed, even totally error-ridden, non-fiction book were moved to the fiction section the non-fiction section would be virtually empty. Well, that would depend on the library. In some parts of Kansas the non-fiction section would only contain the Bible; in Berkeley, it would only contain Che's Bolivian Diary and Kerouac's On the Road; in Maine it would only contain the Angler's Almanac. Sheeesh!
Probably not, but you CAN conclude that men are the ones making most of the lists.
I worked on one of the first major library systems available for open access on the Internet. Three-quarter of the technical staff was female, but the boss was always one of the guys. When I would tell people that the system was created by and implemented by women, then followed up with the facts, their jaws would drop. Women in technology tend to be invisible, but they are definitely there and doing a lot of the interesting work.
That's what I call user service! The good news:
So if you care about patents, better get a Mac, folks. (To see the whole PTO message, click on the "Images" button at the top of the patent, then try to see the images, then... ask for help.)
The Fictionwise e-books use a variety of secure formats, including the Microsoft secure reader, secure PDF, MobiPocket, etc. Each of these uses the "trick" of tying itself to your particular hardware. So part of the purchase negotiation on Fictionwise is that you have registered your reading device (or the individual software copy) with Fictionwise. If you copy the file to any other device, it will not open. Interestingly, I purchased an audio book recently from an Italian company and it arrived as a simple MP3, presumably with no technical protection. It's quite unusual to find unprotected files being sold commercially, however.
No, section 108 of the copyright law only allows libraries to make copies of works that are damaged or deteriorating and that cannot be re-purchased reasonably either new or used. The allowances for libraries are pretty tightly circumscribed. What it comes down to is that owning a copy of a book doesn't really give you any rights to make other copies. You only have the right to do what you want to that copy: lend, sell, destroy.
2.5 U of M Digital Copy. Google agrees to provide to U of M a copy of all Digitized Selected Content that has been "Successfully Processed" with thirty (30) days after the Selected Content is Digitized... the U of M Digital Copy will consist of a set of image and OCR files and associated information indicating at a minimum (1) bibliographic information... (2) which image files correspond to that Digitized work, and (3) the logical order of those image files.
So Google is giving the library a digital copy that is not just an index -- it is a full copy of the original, probably PDF or TIFF images of pages plus the OCR. Were Google discarding this copy rather than making a copy for the library, then the "it's only an index" argument might hold. As it stands, it doesn't.
Something that wasn't mentioned in the article, nor so far here on /., is that OCR does not produce a digital copy of the text -- at least, not without a great deal of editing. When Google and various libraries announced their Google Print deal, they specified that the searching would be on "uncorrected OCR" of the text. I also suspect that Amazon is using uncorrected OCR, just for cost reasons. OCR also means that things like images, their captions, and any data in tables are not searchable. So although the images aren't as useful as text, the text that they produce is not equivalent to the original publication either. In this sense, Bezos is correct when he says he is not creating ebooks, but just a search mechanism.
.sig was here a minute ago
Not true. I have commented before to the Copyright Office, and once testified at a hearing they held. They DO pay attention to comments. Unfortunately, they don't look beyond the comments -- they tend to be a very literal bunch -- so if 50 big shot lawyers write comments for large firms, and only 5 individual citizens write comments, the Office concludes that it isn't of interest to the general public. They don't hear what we don't say.
I don't see why you dismiss the fair use possibility. Fair use is when you know that something is under copyright, or you cannot prove that is is not under copyright. You still make use of it because you determine, based on the criteria in copyright law, that your use is "fair." Fair use doesn't mean that you are ignorant of copyright, it's a judgment that you make with full knowledge of copyright law and its meaning. You could indeed take an mp3 and post it online and claim that your use is fair (based on the famous four factors in the copyright law, see link above). If you are wrong about your judgment, and the use isn't fair, the owner of the copyright can take you to court. That's why fair use is always a risk. You know that the risk is high if you are making copies of a hit song issued by a major recording studio; your risk is low if you are making use of an unnamed, unsigned, undated photograph that appears to be from the early 1900's and came from the library's archive.