Is it possible these senators are just uneducated? If I wasn't a geek (and I can confirm this through conversations with many non-geek friends), I might question why my state wants to spend thousands (millions?) of dollars to transition from the de-facto file format used by almost everybody to this lesser-known format that nobody outside of the IT department has ever heard of.
The other consideration is that while you and I know this change will undoubtedly help in the long run, it's going to be a pain in the butt over the next few years, as old documents are converted, people trained to use OpenOffice.org, etc. Very, very few people have heard of OpenOffice.org. Asking people to download an 80 MB installer is not reasonable for the many people still on dialup who want to interact with the government. (Many of these people are presumably on fixed incomes, and arguably the ones that most need contact with the government.) The general public is going to see these changes and question why their elected officials made such a stupid decision.
So, yes, the sooner everybody switches to OpenDocument, the better; however, there are major hurdles that have to be overcome first.
People go in undercover and [do whatever: buy drugs, whatnot] No, police do. I'm no lawyer, but I do know that if you buy drugs from a dealer and then turn it in as "evidence," you're going to get arrested on the spot. Microsoft is not the police. They might offer to lend their technical expertise to the police, but it is not their place to catch the criminals. They should leave that to the professionals.
It may be a big security hole, but it is by far the best desktop personal information manager. Outlook is one of the things I missed since I switched to a Linux desktop. Evolution doesn't even approach Outlook in terms of functionality.
If you think it will take 2 days to move if everything goes according to plan, tell your customers it will take up to 4 weeks to iron out all the kinks.
The last two are (somewhat) easy - just match them against an exhaustive list of military titles and their abbreviations. I challenge you to provide an algorithm to conclusively show me whether person x is famous. Remember, according to your rules, your algorithm has to have a miniscule false negative rate because we won't take their name away once it's approved by software.
Well, if people start trying to use TinyURL as a file system, it may be more cost-effective to do the validation than blindly accept the long URL. TinyURL could decide how much bandwidth to devote to checking URLs based on the payoff from eliminating a bad one.
No, mere creation of a full duplicate of a work is not necessarily a copyright violation, even in the absence of a statutory exception.
We are in agreement here.
If providing a full-text search with summary page results is fair use, then the duplication on Google's hard drive is arguably fair use by necessity.
I'm not necessarily sure that providing such a search is fair use. Even if it is, there is no statuatory exemption for "necessary" copies that I'm aware of, except for backup and in-memory copies for software.
Just like my complete duplication of a TV broadcast on a videotape is fair use for the permitted purpose of time-shifting.
You are an individual making the copy for non-profit purposes. Google is a business making the copy so it can sell ads on its Print service and make money.
The fact that Google's database would ultimately benefit society doesn't necessarily outweigh the fact that the copies were made for commercial purposes. Consider Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphic Corp., where Kinko's was found liable for copyright infringement for creating photocopies of books at the direct request of professors and the exclusive use of students in a classroom setting.
Authors and publishers do not and have never historically published in the expectation of fees for or a veto over methods for users to discover the subject-matter of a book
The fact that the veto power has never been used doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Copyright law protects not only current methods of exploiting a work, but uninvented or unutilized methods as well. For example, just because a publisher refuses to print a paperback copy of a book doesn't mean some other company can base a copy off the hardcover edition.
(such as card catalogs, bibliographies, and book reviews)
In none of those cases is a verbatim copy of the entire original work made, as a necessary step or otherwise.
Is that the OEM version? The OEM and retail versions of Windows have substantially different terms, because the OEM version is tied to the hardware. I haven't seen the retail EULA for anything more recent than Windows 95, but it might offer the right to make a second copy.
Now for an absurdly impossible hypothetical question: let's say google hires a million monkeys, Don't you mean pigeons?
So, my question boils down to: if google could offer an identical service from a user's point of view without needing to copy all books...then it would be legal, yes? IANAL, but yes, I think in that case it would be legal. In that situation, you're tipping the fair-use test because humans are inolved in the critical thinking.
My understanding of the original motivations behind fair-use is that you want to ensure ideas can be exchanged in a democratic society so that better ideas can be discovered and acted on. In Google's case, there's not really a judgement of ideas, but a calculation, and as silly as it sounds, I think that does make an ethical difference.
"this is really cool and useful and I hope it doesn't get shut down" I think it's an insanely cool idea that the publishers would be wise to opt-in to. My problem is the way Google is going about it. It makes them look arrogant. I think there's valid reasons why copyright owners may not want to participate in the program, and those should be respected.
I feel that if Google made the whole program opt-in and marketed it correctly, it would catch on. Small publishers would use it, and the larger ones would notice and follow suit. I think that Google has historically recognized that they owe their existence to the people that create content. It would be in their best interest to keep this group happy as they have done in the past.
The problem I see it as making it opt-in only, is that there are probably a lot of publishers out there that have gone under, or even better, the books of copyright has expired (the article said there was a good portion, perhaps up to 60%, of the books they are indexing that are out of copyright).
If the book's copyright has expired, it's in the public domain, so anybody can do anything they want with it. I have no problem with Google indexing books in the public domain.
As far as the company going under and the book becoming "abandonware," so to speak, I've always felt the law should declare such a book public domain at that point. Unfortunately, the law in the United States isn't set up this way, and Google, as a public corporation, should abide by the law as it stands now (or possibly lobby to have it changed - it'd be nice to see a corporation throwing money at overturning a bad law for a change).
The program banks on the majority of books being indexed, and if the books cannot be indexed because of the (smaller) portion of books copyright holders requiring them to make it opt-in only, it is pretty useless.
As I keep stating in articles related to Google Print (and I have yet to see a challenge to this assertion), Amazon.com is operating a program almost exactly like what Google proposes to do. They have succeeded in getting a substantial number of books included in the program, and in each case the publisher decided to opt-in. Amazon.com's program is wildly successful despite the fact that they don't have every book indexed.
It can't be that difficult for a copyright holder (publisher) to be able to pull up a list of all their books, to say they do not want them indexed. Or even better, just tell them that they cannot index any of the publisher's books (they have to determine it when filling out the electronic card catalog anyhow).
What if they miss one? It's easy to do so if you have a large collection of copyrighted books you sell. Even if an opt-out was the ethical thing to do, Google has already stated that they won't honor a blanket opt-out by the publishers; they have to opt-out each book.
An "opt-in" scheme is obviously unworkable, because the amount of effort required to chase down the often obscure chain of ownership rights to every book would be cost-prohibative.
Yes, obviously. You should let Amazon.com know. Perhaps then they will stop bleeding money from the futile effort to track down even a single book owner to sign on.
So I'll restate my subject: Why is this even an issue?
I think there might be two potential reasons. First, the benefit of being in a search engine is so much greater than the costs that most people want to be indexed. Second, I think most people who do mind have given up and accepted that it is a lot cheaper to set up opt-out like Google wants than to sue Google for their (in my view) clearly illegal actions.
The issue is the same issue that seems to come up often on Slashdot: it's impossible to hold large corporations to the law and ethics because nobody can afford to sue them.
The moderators apparently didn't notice that you called the parent "mistaken", but didn't address the point. Google will have an entire copy of the works in question on their hard drive(s). It doesn't matter that most people will not have it - Google will, and in so doing, Google is violating copyright on a massive scale.
All Google has to do to make everybody happy is to make this an opt-in program. Amazon.com has been running such a program for years, and you don't hear any complaints about it.
There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.
This isn't entirely a justification, but if IP owners are worried about abuses of the system, they should set the example and deal with their own abuses first. I don't think 100 years, with extensions every 50, is what the founding fathers had in mind when they said "limited time."
I happen to think copyright law is a good thing. I just don't think it should take longer than my lifetime for works created today to enter the public domain.
Credit cards are the preferred choice for electronic transactions. Since it's a pay AFTER you use, as opposed to pay as you use, if fraud occurs, you're not out the money that you were defrauded. I never use my debit cards online.
My bank will, and has, refunded money lost through fraudulent charges in order to keep my business. (Which makes me respect them quite a bit, especially since I don't have that much deposited.) Granted, few banks will do this, but I'm comfortable with the risk given the one I have.
If you don't carry keys, that means you leave your house unlocked, live with mommy, or have a key drop somewhere, in which case, you have bigger things to worry about, or have nothing worth stealing.
Actually, I just figure that getting into the key drop would be more trouble than breaking the door open with a crowbar or axe.
As to your point #2, I would have to agree. I think the status quo is just fine, I've never had to deal with bank fraud simply because I never fall for the phishing schemes.
Thanks. It's nice to occasionally see common sense surface on Slashdot.
1. You carry around credit cards don't you? What about car and door keys? How cumbersome can this be? I carry around one debit card. I don't carry keys, and I like it that way.
2. Would you rather they took biometric information? It is digital info that someone could HACK and reuse, that is referrenced irretrievably to YOU. I would rather carry the something around. Given that choice, I'll take the token, but so far nobody's convinced me that the token is going to actually make the process secure from phishing. In fact, it will probably lull the average consumer into a false sense of security. If it's not going to help, why bother with an extra step?
This doesn't help you with the problem your parent poster posed. If I can get you to my web site instead of your bank's through phishing, I can easily relay the challenge from the bank to you and your box's response back to the bank. This is a classic man-in-the-middle attack, and the fancy box that millions of customers in Sweden use won't do a thing for security.
But I'm betting you wouldn't sign a waiver relieving them of liability if you opt out of using their T-FA...
It depends. If the waiver covered them purely for losses incurred through phishing, I would happily sign it. I use only secure computers to get to my bank's web site, and I type the URL by hand. I would rather not carry a token to access just one web site.
On the other hand, if they wanted to extend the waiver to all forms of account loss, regardless of whether it involved an online transaction or not, I'd be more concerned about signing it.
I don't really blame them. The kind of technological revolutions that truly cause radical shifts in the direction of modern society only arrive once in a lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
Massachusetts state senators come much cheaper.
Is it possible these senators are just uneducated? If I wasn't a geek (and I can confirm this through conversations with many non-geek friends), I might question why my state wants to spend thousands (millions?) of dollars to transition from the de-facto file format used by almost everybody to this lesser-known format that nobody outside of the IT department has ever heard of.
The other consideration is that while you and I know this change will undoubtedly help in the long run, it's going to be a pain in the butt over the next few years, as old documents are converted, people trained to use OpenOffice.org, etc. Very, very few people have heard of OpenOffice.org. Asking people to download an 80 MB installer is not reasonable for the many people still on dialup who want to interact with the government. (Many of these people are presumably on fixed incomes, and arguably the ones that most need contact with the government.) The general public is going to see these changes and question why their elected officials made such a stupid decision.
So, yes, the sooner everybody switches to OpenDocument, the better; however, there are major hurdles that have to be overcome first.
People go in undercover and [do whatever: buy drugs, whatnot]
No, police do. I'm no lawyer, but I do know that if you buy drugs from a dealer and then turn it in as "evidence," you're going to get arrested on the spot. Microsoft is not the police. They might offer to lend their technical expertise to the police, but it is not their place to catch the criminals. They should leave that to the professionals.
It may be a big security hole, but it is by far the best desktop personal information manager. Outlook is one of the things I missed since I switched to a Linux desktop. Evolution doesn't even approach Outlook in terms of functionality.
If you think it will take 2 days to move if everything goes according to plan, tell your customers it will take up to 4 weeks to iron out all the kinks.
Ahh, so you're using the Scotty Manuver.
The last two are (somewhat) easy - just match them against an exhaustive list of military titles and their abbreviations. I challenge you to provide an algorithm to conclusively show me whether person x is famous. Remember, according to your rules, your algorithm has to have a miniscule false negative rate because we won't take their name away once it's approved by software.
Can't get any lower than scapegoat, right?
if the rules cannot be programmed into the game, then they should not be "enforced" by plebes.
Isn't that a little like saying that if the police can't catch John Q. Bank Robber in the bank, then the law shouldn't be enforced after he leaves?
Can't you do a syntax check in Apache without restarting it? I think it's the -t switch.
Well, if people start trying to use TinyURL as a file system, it may be more cost-effective to do the validation than blindly accept the long URL. TinyURL could decide how much bandwidth to devote to checking URLs based on the payoff from eliminating a bad one.
No, mere creation of a full duplicate of a work is not necessarily a copyright violation, even in the absence of a statutory exception.
We are in agreement here.
If providing a full-text search with summary page results is fair use, then the duplication on Google's hard drive is arguably fair use by necessity.
I'm not necessarily sure that providing such a search is fair use. Even if it is, there is no statuatory exemption for "necessary" copies that I'm aware of, except for backup and in-memory copies for software.
Just like my complete duplication of a TV broadcast on a videotape is fair use for the permitted purpose of time-shifting.
You are an individual making the copy for non-profit purposes. Google is a business making the copy so it can sell ads on its Print service and make money.
The fact that Google's database would ultimately benefit society doesn't necessarily outweigh the fact that the copies were made for commercial purposes. Consider Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphic Corp., where Kinko's was found liable for copyright infringement for creating photocopies of books at the direct request of professors and the exclusive use of students in a classroom setting.
Authors and publishers do not and have never historically published in the expectation of fees for or a veto over methods for users to discover the subject-matter of a book
The fact that the veto power has never been used doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Copyright law protects not only current methods of exploiting a work, but uninvented or unutilized methods as well. For example, just because a publisher refuses to print a paperback copy of a book doesn't mean some other company can base a copy off the hardcover edition.
(such as card catalogs, bibliographies, and book reviews)
In none of those cases is a verbatim copy of the entire original work made, as a necessary step or otherwise.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Is that the OEM version? The OEM and retail versions of Windows have substantially different terms, because the OEM version is tied to the hardware. I haven't seen the retail EULA for anything more recent than Windows 95, but it might offer the right to make a second copy.
Now for an absurdly impossible hypothetical question: let's say google hires a million monkeys,
Don't you mean pigeons?
So, my question boils down to: if google could offer an identical service from a user's point of view without needing to copy all books...then it would be legal, yes?
IANAL, but yes, I think in that case it would be legal. In that situation, you're tipping the fair-use test because humans are inolved in the critical thinking.
My understanding of the original motivations behind fair-use is that you want to ensure ideas can be exchanged in a democratic society so that better ideas can be discovered and acted on. In Google's case, there's not really a judgement of ideas, but a calculation, and as silly as it sounds, I think that does make an ethical difference.
"this is really cool and useful and I hope it doesn't get shut down"
I think it's an insanely cool idea that the publishers would be wise to opt-in to. My problem is the way Google is going about it. It makes them look arrogant. I think there's valid reasons why copyright owners may not want to participate in the program, and those should be respected.
I feel that if Google made the whole program opt-in and marketed it correctly, it would catch on. Small publishers would use it, and the larger ones would notice and follow suit. I think that Google has historically recognized that they owe their existence to the people that create content. It would be in their best interest to keep this group happy as they have done in the past.
The problem I see it as making it opt-in only, is that there are probably a lot of publishers out there that have gone under, or even better, the books of copyright has expired (the article said there was a good portion, perhaps up to 60%, of the books they are indexing that are out of copyright).
If the book's copyright has expired, it's in the public domain, so anybody can do anything they want with it. I have no problem with Google indexing books in the public domain.
As far as the company going under and the book becoming "abandonware," so to speak, I've always felt the law should declare such a book public domain at that point. Unfortunately, the law in the United States isn't set up this way, and Google, as a public corporation, should abide by the law as it stands now (or possibly lobby to have it changed - it'd be nice to see a corporation throwing money at overturning a bad law for a change).
The program banks on the majority of books being indexed, and if the books cannot be indexed because of the (smaller) portion of books copyright holders requiring them to make it opt-in only, it is pretty useless.
As I keep stating in articles related to Google Print (and I have yet to see a challenge to this assertion), Amazon.com is operating a program almost exactly like what Google proposes to do. They have succeeded in getting a substantial number of books included in the program, and in each case the publisher decided to opt-in. Amazon.com's program is wildly successful despite the fact that they don't have every book indexed.
It can't be that difficult for a copyright holder (publisher) to be able to pull up a list of all their books, to say they do not want them indexed. Or even better, just tell them that they cannot index any of the publisher's books (they have to determine it when filling out the electronic card catalog anyhow).
What if they miss one? It's easy to do so if you have a large collection of copyrighted books you sell. Even if an opt-out was the ethical thing to do, Google has already stated that they won't honor a blanket opt-out by the publishers; they have to opt-out each book.
An "opt-in" scheme is obviously unworkable, because the amount of effort required to chase down the often obscure chain of ownership rights to every book would be cost-prohibative.
Yes, obviously. You should let Amazon.com know. Perhaps then they will stop bleeding money from the futile effort to track down even a single book owner to sign on.
So I'll restate my subject: Why is this even an issue?
I think there might be two potential reasons. First, the benefit of being in a search engine is so much greater than the costs that most people want to be indexed. Second, I think most people who do mind have given up and accepted that it is a lot cheaper to set up opt-out like Google wants than to sue Google for their (in my view) clearly illegal actions.
The issue is the same issue that seems to come up often on Slashdot: it's impossible to hold large corporations to the law and ethics because nobody can afford to sue them.
While I disagree with you (my analysis is here), I wanted to say that I appreciate that you're bringing actual facts to the debate. Thank you.
The moderators apparently didn't notice that you called the parent "mistaken", but didn't address the point. Google will have an entire copy of the works in question on their hard drive(s). It doesn't matter that most people will not have it - Google will, and in so doing, Google is violating copyright on a massive scale.
All Google has to do to make everybody happy is to make this an opt-in program. Amazon.com has been running such a program for years, and you don't hear any complaints about it.
There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.
This isn't entirely a justification, but if IP owners are worried about abuses of the system, they should set the example and deal with their own abuses first. I don't think 100 years, with extensions every 50, is what the founding fathers had in mind when they said "limited time."
I happen to think copyright law is a good thing. I just don't think it should take longer than my lifetime for works created today to enter the public domain.
That's actually a good idea. I concede. :)
Credit cards are the preferred choice for electronic transactions. Since it's a pay AFTER you use, as opposed to pay as you use, if fraud occurs, you're not out the money that you were defrauded. I never use my debit cards online.
My bank will, and has, refunded money lost through fraudulent charges in order to keep my business. (Which makes me respect them quite a bit, especially since I don't have that much deposited.) Granted, few banks will do this, but I'm comfortable with the risk given the one I have.
If you don't carry keys, that means you leave your house unlocked, live with mommy, or have a key drop somewhere, in which case, you have bigger things to worry about, or have nothing worth stealing.
Actually, I just figure that getting into the key drop would be more trouble than breaking the door open with a crowbar or axe.
As to your point #2, I would have to agree. I think the status quo is just fine, I've never had to deal with bank fraud simply because I never fall for the phishing schemes.
Thanks. It's nice to occasionally see common sense surface on Slashdot.
1. You carry around credit cards don't you? What about car and door keys? How cumbersome can this be?
I carry around one debit card. I don't carry keys, and I like it that way.
2. Would you rather they took biometric information? It is digital info that someone could HACK and reuse, that is referrenced irretrievably to YOU. I would rather carry the something around.
Given that choice, I'll take the token, but so far nobody's convinced me that the token is going to actually make the process secure from phishing. In fact, it will probably lull the average consumer into a false sense of security. If it's not going to help, why bother with an extra step?
This doesn't help you with the problem your parent poster posed. If I can get you to my web site instead of your bank's through phishing, I can easily relay the challenge from the bank to you and your box's response back to the bank. This is a classic man-in-the-middle attack, and the fancy box that millions of customers in Sweden use won't do a thing for security.
But I'm betting you wouldn't sign a waiver relieving them of liability if you opt out of using their T-FA...
It depends. If the waiver covered them purely for losses incurred through phishing, I would happily sign it. I use only secure computers to get to my bank's web site, and I type the URL by hand. I would rather not carry a token to access just one web site.
On the other hand, if they wanted to extend the waiver to all forms of account loss, regardless of whether it involved an online transaction or not, I'd be more concerned about signing it.
Even the Wall Street Journal editors think nothing of downloading and sharing TV shows...IP owners sure have a tough battle ahead of them.
Isn't the owner of the Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones, an I.P. owner?
I don't really blame them. The kind of technological revolutions that truly cause radical shifts in the direction of modern society only arrive once in a lifetime.