If your Gmail is anything like my Gmail*, you'll see ads in the right column when you read threads. However, the ads don't always show up when you're not discussing mainstream topics in your e-mail. Others have also found that Gmail will avoid placing ads alongside e-mails which appear to be about sensitive topics such as death.
* Of course, your Gmail might not be anything like my Gmail because I've noticed they have several different versions deployed. For example, there's a RSS reader integrated into some Gmail accounts that I don't have access to.
Actually, copyright protection applies to unpublished works as well, provided they would otherwise be eligible for protection (see http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#uw). The rest of your post is on the right track. Just because copyright expires doesn't mean the owner suddenly has to give the work away - they just lose the right to keep other people from making copies of it.
At the moment, the formal process of copyright registration, where you pay the fee and submit a copy of the work, entitles you to additional rights (mainly, the right to sue for statuatory damages and attorney's fees, rather than actual damages). I don't think it's too much to ask that source files be included as part of the registration requirement.
Registration is advantageous to society because it establishes when the work was created and who to contact to request permission to make deriviative works. Registrants could be rewarded in exchange for making the additional source material available by receiving a longer copyright term (say, 30 years if you register or 10 if you don't).
Of course, big business has such a stranglehold on the politicians that I don't see much coming of this wishful thinking.
First of all, that article says nothing except that selective availability was disabled, meaning the accuracy improves for everybody. There's some veiled tin-foil hat comments about why the government turned it off, but nothing to substantiate the fears.
Second, the GPS constellation never misrepresented the locations of the satellites. They dithered the unscrambled signal from the satellites so receivers couldn't calculate their position as accurately. The article speculates that selective availability may have been disabled because the distance between 30 meters and 100 meters is relatively small, and equipment (missiles?) could easily compensate for the difference.
I happen to think that Yahoo! is doing some amazing, cool stuff - cool enough to be a major Google competitor. I like it that way, because in my opinion, neither company has a definitive edge, and they keep trying to out-innovate each other because of it. That's an incredibly good thing.
Yahoo! was the first Google - the site that strived to sort the web so mere mortals could get around. I first used it when it was http://akebono.stanford.edu/. The day it gets bought by Microsoft will be a sad day, indeed.
Google gets money from stock sales and selling search appliances.
In the second fiscal quarter of 2005, advertising revenue on Google web sites accounted for 53% of gross revenue, and advertising on other sites earned the company 46%. It's a Very Bad Thing (tm) to have 99% of your company's revenue disappear because people are increasingly blocking your ads.
I have a feeling all of this boils down to a simple case of price discrimination. The "business machines" sold by Dell are priced higher than the home machines, because businesses need to deploy computers en masse and Dell won't sell them home units at that quantity. Similarly, home users get a cheaper price because they won't pay the business price for the machine.
I think the vast majority of people who buy a blank computer will be Linux enthusiasts who object to the Microsoft tax. For those people, they are concerned enough about their moral stance that paying more for a computer might be worth it. Computers with no software are rare, and rarity drives up prices.
you hit a 'login required' area where you'd have to use a password, and didn't have one That's a 401 Unauthorized. By definition, a 401 is temporary until proper credentials are presented (note, this doesn't necessarily include a password. Pages that require things like hardware tokens would also present a 401.)
In contrast, a 403 Forbidden means that you won't get the resource and should give up rather than keep trying.
Sorry, but I can be pedantic when it comes to using the full vocabulary defined in a spec. For example, I think 410 Gone is on the web way too rarely.
Just imagine being able to show Grandma a short video of that cute thing Junior did, without going to another room, setting up the tv and the VCR or the DVD player and then remembering the stuff and... well, you see?
I do, but Grandma doesn't.
Seriously, I can't see a video iPod taking off mainstream like the iPod unless it's either the same price or has highly compelling content at a cheap price. The screen is just too small for comfortable viewing for extended periods.
Of course, Steve has surprised everybody in the past, so who knows? In fact, were there rumors of the nano before it launched? I don't recall any.
I agree that competing on storage is kind of pointless now, but when Gmail launched last year offering a gigabyte of space, that was a really big deal. People were used to having to delete their e-mail every so often; now, they didn't have to.
There's not much difference between 1 gigabyte and 30, but there's a huge difference between 5 MB and 1 GB.
You copied a snippet from the text of my article, you sir, are a bank robber... except the analogy doesn't stand up, becauses its fair use to make snippets available and if you don't want it you can simply say so. You yourself just did it, are you a criminal now?
I concede that my analogy is not a perfect representation of the molecular state of the universe. Few are.
No, I'm not a criminal because I utilized a legal theory known as "fair use" in quoting the points I'm responding to. Current case law uses a four-factor test to determine whether a use is fair or not. I'll leave it to you to Google, but basically one must consider the character of the use, the nature of the work to be used, how much will be used, and the economic effect of the use if it were widespread.
Not so, only a snippet can be and if you don't want snippets then you just have to say so.
Google's plan is to check out and scan the entire text of the books in several major libraries. Let's review whether this idea is a valid fair use using the four-factor test.
1. The character of the use. Google will be using the works for primarily commercial purposes. Their aim is for users to visit their web site, search for snippets in these books, and hopefully either click on an ad or purchase the book from a link on their site. They are not providing criticism, commentary, newsreporting, or parody, which are all factors that weigh in favor of fair use.
2. The nature of the work. Since these books will be checked out from libraries, they're all published. This weighs in favor of fair use. However, the books are not clearly all fact - there may be some fiction or interpretation of facts. These factors weigh against fair use. The net result of this test is somewhere in the middle of the road.
3. How much will be used. This one is easy: less is better, and Google is planning to copy everything.
4. Net economic effect. This question asks, if this behavior was widespread, would the copyright holder suffer economic loss? Clearly, the answer is yes; if everybody went to the library and scanned in a complete copy of all the books, there would be a much smaller incentive to purchase them.
If you read over the four-factor test again, you'll find 3 factors strongly against Google, and one sort of sits in the middle. It seems clear to me that what Google plans to do does not constitute fair use.
By the way, you say they're only presenting small snippets. That's true, but you need to consider whether it was fair use for Google to compile those snippets in the first place. By this reasoning, it wasn't.
Good for you, but offering snippets is not illegal and you keep quoting snippets from my post so you're aware of this.
Offering snippets is not illegal. Compiling your entire posting history in a database and offering snippets on demand without any commentary, criticism, parody, or journalistic review is.
Yes, they have a motive different from the stated one, it's a lie. The Authors Guild's stated motive is that digitizing entire books without permission is copyright infringement. As I hope I've managed to say, that's precisely the case.
Intellectual property laws are important. The RIAA is a gang of selfish, money-hungry corporations engaging in legalized extortion. These opinions are not mutually exclusive. I think we just need to figure out some sensible middle ground - say, 10 years for copyright/patent protection and no DRM allowed.
The purpose of IP laws are to enhance public domain. When viewed this way, the general principle (though possibly not the implementation in the U.S.) makes a lot of sense.
Somebody I know once suggested making copyrights non-transferable (i.e., the performer owns the copyright, and can't sign it over to the RIAA). I think that should be explored further. It might lead to interesting possibilities.
They obviously want an 'opt-in' system, because that reduces the number of books competing to just the current commercial books, and removes possible public domain, orphan works and smaller publishers authors.
Google can scan books in the public domain to their hearts' content. Smaller publishers are as free to opt-in as the big publishers are.
Joe public on the other hand, *is* best served by 'opt-out' because that includes orphaned work & possible public domain books.
I would also be best served by robbing my friendly neighborhood bank. I'm not allowed to do that, however, because my robbery means that I've deprived other people of their hard-earned money. In society, everybody has to make sacrifices for the greater good.
So they want Google to index their books,just not index everyone elses.
That may be what they want. That's fine, because it'll be opt-in, and whoever wants their book indexed can have it indexed.
All the 'copyright infringment / worried about security / worried about snippet size' claims are just bollocks that make no sense.
Google is infringing on the copyright of the publishers by copying the book without permission. They are keeping a full, OCR'd copy of the scanned book on servers that can be reached via the public Internet. They are deciding on how much text to show arbitrarily, and without permission from the copyright holders.
Since Google has offered them an opt out, if they were truely worried, they could just flag their books as opt out and that would end it.
I am also offering an opt-out to every bank in the United States. If they're truly worried, they can send me a letter flagging their bank as opt out, and that would end it.
They lied, Google called them on their lie and now they will go to court and look real dumb.
They lied?
Really, this is a no-brainer to me. Even Amazon.com, notorious thief of the public domain via patenting the patently obvious, has an opt-in system for their book searching feature. The most popular titles are all in there, without Amazon having to pay anybody.
All Google has to do is make their program opt-in, nobody will care, and forward-thinking publishers will still get the obvious benefits of having their book searchable. That is how everybody can win.
If you read the front cover of most books, you'll find that making them available through an "information retrieval system" is prohibited. If Google isn't an "information retrieval system," I don't know what is.
Copyright law doesn't make exceptions for changing the format of an entire work, providing you destroy the original. The copyright holder (absent fair use, which this isn't) is the sole party that can authorize scanning the books.
If you are an employee, your employer owns the work unless you have a written agreement that waives the employer's rights. If you are a contractor, you own the work unless you waive the rights.
IANAL, but I can RTFL.
Excerpts from Title 17 USC follow.
A "work made for hire" is-- (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment;
(b) Works Made for Hire.--In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
If your Gmail is anything like my Gmail*, you'll see ads in the right column when you read threads. However, the ads don't always show up when you're not discussing mainstream topics in your e-mail. Others have also found that Gmail will avoid placing ads alongside e-mails which appear to be about sensitive topics such as death.
* Of course, your Gmail might not be anything like my Gmail because I've noticed they have several different versions deployed. For example, there's a RSS reader integrated into some Gmail accounts that I don't have access to.
Actually, copyright protection applies to unpublished works as well, provided they would otherwise be eligible for protection (see http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#uw). The rest of your post is on the right track. Just because copyright expires doesn't mean the owner suddenly has to give the work away - they just lose the right to keep other people from making copies of it.
At the moment, the formal process of copyright registration, where you pay the fee and submit a copy of the work, entitles you to additional rights (mainly, the right to sue for statuatory damages and attorney's fees, rather than actual damages). I don't think it's too much to ask that source files be included as part of the registration requirement.
Registration is advantageous to society because it establishes when the work was created and who to contact to request permission to make deriviative works. Registrants could be rewarded in exchange for making the additional source material available by receiving a longer copyright term (say, 30 years if you register or 10 if you don't).
Of course, big business has such a stranglehold on the politicians that I don't see much coming of this wishful thinking.
It's interesting that those languages also correspond with the UN's official languages.
First of all, that article says nothing except that selective availability was disabled, meaning the accuracy improves for everybody. There's some veiled tin-foil hat comments about why the government turned it off, but nothing to substantiate the fears.
Second, the GPS constellation never misrepresented the locations of the satellites. They dithered the unscrambled signal from the satellites so receivers couldn't calculate their position as accurately. The article speculates that selective availability may have been disabled because the distance between 30 meters and 100 meters is relatively small, and equipment (missiles?) could easily compensate for the difference.
You mean something like this?
-1 The End of Yahoo as we Know It
I happen to think that Yahoo! is doing some amazing, cool stuff - cool enough to be a major Google competitor. I like it that way, because in my opinion, neither company has a definitive edge, and they keep trying to out-innovate each other because of it. That's an incredibly good thing.
Yahoo! was the first Google - the site that strived to sort the web so mere mortals could get around. I first used it when it was http://akebono.stanford.edu/. The day it gets bought by Microsoft will be a sad day, indeed.
Google gets money from stock sales and selling search appliances.
In the second fiscal quarter of 2005, advertising revenue on Google web sites accounted for 53% of gross revenue, and advertising on other sites earned the company 46%. It's a Very Bad Thing (tm) to have 99% of your company's revenue disappear because people are increasingly blocking your ads.
(Source)
I have a feeling all of this boils down to a simple case of price discrimination. The "business machines" sold by Dell are priced higher than the home machines, because businesses need to deploy computers en masse and Dell won't sell them home units at that quantity. Similarly, home users get a cheaper price because they won't pay the business price for the machine.
I think the vast majority of people who buy a blank computer will be Linux enthusiasts who object to the Microsoft tax. For those people, they are concerned enough about their moral stance that paying more for a computer might be worth it. Computers with no software are rare, and rarity drives up prices.
you hit a 'login required' area where you'd have to use a password, and didn't have one
That's a 401 Unauthorized. By definition, a 401 is temporary until proper credentials are presented (note, this doesn't necessarily include a password. Pages that require things like hardware tokens would also present a 401.)
In contrast, a 403 Forbidden means that you won't get the resource and should give up rather than keep trying.
Sorry, but I can be pedantic when it comes to using the full vocabulary defined in a spec. For example, I think 410 Gone is on the web way too rarely.
I think you've been using Ubuntu waaay too much.
What is friggin' wrong with them? Where are the evil tactics?
Microsoft seeded its database with Google search results.
Just imagine being able to show Grandma a short video of that cute thing Junior did, without going to another room, setting up the tv and the VCR or the DVD player and then remembering the stuff and... well, you see?
I do, but Grandma doesn't.
Seriously, I can't see a video iPod taking off mainstream like the iPod unless it's either the same price or has highly compelling content at a cheap price. The screen is just too small for comfortable viewing for extended periods.
Of course, Steve has surprised everybody in the past, so who knows? In fact, were there rumors of the nano before it launched? I don't recall any.
I agree that competing on storage is kind of pointless now, but when Gmail launched last year offering a gigabyte of space, that was a really big deal. People were used to having to delete their e-mail every so often; now, they didn't have to.
There's not much difference between 1 gigabyte and 30, but there's a huge difference between 5 MB and 1 GB.
At the risk of sounding like a troll, who's Matalan? I've never heard of them before.
Or, Google could "do no evil," and do an opt-in, which would reduce the number of complaints about this scheme to statistically insignificant numbers.
Thanks for the debate.
You copied a snippet from the text of my article, you sir, are a bank robber... except the analogy doesn't stand up, becauses its fair use to make snippets available and if you don't want it you can simply say so. You yourself just did it, are you a criminal now?
I concede that my analogy is not a perfect representation of the molecular state of the universe. Few are.
No, I'm not a criminal because I utilized a legal theory known as "fair use" in quoting the points I'm responding to. Current case law uses a four-factor test to determine whether a use is fair or not. I'll leave it to you to Google, but basically one must consider the character of the use, the nature of the work to be used, how much will be used, and the economic effect of the use if it were widespread.
Not so, only a snippet can be and if you don't want snippets then you just have to say so.
Google's plan is to check out and scan the entire text of the books in several major libraries. Let's review whether this idea is a valid fair use using the four-factor test.
1. The character of the use. Google will be using the works for primarily commercial purposes. Their aim is for users to visit their web site, search for snippets in these books, and hopefully either click on an ad or purchase the book from a link on their site. They are not providing criticism, commentary, newsreporting, or parody, which are all factors that weigh in favor of fair use.
2. The nature of the work. Since these books will be checked out from libraries, they're all published. This weighs in favor of fair use. However, the books are not clearly all fact - there may be some fiction or interpretation of facts. These factors weigh against fair use. The net result of this test is somewhere in the middle of the road.
3. How much will be used. This one is easy: less is better, and Google is planning to copy everything.
4. Net economic effect. This question asks, if this behavior was widespread, would the copyright holder suffer economic loss? Clearly, the answer is yes; if everybody went to the library and scanned in a complete copy of all the books, there would be a much smaller incentive to purchase them.
If you read over the four-factor test again, you'll find 3 factors strongly against Google, and one sort of sits in the middle. It seems clear to me that what Google plans to do does not constitute fair use.
By the way, you say they're only presenting small snippets. That's true, but you need to consider whether it was fair use for Google to compile those snippets in the first place. By this reasoning, it wasn't.
Good for you, but offering snippets is not illegal and you keep quoting snippets from my post so you're aware of this.
Offering snippets is not illegal. Compiling your entire posting history in a database and offering snippets on demand without any commentary, criticism, parody, or journalistic review is.
Yes, they have a motive different from the stated one, it's a lie.
The Authors Guild's stated motive is that digitizing entire books without permission is copyright infringement. As I hope I've managed to say, that's precisely the case.
No, making a copy is also a violation. That's why it's called "copyright law" - it protects the content creator's almost-exclusive "right to copy."
True, but they're not claiming rights beyond those provided in the law - they're just reminding Joe Reader of the rights they do have.
Intellectual property laws are important. The RIAA is a gang of selfish, money-hungry corporations engaging in legalized extortion. These opinions are not mutually exclusive. I think we just need to figure out some sensible middle ground - say, 10 years for copyright/patent protection and no DRM allowed.
The purpose of IP laws are to enhance public domain. When viewed this way, the general principle (though possibly not the implementation in the U.S.) makes a lot of sense.
Somebody I know once suggested making copyrights non-transferable (i.e., the performer owns the copyright, and can't sign it over to the RIAA). I think that should be explored further. It might lead to interesting possibilities.
I'm not sure who you are, but I disagree with Zerth. You can't scan a book, destroy the original, and say it's legal.
They obviously want an 'opt-in' system, because that reduces the number of books competing to just the current commercial books, and removes possible public domain, orphan works and smaller publishers authors.
,just not index everyone elses.
Google can scan books in the public domain to their hearts' content. Smaller publishers are as free to opt-in as the big publishers are.
Joe public on the other hand, *is* best served by 'opt-out' because that includes orphaned work & possible public domain books.
I would also be best served by robbing my friendly neighborhood bank. I'm not allowed to do that, however, because my robbery means that I've deprived other people of their hard-earned money. In society, everybody has to make sacrifices for the greater good.
So they want Google to index their books
That may be what they want. That's fine, because it'll be opt-in, and whoever wants their book indexed can have it indexed.
All the 'copyright infringment / worried about security / worried about snippet size' claims are just bollocks that make no sense.
Google is infringing on the copyright of the publishers by copying the book without permission. They are keeping a full, OCR'd copy of the scanned book on servers that can be reached via the public Internet. They are deciding on how much text to show arbitrarily, and without permission from the copyright holders.
Since Google has offered them an opt out, if they were truely worried, they could just flag their books as opt out and that would end it.
I am also offering an opt-out to every bank in the United States. If they're truly worried, they can send me a letter flagging their bank as opt out, and that would end it.
They lied, Google called them on their lie and now they will go to court and look real dumb.
They lied?
Really, this is a no-brainer to me. Even Amazon.com, notorious thief of the public domain via patenting the patently obvious, has an opt-in system for their book searching feature. The most popular titles are all in there, without Amazon having to pay anybody.
All Google has to do is make their program opt-in, nobody will care, and forward-thinking publishers will still get the obvious benefits of having their book searchable. That is how everybody can win.
If you read the front cover of most books, you'll find that making them available through an "information retrieval system" is prohibited. If Google isn't an "information retrieval system," I don't know what is.
Copyright law doesn't make exceptions for changing the format of an entire work, providing you destroy the original. The copyright holder (absent fair use, which this isn't) is the sole party that can authorize scanning the books.
I'm curious. Do you see any downside to wcdw's proposal? It seems like a pretty good idea to me.
If you are an employee, your employer owns the work unless you have a written agreement that waives the employer's rights. If you are a contractor, you own the work unless you waive the rights.
IANAL, but I can RTFL.
Excerpts from Title 17 USC follow.
A "work made for hire" is--
(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment;
(b) Works Made for Hire.--In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title, and, unless the parties have expressly agreed otherwise in a written instrument signed by them, owns all of the rights comprised in the copyright.