The author's guild may be wrong from the logical and societal point of view, and probably a whole lot of other POV as well, however It may well be that from the point of view of the law they are right. This is their work after all.
With all due respect, you are confusing two issues.
Joe Random going through Google Print and trying to read some copyrighted work will not succeed, because Google made sure he could only see very small parts of the book, so can't himself commit copyright infringement. We are clear on that.
However this is *not* the issue. The Guild is reasoning that *Google* has scanned the whole books, and necessarily retains digital copies of all the pages of all the books. This is the problem. Google has, in the eye of the Guild, copied massive amount of their authors' work without asking them.
Personally I don't see that it is automatically and clearly fair use. I very much doubt that it is in fact, as Google is a commercial entity and very likely plans to make money out of this endeavour.
The issue is control. What Google is doing may not be strictly fair use. The Author's guild is not going to demand that Google Print be shut down, but they'll want compensation over every penny that Google is going to make through it.
Personnally I'm sure the Guilds' plan is not so badly thought out.
Clearly it is in the Guild's _members_ best interest to publicise their books, and Google print would certainly help in that case.
However this is not the issue. The Guild is not about to shut Google Print down, they simply want a piece of the action.
For Google to build their index they have to scan the whole of all the books. Furthermore it is not unreasonable to think that Google are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they are in it to earn a piece of the earnings on each book sold through their portal somehow, be it by arrangements with Amazon, etc ; or like they do with their web search engine via relevant, unobtrusive yet money-earning adds, or perhaps something similar.
OK, so if you read the US law on copyright/fair use, you realize that for fair use to apply, only an unspecified subset of the work can be copied, scanned, etc, and it must be for research/study/personal use, etc, but certainly not commercial.
So Google is probably not in the clear there w.r.t. fair use. If they are this will be great news for them, and for future services that depend on whole bits of commercial works that can be indexed, but I don't believe this will be the case.
BTW it doesn't matter than only a small bit of copyrighted work is shown to the public. This is to ensure that the public does not commit copyright infrigement. This is not the issue. The issue is that Google has scanned the whole lot without permission. *They* are being sued, not us !
So the Author's guild wants a piece of the action, and they want control. For every dollar that Google is going to earn via Google Print they want something for them too.
How about all the SW (ep. IV-VI) fans who were skeptical after downright awful Ep. I & II, downloaded Ep. III and saw it was really no better, in spite of glowing reviews ?
To find any information on the web as opposed to mindless drivel, you have to use your wits a little. Here are a few tips.
Just to remind you, RH9 was the last free RedHat distribution called that way. Now they are called Fedora. Is that any surprise you wont find much *free* information on recent RHEL?
To find answers on the web about recent RedHat releases, do *not* search for RedHat, search for "Fedora Core" or FCx where x goes from 1 to 4 (so far). You'll find *heaps* of information. Every single problem I've had so far in FC had already been dealt with to death online by the time I realized I had them.
Now all RHEL distribution are based off FC ones, I forget which are which, but you should be able to find the info on google (left as an exercice to the reader), so you should be able to use the nearest FC information to help with your RHEL distro problems.
Now for real RHEL distribution, they are supposed to come with support. You've paid for it, now use it!
If you are not happy with the paid-for support, perhaps you should let RH know about this issue. If you are their customer, perhaps they'll listen to you.
Last tip, you can also search for the free repackaged version of RHEL. One of the most popular one is WhiteBox Linux but there are others. To find free answer on RHEL simply search for "WBEL" instead. You'll find forums, etc.
More than likely we all have a few cancerous cells in our bodies right now. The point is that they don't bloom to full-on cancer, they get dispatched by the immune system.
Will this extremely accurate test be able to tell between unchecked cancer cells and those few cells which the body would take care off naturally? Or are we all going to turn into cancer patients ?
As an fellow expatriate Aussie, now that I'm in Europe I'm amazed at the level of government services I have access to and the relatively smaller amount of taxes that I'm paying.
Let me count a few of the ways:
School for kids starts at 3, not 5. The best schools are public, and they are free. University is free. A visit to the doctor costs me 1 Euro. Dentistry work is up to 3 times cheaper than in Oz.
It seems that running a small country (in terms of #of inhabitants), but occupying a large area in the middle of nowhere is expensive.
The hope is that if we can build the cable out of light materials like carbon nanotubes (very low density) then it will simply combust in the atmosphere if it should break.
Some asteroid reach down to the surface of the Earth because they are both bulky and dense. Smaller OR lighter asteroids simply make a nice shooting star display.
For the ribbon to stay put under a fixed point on Earth, the idea is to have the center of mass of the space elevator in geosynchronous orbit. To reach Earth, conceptually the SE is like a satellite in GS orbit with a very very long body, one end of which reaches vertically straight down to Earth and the other end in the opposite direction way into space.
GS orbit is approximately 40,000km up, so the strain is partly due to the weight of this enormous length of ribbon. It gets worse because we actually want to use this ribbon for something, i.e. lift things into space, so we need to put some kind of counterweight to the extremity into space and firmly anchor the extremity that reaches down to Earth so that the whole assembly doesnt fly off.
Now if I understand your idea, one extremity of the ribbon would not be on Earth but somewhere in the atmosphere.
There are two basic problems with that idea. One is that balloons wouldn't be able to go very much past 100km up, which is a tiny distance compared with 40,000km, i.e. we wouldn't save much on the strain due to the weight of the ribbon.
The second problem would be that the extremity in the atmosphere wouldn't be firmly anchored, and so we wouldn't be able to put a large counterweight at the other end, and so we wouldn't be able to lift very much with that space elevator.
Also there would be hosts of other problems. With an extremity firmly anchored, we can at least hope that the elevator would stay in place, but if it were floating somewhere in the atmosphere, the extremity would sway wildly, possibly quickly out of reach. The GS orbit is actually elliptical, so the extremity would go up and down quickly and by relatively large amounts, and would go sometime faster than the rotation of the Earth and sometimes slower. It would remain under a given point on Earth only on average. In other words, reaching that extremity with a balloon would be a little bit of a challenge...
The world is not as simple as you describe. For sure lost of very important problems can be solved, but part of the art of science is to identify those hard problems which can be solved in practice.
Not so long ago many materials scientists thought we would soon have room temperature superconductivity, but it didn't happen, and not for the lack of trying or lack of funds. Similar story about nuclear fusion as a practical source of energy (fission works fine though).
As for your example involving pharmas, you'll find that modern-day pharma industry is not interested in practical cures. They want to come up with drugs that patients have to take for a long time, if possible for ever, for obvious economic reasons. Hence the paucity of investment in new antibiotics or actual cancer cures, and the multiplicity of antidepressants on the market.
He is correct. The space elevator is meant to be 10^8 m in lenght, because it needs to reach at least twice the altitude of geosynchronous orbit. At 8s/m approx., that would take 27 years to spin if it needs to be spun in one single sheet.
Does it now? I hadn't noticed, I thought it was entirely optional. However the memory footprint of the X version is tiny compared to that of NeoOffice/J.
1- Google Library scanned data ends up in Google Print so yes I did confuse the two. 2- The book I used as an example was in fact available through the publisher program, not scanned at some library, however on its publisher program page, Google states:
You're in complete control People will only be able to see a few pages related to their search and copy, save and print are disabled. And you can remove a book from Google Print at any time.
This is innacurate, saving a page is trivial to do, and people can in fact read most of the book, not just a few pages. Mind you I think this is excellent!
3- In spite of my example not being relevant, I still think the Guild has a leg to stand on, as photocopying/scanning a whole book for any purpose whatsoever without permission is not allowed, at least in my jurisdiction. I'd be very surprised if US Federal law is more lenient, but we'll see.
In some sense it's not even relevant what portion of the data is made available to the public. Google took a whole copy for themselves, I really can't see how that can be allowed, period.
Perhaps if they destroyed the actual copied book data but kept only the index that might be OK, but it does look like they have all the full pages on their servers.
Go to Google Print, search for "Image Processing Handbook", The first item is the J.C. Russ book. Click on it. This is a recent, copyrighted book.
Now search for "noise", go to page 19. You can read the book from page 17 to 21. Notice the pretty pictures.
Now look for "coarsening", a rarish word found on page 21. Select page 21, and Lo and behold you can now also read page 22 and 23. Repeat ad nauseam.
In most book a few pages are permanently blotted out, but by and large you can easily read *most* of the book.
Try the same trick with any book in Google Print, it works.
THIS goes beyond fair use. The guild has a point. They will win that case, unless Google scale back their offering dramatically, to the point where is has no value beyond what Amazon (say) offers now.
>> Wrong. You can search all books in their entirety. You can display >> almost any page. There are some non-severe limitations but this is >> not the point.
> Have you even tried using it? Yes, you can search the entire book, > you just can't see the entire book, only a few pages. Search for a > common word, not on their "no search" list and you may get 50 > references in the book, but you will only be able to see a few > pages that have that term on them before Google denies you access > to the others.
Have *you* tried the service ? they claim they deny you access to the rest of the book but they are not. You are free to search again for any other word, and lo and behold, you can read 5 more pages.
In fact I tried a few random books last night and I was able to read about 80% of a couple of books without trying too hard. Direct saving of the images is disabled by some javascript code, and this is trivial to hack (or just do a screen grab of the window...).
Onto your other points:
To read most of the content of any book in Google Print I now only need to go down to the nearest internet cafe. I can even print the pages I like for very little money. Compare this to the cost of going to Harvard, and be realistic about the consequences, please.
If you take a cameraphone in a bookstore *or a library* and make systematic photos of the content of some book you are liable to be arrested on the spot, because you are committing copyright infrigement there and then. Thanks for proving my point. In google case, they have done the scanning, and so they are by your own definition committing copyright infrigement.
In most countries, there are very sharp limitation on how much photocopying of copyrighted material you can make. In Australia where I live, this is at most 10% of any book, magazine, etc or a full chapter or article, whichever is *lower*, and the purpose must be personal use and research, not developing a service based on what you have scanned. Clearly Google has gone over that limit. This may be outrageous but that's the law!
Google didn't generate any data. They *copied* it. The publisher can and will claim that what Google has scanned in fact belongs to them!
Again Google provides way, way more access to content of the books than any other like Amazon or B&N.
Either Google scale back their offering to the level of Amazon (say) or they face a huge settlement. Scaling Google Print's service to the level of Amazon's is of basically of no interest to anybody.
The libraries are not putting up the result of this scanning effort on the web for all to read. Google is, and is planning to make a profit of it.
If the result of the scanning effort was some index that only library patrons could consult on the libraries' premises, I'm sure no publisher would see anything amiss. However in the Google case they are disseminating *most* of the book content for all to read (copy, archive, etc). This is a brilliant service BTW, and I would agree that even then, Google Print is going to help publishers rather than hinder sales. However the issue is control of the data.
Try Google Print for a while, you'll see that the Google offering is miles better than whan Amazon offers *for the public*. Whereas Amazon lets you read at most 10 pages of any book including the table of content, Google is happy to let you search and browse *most* of the book. They do blot out a page here or there, but it goes beyond fair use IMHO.
In many countries, fair use for sampling is at most a chapter or 10% of a book, whichever is *lower*. This may be outrageous, but that's the Law. Clearly Google goes beyond that on any book I've tried.
BTW it's fairly clear the scanning+OCR part is quick and dirty. There are many uncorrected OCR errors.
NeoOffice/J is very very very very very slow. It looks good, but damn it is slow. It doesn't require X, but it does require the bloody Godawful JVM. Which is slow. And start reaaally slowly. Don't even try to run it on a G3.
Did I mention it was slow? In comparison the X version is lightning fast (but ugly, for sure). Ah, and it positively gobbles up memory. On startup it REQUIRES 1GB of virtual mem on my machine.
The only reason one should use NeoOffice/J is *not* that it looks good, but that the *only* precompiled X11 version of OOo.org for MacOs/X I've managed to found on OpenOffice.org's site was version 1.1.2, whereas NeoOffice/J is based on 1.1.4.
In fact the state of OOo on OS/X is not very good.
>> First of all the content of public web sites is >> generally freely available to all. > > And the contents of the libraries Google is > scanning are not?
No they are not. To go read something at the Harvard Library I need to purchase a plane ticket and go there in person, and then if someone else has the book I'm interested in then I might have to wait for a long time. Now if I want to actually borrow the book I need to be faculty or a student, neither are an option for me at this point.
With Google Print the library concept becomes global, shared with all and free of charge.
You'd have to be pretty disingenuous to compare both cases.
> Now Google has added library books and you can > view a page or two of the book to determine if > it is a book you want to buy or check out from a > library.
It is way more than that. You can copy the pages and keep them forever, you can redistribute them without any effort. With a bit of patience and organisation you can in fact copy the whole book.
Furthermore, google will be sitting on a huge pile of data no one has ever had: the digitized and OCRed content of (potentially) all books on the surface of the planet. Who will have control over this? a disjointed band of publishers with no direct access to the data or Google itself?
What happens if Google goes out of business? what if they decide they want to sell this data? is it valuable? you bet! who would get the money?
What happens if organized people hack into the system, copy all and start selling those like allofmp3 is doing now?
The issue is control. Publishers are afraid of that.
> You have looked at the Google pages right? You > know they only let you see a few pages of most > books and only public domain books and books > whose copyright holder has given permission are > shown in their entirety right?
Wrong. You can search all books in their entirety. You can display almost any page. There are some non-severe limitations but this is not the point.
The point is that publishers believe they own the *content* of books still under copyright, and right now Google is disseminating that content pretty much willy-nilly. They have every right to complain IMHO.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of what Google is doing, I love books and being able to read bits of them. This is a brilliant service !
A book in a library is arguably not freely available in the usual sense. It is available for you to read for a limited time and then you have to return it (in good condition) for others to read. Libraries are the extension of the right people have to loan or give away the things that they do own, because books are physical things.
RMS is right when he says the right to read is in jeopardy. Just like with software publishers want to charge you a fee for use.
The text of some work might very well be public-domain, however a particular instance of a copy of that work, i.e. in a book, might not be. In other words publishers can argue that their printing of a novel by Jane Austen cannot be put on the web without permission (i.e if you scan it and put the images up).
Whether this makes sense or not, this is exactly what is happening in music sheet printing all the time. Even if the music is by Mozart, the printing is copyrighted and cannot be redistributed.
Slashdot Mirror
The author's guild may be wrong from the logical and societal point of view, and probably a whole lot of other POV as well, however It may well be that from the point of view of the law they are right. This is their work after all.
With all due respect, you are confusing two issues.
Joe Random going through Google Print and trying to read some copyrighted work will not succeed, because Google made sure he could only see very small parts of the book, so can't himself commit copyright infringement. We are clear on that.
However this is *not* the issue. The Guild is reasoning that *Google* has scanned the whole books, and necessarily retains digital copies of all the pages of all the books. This is the problem. Google has, in the eye of the Guild, copied massive amount of their authors' work without asking them.
Personally I don't see that it is automatically and clearly fair use. I very much doubt that it is in fact, as Google is a commercial entity and very likely plans to make money out of this endeavour.
They want their share, that's all.
The issue is control. What Google is doing may not be strictly fair use. The Author's guild is not going to demand that Google Print be shut down, but they'll want compensation over every penny that Google is going to make through it.
This is not perhaps so stupid, I don't know.
Personnally I'm sure the Guilds' plan is not so badly thought out.
Clearly it is in the Guild's _members_ best interest to publicise their books, and Google print would certainly help in that case.
However this is not the issue. The Guild is not about to shut Google Print down, they simply want a piece of the action.
For Google to build their index they have to scan the whole of all the books. Furthermore it is not unreasonable to think that Google are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart, they are in it to earn a piece of the earnings on each book sold through their portal somehow, be it by arrangements with Amazon, etc ; or like they do with their web search engine via relevant, unobtrusive yet money-earning adds, or perhaps something similar.
OK, so if you read the US law on copyright/fair use, you realize that for fair use to apply, only an unspecified subset of the work can be copied, scanned, etc, and it must be for research/study/personal use, etc, but certainly not commercial.
So Google is probably not in the clear there w.r.t. fair use. If they are this will be great news for them, and for future services that depend on whole bits of commercial works that can be indexed, but I don't believe this will be the case.
BTW it doesn't matter than only a small bit of copyrighted work is shown to the public. This is to ensure that the public does not commit copyright infrigement. This is not the issue. The issue is that Google has scanned the whole lot without permission. *They* are being sued, not us !
So the Author's guild wants a piece of the action, and they want control. For every dollar that Google is going to earn via Google Print they want something for them too.
What do you think ?
How about all the SW (ep. IV-VI) fans who were skeptical after downright awful Ep. I & II, downloaded Ep. III and saw it was really no better, in spite of glowing reviews ?
Thanks, you're my new friend, that deserved a lot of mod points.
Also Janis Ian, and you should read this article by her.
To find any information on the web as opposed to mindless drivel, you have to use your wits a little. Here are a few tips.
Just to remind you, RH9 was the last free RedHat distribution called that way. Now they are called Fedora. Is that any surprise you wont find much *free* information on recent RHEL?
To find answers on the web about recent RedHat releases, do *not* search for RedHat, search for "Fedora Core" or FCx where x goes from 1 to 4 (so far). You'll find *heaps* of information. Every single problem I've had so far in FC had already been dealt with to death online by the time I realized I had them.
Now all RHEL distribution are based off FC ones, I forget which are which, but you should be able to find the info on google (left as an exercice to the reader), so you should be able to use the nearest FC information to help with your RHEL distro problems.
Now for real RHEL distribution, they are supposed to come with support. You've paid for it, now use it!
If you are not happy with the paid-for support, perhaps you should let RH know about this issue. If you are their customer, perhaps they'll listen to you.
Last tip, you can also search for the free repackaged version of RHEL. One of the most popular one is WhiteBox Linux but there are others. To find free answer on RHEL simply search for "WBEL" instead. You'll find forums, etc.
Good luck.
Usually it is as hard a opening the case and setting a jumper to reset the BIOS to factory default, i.e. no security at all.
More than likely we all have a few cancerous cells in our bodies right now. The point is that they don't bloom to full-on cancer, they get dispatched by the immune system.
Will this extremely accurate test be able to tell between unchecked cancer cells and those few cells which the body would take care off naturally? Or are we all going to turn into cancer patients ?
As an fellow expatriate Aussie, now that I'm in Europe I'm amazed at the level of government services I have access to and the relatively smaller amount of taxes that I'm paying.
Let me count a few of the ways:
School for kids starts at 3, not 5.
The best schools are public, and they are free.
University is free.
A visit to the doctor costs me 1 Euro.
Dentistry work is up to 3 times cheaper than in Oz.
It seems that running a small country (in terms of #of inhabitants), but occupying a large area in the middle of nowhere is expensive.
The hope is that if we can build the cable out of light materials like carbon nanotubes (very low density) then it will simply combust in the atmosphere if it should break.
Some asteroid reach down to the surface of the Earth because they are both bulky and dense. Smaller OR lighter asteroids simply make a nice shooting star display.
Wouldn't help very much.
For the ribbon to stay put under a fixed point on Earth, the idea is to have the center of mass of the space elevator in geosynchronous orbit. To reach Earth, conceptually the SE is like a satellite in GS orbit with a very very long body, one end of which reaches vertically straight down to Earth and the other end in the opposite direction way into space.
GS orbit is approximately 40,000km up, so the strain is partly due to the weight of this enormous length of ribbon. It gets worse because we actually want to use this ribbon for something, i.e. lift things into space, so we need to put some kind of counterweight to the extremity into space and firmly anchor the extremity that reaches down to Earth so that the whole assembly doesnt fly off.
Now if I understand your idea, one extremity of the ribbon would not be on Earth but somewhere in the atmosphere.
There are two basic problems with that idea. One is that balloons wouldn't be able to go very much past 100km up, which is a tiny distance compared with 40,000km, i.e. we wouldn't save much on the strain due to the weight of the ribbon.
The second problem would be that the extremity in the atmosphere wouldn't be firmly anchored, and so we wouldn't be able to put a large counterweight at the other end, and so we wouldn't be able to lift very much with that space elevator.
Also there would be hosts of other problems. With an extremity firmly anchored, we can at least hope that the elevator would stay in place, but if it were floating somewhere in the atmosphere, the extremity would sway wildly, possibly quickly out of reach. The GS orbit is actually elliptical, so the extremity would go up and down quickly and by relatively large amounts, and would go sometime faster than the rotation of the Earth and sometimes slower. It would remain under a given point on Earth only on average. In other words, reaching that extremity with a balloon would be a little bit of a challenge...
I hope this makes sense to you.
The world is not as simple as you describe. For sure lost of very important problems can be solved, but part of the art of science is to identify those hard problems which can be solved in practice.
Not so long ago many materials scientists thought we would soon have room temperature superconductivity, but it didn't happen, and not for the lack of trying or lack of funds. Similar story about nuclear fusion as a practical source of energy (fission works fine though).
As for your example involving pharmas, you'll find that modern-day pharma industry is not interested in practical cures. They want to come up with drugs that patients have to take for a long time, if possible for ever, for obvious economic reasons. Hence the paucity of investment in new antibiotics or actual cancer cures, and the multiplicity of antidepressants on the market.
He is correct. The space elevator is meant to be 10^8 m in lenght, because it needs to reach at least twice the altitude of geosynchronous orbit. At 8s/m approx., that would take 27 years to spin if it needs to be spun in one single sheet.
For great radio content I recommend (among many others)
USA -> NPR
UK -> BBC
Continent -> RFI (Radio France International)
Australia -> Radio National.
For the latter, all their programs are on-line: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/
How do you get to choose your own music? friends, relative, etc. Try the radio sometime, you might get surprised.
Fantastic stuff.
Hi,
> Open office also needs the JVM so dont moan!
Does it now? I hadn't noticed, I thought it was entirely optional. However the memory footprint of the X version is tiny compared to that of NeoOffice/J.
Thanks for this, nonetheless:
1- Google Library scanned data ends up in Google Print so yes I did confuse the two.
2- The book I used as an example was in fact available through the publisher program, not scanned at some library, however on its publisher program page, Google states:
You're in complete control
People will only be able to see a few pages related to their search and copy, save and print are disabled. And you can remove a book from Google Print at any time.
This is innacurate, saving a page is trivial to do, and people can in fact read most of the book, not just a few pages. Mind you I think this is excellent!
3- In spite of my example not being relevant, I still think the Guild has a leg to stand on, as photocopying/scanning a whole book for any purpose whatsoever without permission is not allowed, at least in my jurisdiction. I'd be very surprised if US Federal law is more lenient, but we'll see.
In some sense it's not even relevant what portion of the data is made available to the public. Google took a whole copy for themselves, I really can't see how that can be allowed, period.
Perhaps if they destroyed the actual copied book data but kept only the index that might be OK, but it does look like they have all the full pages on their servers.
OK, what is the guild complaining about ?
Try the following experiment.
Go to Google Print, search for "Image Processing Handbook", The first item is the J.C. Russ book. Click on it. This is a recent, copyrighted book.
Now search for "noise", go to page 19. You can read the book from page 17 to 21. Notice the pretty pictures.
Now look for "coarsening", a rarish word found on page 21. Select page 21, and Lo and behold you can now also read page 22 and 23. Repeat ad nauseam.
In most book a few pages are permanently blotted out, but by and large you can easily read *most* of the book.
Try the same trick with any book in Google Print, it works.
THIS goes beyond fair use. The guild has a point. They will win that case, unless Google scale back their offering dramatically, to the point where is has no value beyond what Amazon (say) offers now.
Do you understand now? Thanks.
This is incorrect:
>> Wrong. You can search all books in their entirety. You can display
>> almost any page. There are some non-severe limitations but this is
>> not the point.
> Have you even tried using it? Yes, you can search the entire book,
> you just can't see the entire book, only a few pages. Search for a
> common word, not on their "no search" list and you may get 50
> references in the book, but you will only be able to see a few
> pages that have that term on them before Google denies you access
> to the others.
Have *you* tried the service ? they claim they deny you access to the rest of the book but they are not. You are free to search again for any other word, and lo and behold, you can read 5 more pages.
In fact I tried a few random books last night and I was able to read about 80% of a couple of books without trying too hard. Direct saving of the images is disabled by some javascript code, and this is trivial to hack (or just do a screen grab of the window...).
Onto your other points:
To read most of the content of any book in Google Print I now only need to go down to the nearest internet cafe. I can even print the pages I like for very little money. Compare this to the cost of going to Harvard, and be realistic about the consequences, please.
If you take a cameraphone in a bookstore *or a library* and make systematic photos of the content of some book you are liable to be arrested on the spot, because you are committing copyright infrigement there and then. Thanks for proving my point. In google case, they have done the scanning, and so they are by your own definition committing copyright infrigement.
In most countries, there are very sharp limitation on how much photocopying of copyrighted material you can make. In Australia where I live, this is at most 10% of any book, magazine, etc or a full chapter or article, whichever is *lower*, and the purpose must be personal use and research, not developing a service based on what you have scanned. Clearly Google has gone over that limit. This may be outrageous but that's the law!
Google didn't generate any data. They *copied* it. The publisher can and will claim that what Google has scanned in fact belongs to them!
Again Google provides way, way more access to content of the books than any other like Amazon or B&N.
Either Google scale back their offering to the level of Amazon (say) or they face a huge settlement. Scaling Google Print's service to the level of Amazon's is of basically of no interest to anybody.
The libraries are not putting up the result of this scanning effort on the web for all to read. Google is, and is planning to make a profit of it.
If the result of the scanning effort was some index that only library patrons could consult on the libraries' premises, I'm sure no publisher would see anything amiss. However in the Google case they are disseminating *most* of the book content for all to read (copy, archive, etc). This is a brilliant service BTW, and I would agree that even then, Google Print is going to help publishers rather than hinder sales. However the issue is control of the data.
Try Google Print for a while, you'll see that the Google offering is miles better than whan Amazon offers *for the public*. Whereas Amazon lets you read at most 10 pages of any book including the table of content, Google is happy to let you search and browse *most* of the book. They do blot out a page here or there, but it goes beyond fair use IMHO.
In many countries, fair use for sampling is at most a chapter or 10% of a book, whichever is *lower*. This may be outrageous, but that's the Law. Clearly Google goes beyond that on any book I've tried.
BTW it's fairly clear the scanning+OCR part is quick and dirty. There are many uncorrected OCR errors.
NeoOffice/J is very very very very very slow. It looks good, but damn it is slow. It doesn't require X, but it does require the bloody Godawful JVM. Which is slow. And start reaaally slowly. Don't even try to run it on a G3.
Did I mention it was slow? In comparison the X version is lightning fast (but ugly, for sure). Ah, and it positively gobbles up memory. On startup it REQUIRES 1GB of virtual mem on my machine.
The only reason one should use NeoOffice/J is *not* that it looks good, but that the *only* precompiled X11 version of OOo.org for MacOs/X I've managed to found on OpenOffice.org's site was version 1.1.2, whereas NeoOffice/J is based on 1.1.4.
In fact the state of OOo on OS/X is not very good.
>> First of all the content of public web sites is
>> generally freely available to all.
>
> And the contents of the libraries Google is
> scanning are not?
No they are not. To go read something at the Harvard Library I need to purchase a plane ticket and go there in person, and then if someone else has the book I'm interested in then I might have to wait for a long time. Now if I want to actually borrow the book I need to be faculty or a student, neither are an option for me at this point.
With Google Print the library concept becomes global, shared with all and free of charge.
You'd have to be pretty disingenuous to compare both cases.
> Now Google has added library books and you can
> view a page or two of the book to determine if
> it is a book you want to buy or check out from a > library.
It is way more than that. You can copy the pages and keep them forever, you can redistribute them without any effort. With a bit of patience and organisation you can in fact copy the whole book.
Furthermore, google will be sitting on a huge pile of data no one has ever had: the digitized and OCRed content of (potentially) all books on the surface of the planet. Who will have control over this? a disjointed band of publishers with no direct access to the data or Google itself?
What happens if Google goes out of business? what if they decide they want to sell this data? is it valuable? you bet! who would get the money?
What happens if organized people hack into the system, copy all and start selling those like allofmp3 is doing now?
The issue is control. Publishers are afraid of that.
> You have looked at the Google pages right? You
> know they only let you see a few pages of most
> books and only public domain books and books
> whose copyright holder has given permission are
> shown in their entirety right?
Wrong. You can search all books in their entirety. You can display almost any page. There are some non-severe limitations but this is not the point.
The point is that publishers believe they own the *content* of books still under copyright, and right now Google is disseminating that content pretty much willy-nilly. They have every right to complain IMHO.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of what Google is doing, I love books and being able to read bits of them. This is a brilliant service !
A book in a library is arguably not freely available in the usual sense. It is available for you to read for a limited time and then you have to return it (in good condition) for others to read. Libraries are the extension of the right people have to loan or give away the things that they do own, because books are physical things.
RMS is right when he says the right to read is in jeopardy. Just like with software publishers want to charge you a fee for use.
Hello,
The text of some work might very well be public-domain, however a particular instance of a copy of that work, i.e. in a book, might not be. In other words publishers can argue that their printing of a novel by Jane Austen cannot be put on the web without permission (i.e if you scan it and put the images up).
Whether this makes sense or not, this is exactly what is happening in music sheet printing all the time. Even if the music is by Mozart, the printing is copyrighted and cannot be redistributed.