Do you have a citation for this? What are the facts of the case? Did the judge explain the ruling? Did the owners of the scans provide the scans under a contract with terms that did not allow republication of the scanned material? There's also such a thing as compilation copyright, so if the defendant copied the entire database instead of one particular document, the ruling may have been that the defendant violated that particular copyright.
IANAL, but Project Gutenberg's rules for source material, which has been vetted by lawyers but probably never been contested in court, allow contributors to use facsimiles of out of copyright material, even if the facsimile publisher claims copyright. In this case, if the Amazon POD book is a facsimile, I think that someone buying the book would be able to scan it and do whatever they want with the scan.
Yes, Disney's guilty of heavy lobbying (unfortunately successful) to extend the term of copyright, but the topic of this slashdot article is companies that falsely claim copyright on their facsimile reproductions of public domain works. Two different things altogether.
Google doesn't try very hard to figure out whether a title is public domain. If there's not something like copyright on the back of the title page, even if there's a clear publication date listed on the title page, it's put into snippet view. When the book is in snippet view, they don't even display the entire title page and the back of the title page, so you usually can't even see enough to try to dispute their classification with them.
Unfortunately Project Gutenberg has no minimum standards for contributions, but many of the recent submissions, especially from Distributed Proofreaders, preserve the page numbers of the original text in the HTML editions.
Australia bumped up their copyright term to life+70 in 2005, so there won't be any new PD works in Australia until 2026. However, Canada's still at life+50, so Project Gutenberg Canada http://www.gutenberg.ca/ potentially has works where the author died in 1958. Also, here in the US, works published up through 1963 which did not get their copyright renewed are in the public domain. PG Australia has been around longer than PG Canada so it has about 10 times the titles of PG Canada, but I think PG Canada may be more active in adding new titles, thanks to Distributed Proofreaders Canada http://www.pgdpcanada.net/.
As a contributor to Project Gutenberg by scanning PD works and proofreading them at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I'd just like to point out that this is not new. Long before the days of public domain scans on the internet, many publishers added a short copyrighted introduction or postscript to a public domain work and then included a copyright notice without indicating that the copyright only covered the original material. Furthermore, while I am not fond of Kessenger Publishing and its ilk, especially if they've used Project Gutenberg content as their source material, they are not obligated to provides free scans of their PD catalog, any more than Penguin, Dover, Barnes & Noble, or any other publisher.
Wind projects occupy anywhere from 28 to 83 acres per megawatt, depending on local terrain, but only 2 to 5 percent of the project area is needed for turbine foundations, roads or other infrastructure. -- American Wind Energy Association
The copyright term discussed in FTA is for performances/recordings, was 50 years, period, and will now be 70 years, period, death of performer has nothing to do with it. Copyright for songwriter/composer was, and still is life+70, and hasn't changed.
In general, this benefits the average performer by a few euros a year, but cumulatively adds up to a much larger amount to the companies with large copyright holdings.
Feel free to mod the parent down, postings that are flat out wrong because the poster clearly did not RTFA shouldn't be Insightful/5.
If the US ever ratifies this, George Foreman will be in big trouble:
The Convention acknowledges that every child has certain basic rights, including the right to life, his or her own name and identity, to be raised by his or her parents within a family or cultural grouping and have a relationship with both parents, even if they are separated.
Besides the turgid writing style, Covenant rapes a woman in the first book. This rape scene is often mentioned in SF convention panels as a reason why people hate, hate, hate this series.
I use the base Plustek Opticbook 3600 for scanner for Distributed Proofreaders, and I've never had problems with the software. I'd recommend upgrading from the Abbyy Finereader 6 Sprint to the latest FR professional version, though.
I have scanned out of copyright Astounding SF magazines with good results with the Plustek Opticbook 3600. These magazines are stapled about a quarter inch from the spine edge of the paper. The biggest problem with the Opticbook is that it still needs about a 3/8ths inch of empty space from the binding, so if your classic comic books are bound this way, and the gutters are extremely narrow, you may even have problems with the Opticbook, but you'd probably have similar problems with a planetary scanner like the original poster was asking about.
I don't know if Project Gutenberg would be the best choice, since they focus on text, I'd recommend contacting Internet Archive.
As far as I know, live.com did not show snippets of copyrighted works like Google does, so if live.com ever displayed any of Ayn Rand's works, it would only have been at the permission of the publisher. It appears that all of her work was published after 1922, and neither Microsoft nor Google is/was attempting to determine if post-1922 works are in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed. Even so, it looks like she or her heirs have been pretty good at renewing her copyrights.
I used GNOME for a while, but I like focus follows mouse AND click to raise. I really hate having windows raised to front just because I type in them, and I could never figure out how to turn that off in metacity. I found where it was happening, and uncommented out an if statement so that it would work the way I wanted it to, and submitted a bug report/enhancement request so it wouldn't raise the window if the appropriate knob was set to zero, and a GNOME developer rejected it with a "you don't understand what that knob's for" response. So, when I found it can be configured the way I like it in KDE, I switched. If the GNOME developer had rejected it with, "you don't understand what that knob's for, but this is how you do want you're requesting" I'd probably still be using GNOME today.
Saying so doesn't make it true. For example, take a look at the HTML editions of a section of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19699, Music Notation and Terminology by Karl Wilson Gehrkens http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19499, and Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany by Douglas Houghton Campbell http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20390, all recent productions from Distributed Proofreaders and top 100 downloads from Project Gutenberg. It is true that we're still using LaTeX to describe formulae, and some of our formatting notations are nowhere near the sophisticated tools a former technical writer at Adobe is no doubt used to. I think we're doing a far better job of retaining the non-textual information you claim we're dropping than your cursory re-examination of our site would indicate.
As others have mentioned, you must have volunteered at DP a very long time ago because ALL of your objections to our work are no longer valid. The only complaint of yours that was valid when I started volunteering there 3.5 years ago was that DP's final versions submitted to Project Gutenberg were plain-text.
At the time you were volunteering, PG was primarily a repository of only plain-text documents. These days, in a large part due to the influence of volunteers at DP, nearly every new text submitted to PG has an HTML edition, some are submitted to PG in PG-TEI, which is Project Gutenberg's draft/proposed XML vocabulary based on the Text Encoding Initiative XML format, which can be transformed into many formats including plain text and HTML.
Fifteen years ago a company I worked for got hit with a BSA audit after a call to their tip line. Our management was not sure, but believed it was in retaliation for firing two guys. I suspect the BSA gets most of their tips from disgruntled former employees.
The original policy of Project Gutenberg may have been to only accept text-only versions, but they've been accepting alternate formats from content producers for some time. In the last couple years, it's been the policy of Distributed Proofreaders, the largest provider of new material for PG, to produce an HTML edition if the original edition contains illustrations.
The current US laws have extended the existing copyright to 95 years after copyright registration, and 1923 is the first year that is not currently public domain, so we only have to wait 12 years, not 60, assuming the Mouse is unable to buy enough votes in Congress again.
Other countries have death+50 or death+70 copyright term laws, so they have new works becoming public domain every year. There are some Project Gutenberg affiliates in these countries, so they have books that can't be hosted by Project Gutenberg because they are still under copyright in the US. Maybe the OpenLibrary will do the same thing.
It's still fraud if the backdating occurred, and it's no less serious just because Apple pre-empted any SEC investigations. Most criminals don't get off scot-free just because they turn themselves in when it becomes obvious that the authorities are about to arrest them.
If the stock options were backdated are not declared, then the Apple officers receiving them were actually receiving additional compensation of the difference between the options' declared price on the backdated date, and the price on the real date of the option grant, and it's a cost to the company that is hidden, therefore overstating earnings, and fraud. If it had been declared at the time, it wouldn't have been fraud. It's not enough to just declare it now.
In my scanning for Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I would have to say that over 90% of the books do not have illustrations or footnotes that require scanning at higher resolutions than 300 DPI. Even the ones with illustrations are probably fine with 300-600 DPI scans. For the most part, the black and white images of text pages in the Google PDF files are adequate, although the illustrations are low resolution garbage. The real problem I see with Google's work is that it's substandard, with missing illustrations, missing pages, and poorly scanned pages. They do rescan books when errors are reported, but even then, it takes a few months and the rescans are subject to error. Unless there are multiple projects independently scanning, OCRing these works, I fear that single source for these works will end up with an incomplete and somewhat unusable digital copy of these Google partner libraries.
The second issue I have is that the full image display at both Google and the OCA/live.com (and PDF downloads of full images) is not particularly useful on low resolution displays, like PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, and dedicated ebook readers. Perhaps future generations of ebook readers will have the form factor of a paperback book with high enough resolution to view the scans made available by google and the OCA, but I don't see it happening for years.
The last complaint I have about Google, is that with their proprietary database, it's not easy to create searches based on criteria not in their search parameters (for example, based on number of pages).
Despite these complaints, I'm still pleased that Google decided to try to digitize the works in these libraries, if for no other reason than it got several digitzation projects funded.
The original web page was superficial, with no supporting documentation, and the commentary is not really any different from any other recent mysql vs. postgresql flamefest (er, discussion) on slashdot. About the only useful thing in the whole thread are the couple of links to recent comparisons, and since I haven't actually checked any of them out, I don't know if they're as poorly researched as the original article. YMMV.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple's new advertising slogan.
Do you have a citation for this? What are the facts of the case? Did the judge explain the ruling? Did the owners of the scans provide the scans under a contract with terms that did not allow republication of the scanned material? There's also such a thing as compilation copyright, so if the defendant copied the entire database instead of one particular document, the ruling may have been that the defendant violated that particular copyright.
IANAL, but Project Gutenberg's rules for source material, which has been vetted by lawyers but probably never been contested in court, allow contributors to use facsimiles of out of copyright material, even if the facsimile publisher claims copyright. In this case, if the Amazon POD book is a facsimile, I think that someone buying the book would be able to scan it and do whatever they want with the scan.
Yes, Disney's guilty of heavy lobbying (unfortunately successful) to extend the term of copyright, but the topic of this slashdot article is companies that falsely claim copyright on their facsimile reproductions of public domain works. Two different things altogether.
Google doesn't try very hard to figure out whether a title is public domain. If there's not something like copyright on the back of the title page, even if there's a clear publication date listed on the title page, it's put into snippet view. When the book is in snippet view, they don't even display the entire title page and the back of the title page, so you usually can't even see enough to try to dispute their classification with them.
Unfortunately Project Gutenberg has no minimum standards for contributions, but many of the recent submissions, especially from Distributed Proofreaders, preserve the page numbers of the original text in the HTML editions.
Australia bumped up their copyright term to life+70 in 2005, so there won't be any new PD works in Australia until 2026. However, Canada's still at life+50, so Project Gutenberg Canada http://www.gutenberg.ca/ potentially has works where the author died in 1958. Also, here in the US, works published up through 1963 which did not get their copyright renewed are in the public domain. PG Australia has been around longer than PG Canada so it has about 10 times the titles of PG Canada, but I think PG Canada may be more active in adding new titles, thanks to Distributed Proofreaders Canada http://www.pgdpcanada.net/.
As a contributor to Project Gutenberg by scanning PD works and proofreading them at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I'd just like to point out that this is not new. Long before the days of public domain scans on the internet, many publishers added a short copyrighted introduction or postscript to a public domain work and then included a copyright notice without indicating that the copyright only covered the original material. Furthermore, while I am not fond of Kessenger Publishing and its ilk, especially if they've used Project Gutenberg content as their source material, they are not obligated to provides free scans of their PD catalog, any more than Penguin, Dover, Barnes & Noble, or any other publisher.
Wind projects occupy anywhere from 28 to 83 acres per megawatt, depending on local terrain, but only 2 to 5 percent of the project area is needed for turbine foundations, roads or other infrastructure. -- American Wind Energy Association
Heh, a recycled *BSD is dying post from 2002 should be moderated funny, not troll.
The copyright term discussed in FTA is for performances/recordings, was 50 years, period, and will now be 70 years, period, death of performer has nothing to do with it. Copyright for songwriter/composer was, and still is life+70, and hasn't changed.
In general, this benefits the average performer by a few euros a year, but cumulatively adds up to a much larger amount to the companies with large copyright holdings.
Feel free to mod the parent down, postings that are flat out wrong because the poster clearly did not RTFA shouldn't be Insightful/5.
If the US ever ratifies this, George Foreman will be in big trouble:
The Convention acknowledges that every child has certain basic rights, including the right to life, his or her own name and identity, to be raised by his or her parents within a family or cultural grouping and have a relationship with both parents, even if they are separated.
I doubt Obama would ever appoint a Canadian citizen to be the US copyright czar.
Besides the turgid writing style, Covenant rapes a woman in the first book. This rape scene is often mentioned in SF convention panels as a reason why people hate, hate, hate this series.
I use the base Plustek Opticbook 3600 for scanner for Distributed Proofreaders, and I've never had problems with the software. I'd recommend upgrading from the Abbyy Finereader 6 Sprint to the latest FR professional version, though.
The Opticbook costs about $250, compared to several thousand for the cheapest planetary scanner kit with software to correct curvature, and the professional versions of these scanners are in the 10's of thousands. A lot of the people at Distributed Proofreaders (who have supplied half of the texts at Project Gutenberg) either use the Opticbook or remove the spines and use scanners with automated sheet feeders.
I have scanned out of copyright Astounding SF magazines with good results with the Plustek Opticbook 3600. These magazines are stapled about a quarter inch from the spine edge of the paper. The biggest problem with the Opticbook is that it still needs about a 3/8ths inch of empty space from the binding, so if your classic comic books are bound this way, and the gutters are extremely narrow, you may even have problems with the Opticbook, but you'd probably have similar problems with a planetary scanner like the original poster was asking about.
I don't know if Project Gutenberg would be the best choice, since they focus on text, I'd recommend contacting Internet Archive.
As far as I know, live.com did not show snippets of copyrighted works like Google does, so if live.com ever displayed any of Ayn Rand's works, it would only have been at the permission of the publisher. It appears that all of her work was published after 1922, and neither Microsoft nor Google is/was attempting to determine if post-1922 works are in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed. Even so, it looks like she or her heirs have been pretty good at renewing her copyrights.
I used GNOME for a while, but I like focus follows mouse AND click to raise. I really hate having windows raised to front just because I type in them, and I could never figure out how to turn that off in metacity. I found where it was happening, and uncommented out an if statement so that it would work the way I wanted it to, and submitted a bug report/enhancement request so it wouldn't raise the window if the appropriate knob was set to zero, and a GNOME developer rejected it with a "you don't understand what that knob's for" response. So, when I found it can be configured the way I like it in KDE, I switched. If the GNOME developer had rejected it with, "you don't understand what that knob's for, but this is how you do want you're requesting" I'd probably still be using GNOME today.
Saying so doesn't make it true. For example, take a look at the HTML editions of a section of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19699, Music Notation and Terminology by Karl Wilson Gehrkens http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19499, and Elements of Structural and Systematic Botany by Douglas Houghton Campbell http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20390, all recent productions from Distributed Proofreaders and top 100 downloads from Project Gutenberg. It is true that we're still using LaTeX to describe formulae, and some of our formatting notations are nowhere near the sophisticated tools a former technical writer at Adobe is no doubt used to. I think we're doing a far better job of retaining the non-textual information you claim we're dropping than your cursory re-examination of our site would indicate.
As others have mentioned, you must have volunteered at DP a very long time ago because ALL of your objections to our work are no longer valid. The only complaint of yours that was valid when I started volunteering there 3.5 years ago was that DP's final versions submitted to Project Gutenberg were plain-text.
At the time you were volunteering, PG was primarily a repository of only plain-text documents. These days, in a large part due to the influence of volunteers at DP, nearly every new text submitted to PG has an HTML edition, some are submitted to PG in PG-TEI, which is Project Gutenberg's draft/proposed XML vocabulary based on the Text Encoding Initiative XML format, which can be transformed into many formats including plain text and HTML.
Fifteen years ago a company I worked for got hit with a BSA audit after a call to their tip line. Our management was not sure, but believed it was in retaliation for firing two guys. I suspect the BSA gets most of their tips from disgruntled former employees.
The original policy of Project Gutenberg may have been to only accept text-only versions, but they've been accepting alternate formats from content producers for some time. In the last couple years, it's been the policy of Distributed Proofreaders, the largest provider of new material for PG, to produce an HTML edition if the original edition contains illustrations.
The current US laws have extended the existing copyright to 95 years after copyright registration, and 1923 is the first year that is not currently public domain, so we only have to wait 12 years, not 60, assuming the Mouse is unable to buy enough votes in Congress again.
Other countries have death+50 or death+70 copyright term laws, so they have new works becoming public domain every year. There are some Project Gutenberg affiliates in these countries, so they have books that can't be hosted by Project Gutenberg because they are still under copyright in the US. Maybe the OpenLibrary will do the same thing.
It's still fraud if the backdating occurred, and it's no less serious just because Apple pre-empted any SEC investigations. Most criminals don't get off scot-free just because they turn themselves in when it becomes obvious that the authorities are about to arrest them.
If the stock options were backdated are not declared, then the Apple officers receiving them were actually receiving additional compensation of the difference between the options' declared price on the backdated date, and the price on the real date of the option grant, and it's a cost to the company that is hidden, therefore overstating earnings, and fraud. If it had been declared at the time, it wouldn't have been fraud. It's not enough to just declare it now.
In my scanning for Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I would have to say that over 90% of the books do not have illustrations or footnotes that require scanning at higher resolutions than 300 DPI. Even the ones with illustrations are probably fine with 300-600 DPI scans. For the most part, the black and white images of text pages in the Google PDF files are adequate, although the illustrations are low resolution garbage. The real problem I see with Google's work is that it's substandard, with missing illustrations, missing pages, and poorly scanned pages. They do rescan books when errors are reported, but even then, it takes a few months and the rescans are subject to error. Unless there are multiple projects independently scanning, OCRing these works, I fear that single source for these works will end up with an incomplete and somewhat unusable digital copy of these Google partner libraries.
The second issue I have is that the full image display at both Google and the OCA/live.com (and PDF downloads of full images) is not particularly useful on low resolution displays, like PDAs, mobile phones, tablets, and dedicated ebook readers. Perhaps future generations of ebook readers will have the form factor of a paperback book with high enough resolution to view the scans made available by google and the OCA, but I don't see it happening for years.
The last complaint I have about Google, is that with their proprietary database, it's not easy to create searches based on criteria not in their search parameters (for example, based on number of pages).
Despite these complaints, I'm still pleased that Google decided to try to digitize the works in these libraries, if for no other reason than it got several digitzation projects funded.
The original web page was superficial, with no supporting documentation, and the commentary is not really any different from any other recent mysql vs. postgresql flamefest (er, discussion) on slashdot. About the only useful thing in the whole thread are the couple of links to recent comparisons, and since I haven't actually checked any of them out, I don't know if they're as poorly researched as the original article. YMMV.
How can you find a trivial, severely out of date comparison useful?