I've been thinking about this problem for a dog's age, from the perspective of a fiction writer.
"Seed" For Sale
Get your wallets out! Christmas is coming!
If you guys really want to understand all of this stuff, as I did, I suggest you listen to my interview with Professor James Grimmelmann, who is writing a long, long, long brief examining all the issues for the court about this settlement in an amicus brief from the New York Law School.
He went to Harvard and Yale, interned for the Creative Commons, and used to be a programmer at Microsoft.
It's a lengthy interview, but we cover all the important stuff.
Here's what it says on page 36 (probably why you didn't include it in your post):
(e) Googleâ(TM)s Exclusion of Books. Google may, at its discretion, exclude particular Books from one or more Display Uses for editorial or non-editorial reasons. However, Googleâ(TM)s right to exclude Books for editorial reasons (i.e., not for quality, user experience, legal or other non-editorial reasons) is an issue of great sensitivity to Plaintiffs and Google. Accordingly, because Plaintiffs, Google and the libraries all value the principle of freedom of expression, and agree that this principle is an important part of GBS and other Google Products and Services, Google agrees to notify the Registry of any such exclusion of a Book for editorial reasons and of any information Google has that is pertinent to the Registryâ(TM)s use of such Book other than Confidential Information of Google and other than information that Google received from a third party under an obligation of confidentiality.
All they have to do is notify the Registry if they remove a book for "editorial" reasons, which is technically what they have to do for YouTube: they have to notify the user whose video they delete.
What makes this "a third party posting?" I did this interview myself. On Friday. For free.
To clarify, if you were to get sued by an author for scanning his or work, you could not receive the right to scan the works of OTHER writers *without getting sued* as part of your potential settlement with that author. Only Google has this right. Under the settlement, its agreement with the Author's Guild counts as an agreement with the class of "all rightsholders."
I had a lot of questions, too, so I tracked down the person who knows more about the settlement than anyone else in the world, except for the lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants on the case who are locked behind a non-disclosure agreement. You might find my interview interesting.
The short answer is that Google doesn't get the rights to any books that may become "orphaned" after January 2009.
Except that Google is indemnified from lawsuits by authors that it never contacted in the first place, whereas anybody else that tries to scan books is not. Google did not simply reach a settlement with all the authors it pissed off: Google bought the ability to not get sued by the 6.8 million rightsholders who do not know about the settlement yet. Google reached a deal with the "Author's Guild;" not individual authors. Otherwise, each author could conceivably claim $150,000 in damages for each scan. Not even Google could afford the damages they would accrue if they had to pay for every book for which they were liable. This is a protectionist piece of copyright legislation masquerading as a settlement. A piece of "orphan works" legislation, instead of an exclusive settlement, would create a market for orphan books that would protect ALL interested parties from infringement lawsuits until rights are negotiated.
Additionally, Ed Champion is reporting that Amazon has finally broken today's silence to comment on the matter to him, calling the episode "a ham-fisted cataloging error." From Champion's website: "After multiple attempts to contact Amazon, I have at long last received the following reply from Patty Smith by email: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles -- in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search. Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."
This isn't just about getting paid. It's also about creative control of intellectual property. For instance, let's say you are a rock musician and you want to maintain your street credibility as an anarchistic free-spirit. Without time protection on copyright, what is to stop McDonald's from stealing your song the moment you die from a drug overdose, or -- in some proposed scenarios -- the moment it is recorded?
How will that hamper sales of your next album?
Musicians aren't worried that fans are stealing their songs. Musicians are worried that other musicians and advertising companies are stealing their songs.
The fact of the matter is that artists...unlike day-job-having-folks...live and die by their reputation, which includes the context of how their work is used. In fact, allegations of greed aside, the best writers generally never get paid for what they do until after they are dead. It is better than never getting paid at all. It is some consolation to sit down every day in front of a novel and think: well, maybe when I die from quinsy or the collywobbles due to my absolute lack of a safety net or health insurance, this piece of work will be able to put my kid through college or let my sad wife finance a nice young lover.
Remember: for every musician who makes enough money that they can legitimately be censured for "not saving for retirement" there are a THOUSAND freelance songwriters and set musicians who work in their spare time while holding down bullshit service sector jobs and who are brutalized by fans, the music industry, lawyers, the electric company, God, the devil, and Walt Disney. Nothing can be done to help them, but for God's sake, let's not brutalize them further.
Bah. Think about how SMART this is for the Democrats.
1). Whistleblowers are protected from being fired by law.
2). Now everyone knows who these whistleblowers are.
3). If any of these people are fired, the Democrats can say they were fired for being whistleblowers, instead of for any partisan or job-related reasons, because...
4). The whistleblowers in mundane government positions would conceivably be more sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans. Conceive this. And the election is coming up. All a lame duck can do right now is clean house.
Imagine Dick Cheney walking around with a secret list of rats that he procured in some D.C garage for several million dollars, and then seeing this on the news. Now any pretext to potentially fire a whistleblower has to be three times as powerful.
First -- to qualify -- I couldn't stand math as taught in public school growing up. Perhaps it had something to do with the rigid, hierarchical structure of progress through the subject, compounded with the relative unsexiness of math teachers, who always had the most brittle tempers when it came to (my) screwing around.
Additionally, it seemed to me that achievement in math and science in public school selected for two types of people (please forgive my brutal generalization):
1) Stable, non-disruptive sorts who had no problem at all doing what they'd been told because they trusted that the system had their best interests in mind (suburban white people)
2) Borderline psychotic loners on a kick to show everybody -- to show them all -- to show them that they were the BEST -- the BEST, I say!
I imagined both of these types of people with the same father sitting at home in a recliner, highball in hand: "Numbers don't lie, child. Number's don't lie. Not like women. Not like liberals."
Rarely did either of these two types of people have drugs or sex for me, so generally I avoided them. Perhaps to my detriment...perhaps...who can say...
And then there was the factor that every adult I encountered and admired let me on the "Adult Math Secret." Unless you love math, unless you LOVE IT, you will never have to do it ever again as soon as you graduate high school. 90% of jobs don't even need ARITHMETIC. And there is always somebody around who is better at you than math, and who wants to show you just how much better they are by meeting your math needs.
That being said, there was one time in college where I felt a pang of regret. Where I felt as if I had "chosen poorly," and that if I had it to do over again, I would have spent those hours doing something called "trigonometry" instead of playing football and reading novels.
The class that made me reevaluate all of my opinions was "Pseudoscience," as taught by Dr. Rory Coker at the University of Texas. The rumour was that Coker had been forced to teach the class because he had failed an entire class of physics students and wasn't allowed to teach physics anymore. I'd never been in a math or science class that had an actual INTENT, whereas you could smoke out a history or English teacher's agenda the moment you heard their accent. The intent of Pseudoscience was to disabuse liberal artists (me) of ridiculous beliefs that were popularized as science by the greedy and malicious, such as crystal worship, astrology, alien abduction, faith healing, etc.
Every day, Coker -- a pretty damn good stage magician and an actual LITERATE science professor who read beyond the newspaper -- would perform a piece of magic, with the intent not to make us wonder and clap, but to figure out how he did it, and how that "magic" could be used for evil. He schooled us on the principles of misdirection, logical analysis, and Occam's razor. Suddenly, science had a point. You could use it as a yardstick for seeing if somebody was full of shit or not! Oh how I wished -- how I WISHED -- that I had taken the time to study this stuff in grade school, so that I could know how far this skill could be taken.
Dear readers, this power of science appeals to everyone. The WEAPON of science is the most important part to a person who does not get sexually excited by the prospect of a supercollider. That's where the ability to generate enthusiasm lies. To use science as a shield against the powers that be, and the powers that want to take your money and leave you dying on the side of the street, rubbing a rabbit's foot and burning incense.
Remember, the first chemists were alchemists trying to live forever, and the first astronomers were priests trying to control their society. I guess things have changed. I don't know.
Can science be taught as a weapon in a public school system that thrives on lies and control? It is a test. But until this happens, you can count on the vast majority of students not caring. And why should they?
P.S. Shame on you for letting your administration make you feel that English is a "support subject." English has every right to be an end unto itself. You have to have a reason to live, not just the ability.
Reactionary internet graffiti aside, the divisiveness of Wal-Mart signals a more complicated problem than the superficial split between the caring and the cold-hearted.
Wal-Mart's revolting nature comes on a gut level, and not a rational one. There are arguments against its existence for worker's rights reasons, for anti-globalization reasons, and for aesthetic reasons - but most people go looking for these reasons in the first place as a result of actual time spent in the store, and the feeling of sweaty, raw animal terror that the experience inspires in a person who has a choice to go elsewhere.
Should Wal-Mart be allowed to exist? Of course it should. It's a free market, baby, and they are PROVIDING. Jobs, cheap-ass crockery, optometry, etc. But that's no reason not to feel overwhelming pity for the people that are forced to shop and work there. It's a horrible place, but so is the overnight shift at a city hospital. You can't get rid of a place like that because it is ugly.
If anything, Wal-Mart does a public service for the impoverished of a community. It forces the middle-class to look at them -- under stark, neuron-scrambling fluorescents -- and see that they are neither institutionally lazy nor inhuman. They are falling apart, and the only people interested in helping are a corporation with a profit motive that panders to their every prejudice and weakness.
The first impulse is to trample that ant-hive. Find a reason to get rid of it. The ant-hive is the problem!
But Wal-Mart is a challenge. Can we do better to provide for the bottom of society? If not, then Wal-Mart is better than nothing. I think we can do better. I think -- in the same way that Scientology is challenge to scale down the state protections for religion -- Wal-Mart is a challenge to improve the quality of life of impoverished America. It is the natural outgrowth of the system that we have created. It is a website under construction that says "FIX ME."
So shop Wal-Mart, think real hard about how to make it better, and SAVE.
Can we take up a collection to send a civilian into space with the ability to translate the experience into art? Somebody like Spider Robinson, or Tom Wolfe, perhaps? How long will the most liminal and mind-expanding human experience only be the province of those who lack the passion and subtlety to appreciate it, and who cannot, therefore, sublimate it for the rest of us?
"Space. Wow. It was so damn empty. Man, you can see the whole earth! Even the dark bits, without people!"
If we send somebody up who has the craft to record their experience in an engaging and creative way, then it is like sending ALL of us into space. I can think of no quicker way to give the space program the cultural boost it needs to survive increasing (understandable) voter apathy. Sure, Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop like chocolate, but they don't deserve the factory...
Slashdot Mirror
I've been thinking about this problem for a dog's age, from the perspective of a fiction writer. "Seed" For Sale Get your wallets out! Christmas is coming!
The English language is literally a riot.
If you guys really want to understand all of this stuff, as I did, I suggest you listen to my interview with Professor James Grimmelmann, who is writing a long, long, long brief examining all the issues for the court about this settlement in an amicus brief from the New York Law School.
He went to Harvard and Yale, interned for the Creative Commons, and used to be a programmer at Microsoft.
It's a lengthy interview, but we cover all the important stuff.
http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=356&mode=one
You are awesomely, powerfully wrong.
Here's what it says on page 36 (probably why you didn't include it in your post):
(e) Googleâ(TM)s Exclusion of Books. Google may, at its discretion, exclude
particular Books from one or more Display Uses for editorial or non-editorial reasons.
However, Googleâ(TM)s right to exclude Books for editorial reasons (i.e., not for quality, user
experience, legal or other non-editorial reasons) is an issue of great sensitivity to
Plaintiffs and Google. Accordingly, because Plaintiffs, Google and the libraries all value
the principle of freedom of expression, and agree that this principle is an important part
of GBS and other Google Products and Services, Google agrees to notify the Registry of
any such exclusion of a Book for editorial reasons and of any information Google has
that is pertinent to the Registryâ(TM)s use of such Book other than Confidential Information of
Google and other than information that Google received from a third party under an
obligation of confidentiality.
All they have to do is notify the Registry if they remove a book for "editorial" reasons, which is technically what they have to do for YouTube: they have to notify the user whose video they delete.
What makes this "a third party posting?" I did this interview myself. On Friday. For free.
To clarify, if you were to get sued by an author for scanning his or work, you could not receive the right to scan the works of OTHER writers *without getting sued* as part of your potential settlement with that author. Only Google has this right. Under the settlement, its agreement with the Author's Guild counts as an agreement with the class of "all rightsholders."
I had a lot of questions, too, so I tracked down the person who knows more about the settlement than anyone else in the world, except for the lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants on the case who are locked behind a non-disclosure agreement. You might find my interview interesting. The short answer is that Google doesn't get the rights to any books that may become "orphaned" after January 2009.
You should probably read the interview or listen to it before you start having opinions about the contents.
Except that Google is indemnified from lawsuits by authors that it never contacted in the first place, whereas anybody else that tries to scan books is not. Google did not simply reach a settlement with all the authors it pissed off: Google bought the ability to not get sued by the 6.8 million rightsholders who do not know about the settlement yet. Google reached a deal with the "Author's Guild;" not individual authors. Otherwise, each author could conceivably claim $150,000 in damages for each scan. Not even Google could afford the damages they would accrue if they had to pay for every book for which they were liable. This is a protectionist piece of copyright legislation masquerading as a settlement. A piece of "orphan works" legislation, instead of an exclusive settlement, would create a market for orphan books that would protect ALL interested parties from infringement lawsuits until rights are negotiated.
Additionally, Ed Champion is reporting that Amazon has finally broken today's silence to comment on the matter to him, calling the episode "a ham-fisted cataloging error." From Champion's website: "After multiple attempts to contact Amazon, I have at long last received the following reply from Patty Smith by email: "This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection. It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles -- in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search. Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future."
That should be "out-of-print," not "out-of-copyright." NOW everybody go nuts and tell me how terrible I am. --Jones
The DS is a horrible, clunky interim device, but it is definitely closer to what I'd like to see than the Kindle or the Sony Ereader. I've penned a lengthy essay on the matter over at The Fiction Circus: The Dream You Hold: Four Metaphors for Books, Offered as Aid to the New Electronic Bookbinders You guys should read it and tell me what you think. What I am missing and what I've got right.
This isn't just about getting paid. It's also about creative control of intellectual property. For instance, let's say you are a rock musician and you want to maintain your street credibility as an anarchistic free-spirit. Without time protection on copyright, what is to stop McDonald's from stealing your song the moment you die from a drug overdose, or -- in some proposed scenarios -- the moment it is recorded?
How will that hamper sales of your next album?
Musicians aren't worried that fans are stealing their songs. Musicians are worried that other musicians and advertising companies are stealing their songs.
The fact of the matter is that artists...unlike day-job-having-folks...live and die by their reputation, which includes the context of how their work is used. In fact, allegations of greed aside, the best writers generally never get paid for what they do until after they are dead. It is better than never getting paid at all. It is some consolation to sit down every day in front of a novel and think: well, maybe when I die from quinsy or the collywobbles due to my absolute lack of a safety net or health insurance, this piece of work will be able to put my kid through college or let my sad wife finance a nice young lover.
Remember: for every musician who makes enough money that they can legitimately be censured for "not saving for retirement" there are a THOUSAND freelance songwriters and set musicians who work in their spare time while holding down bullshit service sector jobs and who are brutalized by fans, the music industry, lawyers, the electric company, God, the devil, and Walt Disney. Nothing can be done to help them, but for God's sake, let's not brutalize them further.
They put the poison in both parties. Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha--
Bah. Think about how SMART this is for the Democrats. 1). Whistleblowers are protected from being fired by law. 2). Now everyone knows who these whistleblowers are. 3). If any of these people are fired, the Democrats can say they were fired for being whistleblowers, instead of for any partisan or job-related reasons, because... 4). The whistleblowers in mundane government positions would conceivably be more sympathetic to Democrats than Republicans. Conceive this. And the election is coming up. All a lame duck can do right now is clean house. Imagine Dick Cheney walking around with a secret list of rats that he procured in some D.C garage for several million dollars, and then seeing this on the news. Now any pretext to potentially fire a whistleblower has to be three times as powerful.
First -- to qualify -- I couldn't stand math as taught in public school growing up. Perhaps it had something to do with the rigid, hierarchical structure of progress through the subject, compounded with the relative unsexiness of math teachers, who always had the most brittle tempers when it came to (my) screwing around.
Additionally, it seemed to me that achievement in math and science in public school selected for two types of people (please forgive my brutal generalization):
1) Stable, non-disruptive sorts who had no problem at all doing what they'd been told because they trusted that the system had their best interests in mind (suburban white people)
2) Borderline psychotic loners on a kick to show everybody -- to show them all -- to show them that they were the BEST -- the BEST, I say!
I imagined both of these types of people with the same father sitting at home in a recliner, highball in hand: "Numbers don't lie, child. Number's don't lie. Not like women. Not like liberals."
Rarely did either of these two types of people have drugs or sex for me, so generally I avoided them. Perhaps to my detriment...perhaps...who can say...
And then there was the factor that every adult I encountered and admired let me on the "Adult Math Secret." Unless you love math, unless you LOVE IT, you will never have to do it ever again as soon as you graduate high school. 90% of jobs don't even need ARITHMETIC. And there is always somebody around who is better at you than math, and who wants to show you just how much better they are by meeting your math needs.
That being said, there was one time in college where I felt a pang of regret. Where I felt as if I had "chosen poorly," and that if I had it to do over again, I would have spent those hours doing something called "trigonometry" instead of playing football and reading novels.
The class that made me reevaluate all of my opinions was "Pseudoscience," as taught by Dr. Rory Coker at the University of Texas. The rumour was that Coker had been forced to teach the class because he had failed an entire class of physics students and wasn't allowed to teach physics anymore. I'd never been in a math or science class that had an actual INTENT, whereas you could smoke out a history or English teacher's agenda the moment you heard their accent. The intent of Pseudoscience was to disabuse liberal artists (me) of ridiculous beliefs that were popularized as science by the greedy and malicious, such as crystal worship, astrology, alien abduction, faith healing, etc.
Every day, Coker -- a pretty damn good stage magician and an actual LITERATE science professor who read beyond the newspaper -- would perform a piece of magic, with the intent not to make us wonder and clap, but to figure out how he did it, and how that "magic" could be used for evil. He schooled us on the principles of misdirection, logical analysis, and Occam's razor. Suddenly, science had a point. You could use it as a yardstick for seeing if somebody was full of shit or not! Oh how I wished -- how I WISHED -- that I had taken the time to study this stuff in grade school, so that I could know how far this skill could be taken.
Dear readers, this power of science appeals to everyone. The WEAPON of science is the most important part to a person who does not get sexually excited by the prospect of a supercollider. That's where the ability to generate enthusiasm lies. To use science as a shield against the powers that be, and the powers that want to take your money and leave you dying on the side of the street, rubbing a rabbit's foot and burning incense.
Remember, the first chemists were alchemists trying to live forever, and the first astronomers were priests trying to control their society. I guess things have changed. I don't know.
Can science be taught as a weapon in a public school system that thrives on lies and control? It is a test. But until this happens, you can count on the vast majority of students not caring. And why should they?
P.S. Shame on you for letting your administration make you feel that English is a "support subject." English has every right to be an end unto itself. You have to have a reason to live, not just the ability.
Reactionary internet graffiti aside, the divisiveness of Wal-Mart signals a more complicated problem than the superficial split between the caring and the cold-hearted.
Wal-Mart's revolting nature comes on a gut level, and not a rational one. There are arguments against its existence for worker's rights reasons, for anti-globalization reasons, and for aesthetic reasons - but most people go looking for these reasons in the first place as a result of actual time spent in the store, and the feeling of sweaty, raw animal terror that the experience inspires in a person who has a choice to go elsewhere.
Should Wal-Mart be allowed to exist? Of course it should. It's a free market, baby, and they are PROVIDING. Jobs, cheap-ass crockery, optometry, etc. But that's no reason not to feel overwhelming pity for the people that are forced to shop and work there. It's a horrible place, but so is the overnight shift at a city hospital. You can't get rid of a place like that because it is ugly.
If anything, Wal-Mart does a public service for the impoverished of a community. It forces the middle-class to look at them -- under stark, neuron-scrambling fluorescents -- and see that they are neither institutionally lazy nor inhuman. They are falling apart, and the only people interested in helping are a corporation with a profit motive that panders to their every prejudice and weakness.
The first impulse is to trample that ant-hive. Find a reason to get rid of it. The ant-hive is the problem!
But Wal-Mart is a challenge. Can we do better to provide for the bottom of society? If not, then Wal-Mart is better than nothing. I think we can do better. I think -- in the same way that Scientology is challenge to scale down the state protections for religion -- Wal-Mart is a challenge to improve the quality of life of impoverished America. It is the natural outgrowth of the system that we have created. It is a website under construction that says "FIX ME."
So shop Wal-Mart, think real hard about how to make it better, and SAVE.
Can we take up a collection to send a civilian into space with the ability to translate the experience into art? Somebody like Spider Robinson, or Tom Wolfe, perhaps? How long will the most liminal and mind-expanding human experience only be the province of those who lack the passion and subtlety to appreciate it, and who cannot, therefore, sublimate it for the rest of us? "Space. Wow. It was so damn empty. Man, you can see the whole earth! Even the dark bits, without people!" If we send somebody up who has the craft to record their experience in an engaging and creative way, then it is like sending ALL of us into space. I can think of no quicker way to give the space program the cultural boost it needs to survive increasing (understandable) voter apathy. Sure, Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop like chocolate, but they don't deserve the factory...