51–60 of 88 posts
>Google has scanned more than 20 million books since 2004 without the permission of the authors. I am blown away how this is ruled legal, but in many cases scanning books as an individual is considered copyright infringement. As though they don't reap financial benefit from expanding the scope of the data they control? It's their entire business model...
I think it's important to mention that Google only returns 'snippets' of the text. The entire book is searchable and indexed but Google book-scanning project prevents use to read the entire book. The court ruled this is fair use since it enables the searcher to find out if the searched book has substantial information regarding their research/searching.
One could wonder if the same rule would apply to music. Would it be okay to have 30 seconds of any song available free online, just so that you could search for a lyrics of the song you heard on the radio, and then match it with 30 sec audio clip to find out whether the song is the one you were looking for.
I'm not sure that I agree with this ruling. Although Google says that they're using it for one specific purpose, I can imagine that they'll use it for other things like improving their search and ad technologies. If that's the case, then wouldn't Google's work be considered derivative of the original content? Why should the authors involved not be able to re-sell those digitalized versions to other companies (especia…
I hope this is not too off-topic but since we are talking about book-scanning, how would I go about scanning my own books for private use? For instance, if I have a bunch of books about drawing, I'd like to scan them all so that I later group all of the figure drawing pages in one folder, all the gesture drawing pages on another, etc, so they can be more easily used (and more useful) as reference. Does anyone here re…
Emeritus community hero Daniel Reetz spent 6 years creating the "Archivist" scanner [1]. He and his collaborators have done a phenomenal job, and created some of the best documentation I've seen for any project (open-source or otherwise). The "Lessons Learned" front matter alone is inspiring [2].
So far I've found that book scanning is an ideal "DIY" project: enough hardware & software quirks that are gratifying to puzzle through, but nothing super difficult. In fact, it is exactly like building and calibrating a simple scientific instrument and learning to collect and process image data. To @planfaster or anyone who is considering book scanning for private use, definitely do it!
I highly recommend buying the "Archivist" scanner kit + electronics pack available at http://tenrec.builders/. There is ample hard-earned wisdom in the forums and tenrec supplemental docs about dozens of minor process details where you think "Why don't people just do X?" and it turns out X isn't ideal, and neither is Y, but Z works fine.
The main thing that I didn't consider before starting was that the scanner hardware only facilitates one very specific part of the workflow: taking pictures of flattened pages with (nearly) identical resolution and positioning. It's an important step, and reducing it to 5 seconds per page doesn't magically eliminate tedious downstream processing with other tools[3]. All that said, it's very rewarding, and really fun to start thinking about what you can do with scans, e.g. turn entire books into posters [4].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10070529
[1] http://www.wired.com/2009/12/diy-book-scanner/
As a former librarian I say YES! The typical librarian actually doesn't fight for the access of materials but fights to enforce copy right stricter than the copy right law even calls for. At my college I took down the sign that said "No Copying of Books" at the photo copier and I put in place the actual copy right law. I can't tell you how many visiting librarians were "shocked" I did that. Well we also allowed bottl…
This is awesome. I can remember clearly, in junior high school, the librarian informing us that we were only allowed to copy six pages of a book for homework assignments. I don't really have a strong opinion on much of this (one way or the other), because I'm not well enough informed on the topic, but I remember feeling weird about it, becaus the library aid made us feel like criminals for wanting to copy more than 6…
Once/if you have kids, you'll get to relive that joy of libraries all over again. :)
(unrelated: my school libraries also prevented excessive photocopying of books.)
Ok this is pretty cool, I've been waiting for the 2nd Circuit to decide this. Now to see if the Supreme Court will take it up. I believe that this would also clear up a service that scans your books and sends you the digitized version. That would seem to be fair use of my own library as well. I spent about $1200 getting roughly a 1/3 of the volumes I've collected over the years digitized at 600 DPI so that I could ha…
May I ask where you scanned your books? I've used 1dollarscan.com before for some book scans, which worked pretty well.
I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.
Now we can run a search engine that just returns Google results since the top 10 results are just a small portion of the total results.
I would love it if the publishers and google figured out a proper way to pay to read books that were still under copyright. I'd love to get rid of all my bookshelves knowing that if I wanted access to a particular book I could pay a few dollars and get it.
I'm not sure that I agree with this ruling. Although Google says that they're using it for one specific purpose, I can imagine that they'll use it for other things like improving their search and ad technologies. If that's the case, then wouldn't Google's work be considered derivative of the original content? Why should the authors involved not be able to re-sell those digitalized versions to other companies (especia…
The ruling pretty much addressed this already:
"Plaintiffs’ contention that Google has usurped their opportunity to access paid and unpaid licensing markets for substantially the same functions that Google provides fails, in part because the licensing markets in fact involve very different functions than those that Google provides, and in part because an author’s derivative rights do not include an exclusive right to supply information (of the sort provided by Google) about her works."
If that's the opinion concerning providing search in the books, I think it's highly likely that the same logic would apply to improving search and even ads.
>Google has scanned more than 20 million books since 2004 without the permission of the authors. I am blown away how this is ruled legal, but in many cases scanning books as an individual is considered copyright infringement. As though they don't reap financial benefit from expanding the scope of the data they control? It's their entire business model...
Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement. Tons of people do it. What you do with the scans afterwards matters more.
At least in the US, you are overstating the certainty. While I agree with you that it should not be infringement, prior to this ruling, the legal status of scanning books you own for personal use was not clear.
The qualified expert opinion I got regarding personal scanning was from a law school professor specializing in copyright (and who actually participated this case), and was along the lines of "it's probably legal but there is not yet settled case law".
This ruling probably moves it closer to settled, but I'd be suggest against placing large bets unless your qualifications exceed hers.