71–80 of 88 posts
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140114/10565225874/copyr...
It's good that this news report includes a citation to the case decision at the end of the article. That citation is Authors Guild v. Google Inc., 13-4829, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Manhattan) The ruling applies, of course, only to the United States, and only if it is not reversed by the United States Supreme Court. But I think the argument that Google's use of the book content is not market-destr…
It has to be that these sorts of lawsuits are supported by a small minority of authors, right? It's crazy. Who has ever planned to buy a book and thought "hey, I'll just use the Google Book Search to read through it"? I've never heard of 99% of the books that turn up on these searches, and I have ended up buying at least 2 or 3 of them.
I'm interested what kind of evidence played a role here. How does the judge determine it didn't harm authors, other than using a time machine?
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May I ask where you scanned your books? I've used 1dollarscan.com before for some book scans, which worked pretty well.
1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist. 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.
1dollarscan doesn't seem that good to me, what am I missing? It's $2 per 100 pages if you want OCR, and even then it's not clear what output format they're delivering -- it sounds like it's still a PDF? The entire point of eBooks to me is that you end up with actual text, not just scans. And $8 per average length novel seems like a lot just to chop a book in half, throw it through an auto-feed scanner, and run an OCR…
For a textbook style book "chopping it in half and throwing it in a scanner" is a bit more work than the sentence would suggest. The most cost effective scanner for this is the Scansnap 1500 as it will scan both sides of a page, has a 100 sheet "feeder", and will OCR the text (using ABBYY which is included). It screws up occasionally and especially on magazines which are very thin / shiny paper it can take a while (and several rescans) to get the magazine scanned. So in general there is a pretty solid time advantage to using 1dollarscan. Especially if you can use your nights and weekends productively doing something else.
That said, once I didn't have another stack of 10,000 pages to go at the end of the month (I had scanned all the "obvious" targets, minus the McGraw-Hill books which they won't scan) I did switch over to manual mode with my scanner because while the total cost of the cutter and scanner was close to $2,000 (not quite 2 years worth of 1dollar scan services) it is a capability that can sit idle without too much cost.
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In my opinions librarians are actually needed more now! Yes we have a fire hose of content and people need people like librarians to help utilize that fire hose more. When I left (I quit the job) being a librarian in 2008 more than 50% of librarians had lost their jobs in the next 2 years. Most people who handle budgets have your same idea. My school district of 19,000 students had ONE librarian for all the elementar…
> people need people like librarians to help utilize that fire hose more Given the explosion of niche interests over the past 50 years I don't think its feasible for librarians to provide that service except at extremes of the spectrum: internal university or corporate information of extreme specificity and controlled scope at one end, and public topics of general specificity at the other. In the middle is a vast inf…
Would you mind explaining what you mean here in a little more detail. I'm curious to learn more about this.
It's good that this news report includes a citation to the case decision at the end of the article. That citation is Authors Guild v. Google Inc., 13-4829, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (Manhattan) The ruling applies, of course, only to the United States, and only if it is not reversed by the United States Supreme Court. But I think the argument that Google's use of the book content is not market-destr…
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…
If you asked them why, they were decent enough to provide some sort of reasoned argument based on the actual copyright law to explain this policy, so I don't think they were just being jerks.
[This was in the UK, so I dunno if the laws were worse or better than in the U.S.]
This is a great win for fair-use, and matches Google's original rationalization for why their scanning was justified. Note, though, that Google in the middle years of this dispute sought to acquiesce to a class-action settlement with the Author's Guild. That would have more-or-less abandoned the (strong and ultimately successful) fair-use argument, and set up a system where Google and the Author's Guild were economic…
Reading the article, I do not see how rejecting the settlement between Google and the Authors' Guild improved the situation vis-à-vis censorship and privacy. I also do not see how approving the settlmenet would have prevented others from reaching a similar arrangement with the Authors' Guild, since Google was not granted exclusive rights. Nor do I see how the settlement would have threatened fair use: it would only h…
Anyone with shallower-pockets that then tried to do what Google did would likely have been sued by Authors' Guild – now strengthened by Google cash – or other members of the class. There was no precedent or requirement that others be offered the same deal as Google: if Authors' Guild liked their deal with Google (and why wouldn't they), they could tell others, sorry, we've already got a system in place, you're not part of it.
But further, why should other 'little guys' have had to fight a legal battle with Authors' Guild, or negotiate under threat of litigation by a de facto Authors' Guild-Google alliance, just to do something that (now, finally) is clearly authorized by fair-use?
The class settlement's Google-financed-and-managed system, for the benefit of the Authors' Guild class, would have started with an overwhelming and likely legally and economically insurmountable advantage in the scanning and marketing of older books. That gave rise to the centralization and privacy/censorship concerns of the ACLU, EFF, and American Libraries Association. They're smart and like old books, too – but perceived a risk that outweighed the benefit of "just scan 'em all quickly – under a Google/Authors' Guild monopoly".
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Interesting and surprising given that companies exist that offer it as a service, but I stand corrected.
They exist, but are well aware of the risks. And sometimes they find it wise not to test the legal boundaries: Any book you cannot scan? Unfortunately, WE CANNOT SCAN ANY PUBLICATION BY McGraw Hill. They do not allow us to scan their publications. When we receive any publication by McGraw Hill from customers, we will return it back by charging actual postage fee." http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php#8a