[Leica] Re: Google book scanning

[abridge at gmail.com (Adam Bridge)]

I believe your quote was "fair use" and was properly attributed along
with a link to the parent publication. That seems good technique to
me.

Unfortunately the kid-lings of the world, in their great desire to
take music, have really made a mockery of intellectual property. On
the other hand copyright holders have pushed the length of ownership
out so far that it seems meaningless.

Once images are release onto the web I think they have to be
considered "in the wild". You put them there at your own peril. Maybe
if you have great steganography you can point to mis-used images and
demand either compensation or that they be taken down, although Tina
hasn't managed to have one of hers taken down after years, according
to one of her recent posts here.

Maybe there's a business model to chase down digitally water-marked
images for rights-holders but I doubt if most of them would pay what
it costs in terms of development and time to make it happen.

Adam

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 8:09 AM, Lawrence Zeitlin
<lrzeitlin@optonline.net> wrote:
>
> On Nov 18, 2008, at 7:44 PM, Tina wrote:
>
>> "One thorny issue has already reached the courts.
>> <http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588-5907506.html>Google faces lawsuits
>> from publishers and authors that claim it is violating their
>> copyrights and overstepping the boundaries of fair use laws.
>
>
> Here is an extract from ZDNet.
>
> "But not every copyright expert is so sure Google is on thin ice. Truth is,
> there's no consensus in the legal community on this one-of-a-kind case. The
> fight comes down to a simple question: Is the search king setting itself up
> to be a copyright violator of epic proportions, or is it a champion of
> learning trying to make even the most obscure books readily accessible in a
> Web search?"
>
> Apart from the fact that my quote may itself be a copyright violation, the
> problem in the academic community is a very real one. As a professor
> teaching doctoral level courses at a very large university a couple of
> decades ago, I found it very difficult to get publishers to consider
> printing annotated collections of obscure articles where the expected
> worldwide total sales would be less than 1000 copies. The entire national
> enrollment of graduate students in some very advanced specialties is often
> less than 100 and class sizes of 5 to 8 were common. What to do?
>
> Fortunately our publication department had recently purchased a high speed
> Xerox printer and we could run off "print on demand" editions of 200 page
> texts on short notice. After we had received the permission of the original
> copyright holder, of course. Today custom publishers like Blurb or Lulu
> could do the same job, and in full color too. But every scholar would have
> welcomed the opportunity to download those obscure and often impossible to
> obtain documents from the internet. Think of the trees that could have been
> saved.
>
> When teaching in India in the 1980s, I was shocked to find that even the
> largest university libraries had very few of the standard texts that were
> widely available in the U.S and Europe. The cost of a single textbook, at
> U.S. bookstore prices would have exceeded the monthly income of an average
> family. As a professor in the U.S. I was overwhelmed by the free copies of
> textbooks that would arrive in the mail every day in the hope that they
> would be adopted as required reading. For several years, through the
> courtesy of Air India, we provided an airlift of textbook publisher's
> samples and overruns to local Indian college libraries. India seems to be
> doing well economically these days but the cost of books is still well out
> of reach of many Third World countries. And in other countries, publication
> and sale of some books is absolutely prohibited. Try to buy a Bible in Iran
> or Saudi Arabia.
>
> So I, for one, applaud Google's efforts.
>
> Larry Z
>
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