Posted on 03/26/2011 10:06:40 PM PDT by Libloather
There has to be a better way of handling orphan works than expecting every author to step up and complain that his work has been sprayed all over the world with no notice and no compensation. Maybe an official orphan candidacy list published on the Internet and on paper by the Library of Congress which allows a significant amount of time, like a decade, to go by with the work on the list before the work gains orphanhood.
As words on paper diminish as our mode of communication, can there be a bigger monopoly on information or a more dangerous carte blanche on taking for one organization the ability to delete or change intellectual content than this project? All someone with changing rights has to do is change the core record and it’s changed forever - oh so sorry, we can’t seem to find the original version of the last chapter of that historical work....But, sir, this is the way it always read, don’t you know....
This next generation of tactic after getting control of the media, is to get control over how the world will get to see the entire body of the civilized world’s intellectual works.
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
I agree. While the basic concept may have considerable intrinsic merit, the conferral of such a degree of power and control to any single entity is very dangerous.
Card catalogs and libraries are dying. Yahoo searches are "powered" by Bing as of last summer. Yandex is Russian.
The problem here is, for Google, their product is the data-mined profile of their users. Their customers are advertisers (and others) who pay for this information.
This is why Google gives things away: Android, Chrome, YouTube, Picassa, GMail, etc.
Soon they hope to have a streaming music service so they can track that behavior as well. They'll do no differently for books if the become gatekeeper to the repository of millions of out-of-print volumes.
YOU are their product, the mouse in the maze. Free stuff is the bait to get you into the maze for observation. Those observations are sold to advertisers (and perhaps other 3rd-parties). Selling your profile is where Google gets nearly all its revenue.
We'd never allow government this detailed look at our behavior: what we read, what we email, what we watch... why are we so keen on embracing Google?
If a library allows Google to digitize a book in their library, is the library prevented from allowing anyone else to do the same?
In some cases they might just put the book out in front of the library to be given away to anyone who wants it.
If the prevention stems solely from the fact that large-scale book digitization and indexing is expensive and technically challenging, then that would be OK in my view. On the other hand if it takes the form of a legal agreement, then it deserves close scrutiny, e.g., does the library have the right and is Google guilty of unlawful trade restraint?
In some cases they might just put the book out in front of the library to be given away to anyone who wants it.
I read somewhere that Google's standard procedure for most books is to guillotine off the spine and put the freed pages through a heavy-duty page feeder. Only if the book is fairly rare do they laboriously hand-press each pair of pages against the glass.
Good luck with it!
Yeah, that's too bad. The more independent search engines there are, the better. If memory serves, Yahoo used to use an indexer they built themselves out of the remains of Alta Vista, which they bought from Overture. When they first started, they used human librarians to build directories of pages about various topics, a totally ineffective and nonscalable approach. Google's original insight was to realize that analyzing linking patterns could harness the intelligence of web authors and turn them into unwitting and highly effective and scalable librarians. That's what gave them their crucial edge over the mere term indexers.
And, da, Яндекс is Russian, but they are actually pretty good. Sometimes it's interesting to compare their results to Google's. The more the merrier.
We'd never allow government this detailed look at our behavior: what we read, what we email, what we watch... why are we so keen on embracing Google?
Because it's dirt cheap and works better than anything else. Google's motivation is to get well paid to produce a superior product. The government's is control, so that the do-gooders can make sure you do their idea of good, while draining your bank account to pay them. Of three viable business models — ad-supported, subscription, or taxpayer-supported — which would you choose? You can always subscribe to Lexis, you know, and for some types of searches, you may find them superior. But they are expensive, and Google is free.
Actually, Google's second major innovation was its business model, its way of auctioning off search terms and ad placement. It created the money machine which has allowed them to grow and innovate further. It isn't perfect, however. Recently I got a gmail from a colleague requesting a "dump" of something off the company databases. Google surrounded the email with ads for trash haulers and dumpster rentals. They were completely off-topic, but at least they were local ;). Next time, I'll have to log on through our Amsterdam office and see what ads show up.
Do you want to ban digital books alltogether, since they are so easily modified?
It doesn’t matter that there are billions of computers worldwide if only one company has the ability to scan and preserve books. Only books scanned by that company will appear on the billions of computers. People could, of course, change their copy to read as they wish, which is another issue because then how will we know what the author originally wrote. It’s very hard to change what’s printed in black and white and bound into a book. It’s there for all to see as long as the book exists.
There’s a place for scanned old books, but not a monopoly for Google.
[[This is where ‘opt-out’ comes in. If you don’t want your book in Google, it won’t be. You have that right as the copyright holder.]]
[But that is the question. Why should I have to opt out of anything? Google needs to be the one asking permission.]
[Maybe an official orphan candidacy list published on the Internet and on paper by the Library of Congress which allows a significant amount of time, like a decade, to go by with the work on the list before the work gains orphanhood.]
Might not be a bad idea. But why wait 10 years for books already out of print for 50.
We agree. If that’s their practice — to destroy the book in the process that deserves scrutiny as well.
When I was in college, the college library would occasionally put books out, free for the taking.
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