Springer Releases eBook LIne

According to a recent article in Publishers Weekly, publishing company Springer has launched "its newest initiative to deliver its content electronically. The Springer eBook Collection debuted June 24 with more than 10,000 e-books...Springer is offering its e-books without any digital rights management software."

Find the complete article here.

You will also find an interesting online conversation among industry experts, execs, and the like entitled "Is It e-Book Time?" - read others' comments, and post your own as Publishers Weekly asks the question: "Springer's announcement about a new e-book product is just the latest example of renewed interest in the format among certain sectors of publishing. With that being the case, do you believe e-books will evolve into a viable segment of the industry?"

Office Suite Teams Up With Creative Commons

According to a press release issued by Microsoft, the mega-company is teaming up with the non-profit Creative Commons to offer copyright licenses directly in the MS Office suite of products for application to Powerpoint, Word, and Excel projects.

From the article:
"The goal of Creative Commons is to provide authors and artists with simple tools to mark their creative work with the freedom they intend it to carry,? said Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of Creative Commons. ?We?re incredibly excited to work with Microsoft to make that ability easily available to the hundreds of millions of users of Microsoft Office.?

The Creative Commons copyright tool addition is already available for free download at the MS Office site, here.

Read the entire release here.

Awww, cute...

While the very serious battles over copyright, fair use, and plagiarism rage on in all sectors of media and communications there is one dashing superhero, Captain Copyright, making his way through Canadian public and private gradeschools, extolling the "A, B, C's of Copyright" and so on.

It's really not a bad idea - getting them younger and educating them on the issue, before they get it into their heads to illegally download that book or music track in the first place.

The website also has a section that Canadian teachers of grades 1-8 can access for classroom tools toward teaching the basics of copyright law to their young students.

This link was sent to us by a visitor who noticed our growing collection of copyright-related oddities and such.
If you find a link to something regarding copyright law, and it's a bit off-the-wall, please feel free to email us .

Copyright Law vs. Intellectual Property

Google Book Search Under Brit Fire

British publishers have now joined the argument against Google's Book Search.

From article:
"Lynne Brindley, chief executive of The British Library, didn't appear surprised that Google has found itself at odds with the established print industry.

Is 'Fair Use' Getting a Fair Trial?

This article, in response to upcoming legislation regarding copyright, music download issues, and in particular the definition of 'fair use' is on many a publishing executive's desk today as the industry watches with keen interest what's going on on the other side of the neighbor's fence.

From the article:
"The new Section 115 Reform Act (SIRA) of 2006 is scheduled for markup tomorrow, and the EFF is sounding the alarm. "Why the rush?" they ask. "Because otherwise someone might notice that the bill represents an unholy alliance between the major music service providers (AOL, Yahoo, Apple, Real Networks, etc.) and [the] music publishing industry. If the bill passes, they win, but fair use loses..."

"The EFF says, 'This is dangerous language that creates a dangerous precedent. When courts look at how copyright should apply to new digital technologies, they often have few judicial precedents for guidance and thus they turn to the Copyright Act itself for clues about how Congress views similar issues. Incidental copies made in the course of otherwise lawful activities should be treated either as outside the scope of a copyright holder's rights or as a fair use (even the Copyright Office agrees on the fair use point). But you can be sure that the copyright industries will use SIRA as a precedent to the contrary in future fights.'"

Read the full text of 'Will "fair use" be fundamentally redefined this week?'

Publishers Attempting to Head Off Google

From Information World Review comes this article detailing how the "Major publishers are racing ahead with their alternative offerings to Google Book Search" with Harper Collins Publishing heading up a major effort in a deal with Newsstand, an online media distributor.

Macmillan Publishing is also reportedly working to develop its own online variation "BookStore" beyond the working-prototype stage.

Richard Charkin, chief executive of Macmillan is quoted as saying, "Publishers have to get their act together with the entry of Yahoo and Microsoft into the arena alongside Amazon and Google.?
 
Find the entire article, with links to more info about Macmillan's effort, here.

Lessig: The Law vs. Technology

Professor Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, and copyright-law expert details his thoughts on what he sees as a "war being fought against creativity" on the field of technology in this article from the BBC.

Lessig suggests a new approach to copyright law, advising that the relative industries: "Embrace and celebrate the potential of new technology. Stop suing our creativity back into the dark ages of the 20th Century."

Lessig touches on the hazards of stifling projects such as Google Print, and calls the new glut of copyright issues "the age prohibition."

Read the complete article here.

Vinton Cerf: Father Net and Google Exec on Google Book Search

Ask and you shall receive: just yesterday we were wondering if anyone had anything to say these days about Google Book Search - and voila, an article from the Washington Post today "Google's Goal: A Worldwide Web of Books" talks to Vinton Cert, famous for his participation in the founding of the internet and current Google exec, about his own "dead-tree" book collection and thoughts on digitizing.

Find the article here.

Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine on Book Scanning and the Digital Library

From The New York Times Magazine comes "Scan This Book! " a fascinating insider's analysis on the future of the digital book, the concept of a universal library, and the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google's book digitization project.

"The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages...

Section 108

The Section 108 Study Group "is a select committee of copyright experts, convened by the Library of Congress, and charged with updating for the digital world the Copyright Act's balance between the rights of creators and copyright owners and the needs of libraries and archives."

According to the group's website: "

Google Has Taken the Hit

this time around, as a California judge ruled against the internet mega-company for violating the copyrights of an adult entertainment website by displaying thumbnail images from the site in it's image search results.
The court's analysis of the circumstances, as well as the final ruling, was based in part on "Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp." a previous case that left a thumbnail/copyright issue law on the books in 2003.

The court also looked at Section 107 of the Copyright Act which states:
"The reproduction of a copyrighted work will not constitute infringement of the copyright if the use is for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research." This fair use doctrine also lists four factors to evaluate whether a particular use is fair: "(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." 17 U.S.C. §107."

For a detailed legal analysis of the court's decision on "Perfect 10 vs. Google" from the San Deigo Source, click here.

Copyright Office Tries To Place Orphans

From today's copyright issue headlines:

"The Copyright Office is proposing legislation that would make it easier for libraries, universities and archives, including the Library of Congress, to digitize collections that contain ?orphan works.?

These orphans are the millions of unidentified but copyright works that are in danger of slipping into obscurity because their owners cannot be found.

'Our primary goal is to construct a system that more often brings owners and users together,? but still allows use of the work if the owner cannot be found, said Jule Sigall, the Copyright Office?s associate register for policy and international affairs.'"

Read the complete article here.
Source: GCN

11th Annual World Book and Copyright Day: April 23, 2006

"23 April: a symbolic date for world literature for on this date and in the same year of 1616, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega all died...
By celebrating this Day throughout the world, UNESCO seeks to promote reading, publishing and the protection of intellectual property through copyright."

From the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization website.

Read the official message of Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO, declaring the 11th annual World Book and Copyright Day, this Sunday, April 23, 2006 here.

What We're Reading

The (very, very) short list of what and who we're reading:

Copyfight, "...touching on intellectual property conflicts, the evolution of copyright..."

The Institute for the Future of the Book, "Starting with the assumption that the locus of intellectual discourse is shifting from printed page to networked screen, the primary goal of the Institute for the Future of the Book is to explore, understand and influence this shift."

Lessig Blog, "Professor [Lawrence] Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace."

Publishers Weekly, "The international voice for book publishing and bookselling."

Library Journal, "...edited to provide a one-stop source for all the information that library directors, managers, and others in public, academic, and corporate/institutional libraries."

American Booksellers Association - Bookselling This Week, The latest headlines in the book industry.

Find more in our 'links list' to the right, just below the headlines.
If you're on the web and in the book publishing industry, involved in copyright issues, or lbraries and content management, and think we should have a link to your site, .

Bip on Copyright

Marcel Marceau, world-renowned mime entertainer celebrated for his performances in 'Baptiste' and 'Praxitele and the Gold Fish' and best known for his alter ego 'Bip': the silent clown dressed in tattered black and white striped shirt and deflowered silk top hat, has another little-known title to his credit 'What is Copyright?'
Seriously.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) website hosts the four minute forty-four second film here.

If Copyright Was Just a Game...

The geeks at Dvorak offer their own version of the copyright fight, in a free and printable card game.

Each 'content card' is worth a whopping 10% of humanity's written works. Other cards that may help, or hinder, a player on their way to controlling 70% of all copyrighted material - the point at which the game is apparently won -include: 'book burning,' lawyers,' 'funding cut,' 'Project Gutenberg,' and 'raid.'

As if it could ever be that simple....

This is apparently an older design as there are no cards for Google, Napster, or Creative Commons - and Sonny Bono is in the deck.

Find the deck and rules here.

Lou Dobbs is a Blithering Idiot

This time I didn't say it... did. For a great debate on Friedman vs. Dobbs, check here.

The goddessly , meanwhile, continues to feed me fun tidbits. In France, we hear that it is NOT fair use to make a backup copy of a DVD. However, the real fun is still with Google. Apparently a porn site is suing Google over fair-use issues - Google displays this site's "intellectual property" (sorry) in its Google Image search. Why subscribe to the porn site if you can get the images for free? Google argues that it merely displays thumbnail images, but according to this article, "Perfect 10's lawyers argued that the thumbnails, which it notes are quite a bit larger than the average thumbnail, have value to the magazine because it sells small images to a British cell phone company.

Curiouser and curiouser. We like us a good IP rumble.

It must be February

Predicting the future

Says the Guardian: "This article, like others in the paper, will be blogged and circulated across the web tomorrow." Happy to oblige....The article is actually an interview with Lawrence Lessig, discussing the Creative Commons license - how this differs from regular copyright continues to elude me. I suppose, like so much, we have to wait until there's a court case.

In other news, the Free Range Librarian will be speaking at the upcoming ALA - a preview of her brilliant ranting can be found here.

Eyes on China

The AP (via MSNBC) reports today that China's economy grew 9.8% last year, largely in the service industry (which had gone under- or unreported in previous years).

MSNBC also reports, interestingly, that a Chinese court has upheld Starbucks' copyright claim to its own name and logo. "It will ... hearten the many other foreign companies in China that face competition from local companies imitating their brands, trademarks, logos or packaging."

It's the service industry precisely that has more copyright issues than manufacturing or mining. Keep your eyes peeled, mateys. Piracy's going down with the ship.

Fair Use

I got an email the other day from a client who aggregates content for redistribution - this email was from a company called XB90.com. They are a company that goes around swiping bloggers' RSS feeds without approval/permission (and certainly no compensation), and then if you don't wish to participate in their distribution service (which is also free), you have to "opt out".

Kind of like Google Print's reading of copyright law- "we have the right to copy and distribute your stuff unless you tell us not to."

No, folks, that is not the way it works. XB90.com's site is down today, but there are plenty of others who step into the vacuum. Om Malik has a great piece on this - and as usual, all roads lead back to Google - in this case, the AdSense program.

At some point someone's going to realize that great content is not just a vehicle for advertising, but a product in and of itself.

A great convergence

Stanley Greenfield is brilliant.

On Sunday, I came across this little gem about selling books by the chapter or passage, citing programs in development by Google and Amazon. Stanley, of course, has been doing this for YEARS - he began in the 1980s, with Dial-A-Book, where you could call up and hear the first chapter of a book. As the Internet took hold, Stanley digitized these chapters and distributed them to Amazon, B&N, Borders, Ingram, B&T, plus all the independent Internet bookshops.

There was a period during the bust, as these bookshops began collapsing like a house of cards, when a lot of us were wondering whether Stanley would be able to make it. The market for digitized chapters seemed to shrink drastically, and it seemed like he'd saturated it.

But he held on. Stanley is both wise and tenacious, and he knows a good thing when he's got it. He drove his own costs down - he was one of the first people I ever knew who outsourced to Asia. And lo and behold...now that Amazon is doing "", now that Google is contemplating a "book rental" program (hello? anyone ever hear of ebrary?), Stanley looks damn near prescient.

Then there's China.

In the 1970s, Stanley was doing a lot of business with China. Now that China's opened up again, Stanley's got a whole infrastructure of contacts there, already in place - he knows how to work the government, and the kinds of political/economic machinations that thwart a lot of US companies are a breeze to him because he knows the ropes already. Yesterday, Stanley sent me a press release which began thusly:

Xinhua China Ltd.., the majority shareholder of the largest book
distributor in the People?s People?s Republic of China, has signed an
agreement with Dial-A-Book Inc. to mount more than 25,000 Chapter One book
browsing excerpts of English language books on its dealer network in China.

Open for Business

Folks, get'cher book searches here - Google Print is open for business. Launching today over the hue and cry from publishers and authors, the long-awaited book search component offers full-text-searchability for thousands and thousands of titles. Google itself has proudly blogged here. Now they just have to get U.S. copyright law changed, and they'll be good to go.

Meanwhile, in less-publicized news, Amazon has announced it is selling books BY THE PAGE. Useful for those who only need a chapter, who would otherwise either have to buy the whole book or (far, far more likely) wouldn't buy the book at all. Great incremental sales.

Microsoft, not to be left out, announced a partnership with the British Library to scan its public-domain titles - some 75 million items - although its agreement with the British Library is a little fuzzy as to the distribution of that content.

So many books...so many copyright laws...so little time....And they told me being an English major was useless.

Google Print: Bandit or Robin Hood?

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of the Creative Commons movement, chimes in not a moment too soon on the Google debate. In the Sydney Morning Herald:

Professor Lessig makes the point that if Google Print is illegal, so is Google
itself. Google is simply indexing and organising text, which is what any library
does. The fact that it is using the internet to do so is irrelevant - it just
makes it easier to do what any visitor to a physical library does. All that's
changed is the technology, which means the old ways need to be re-examined.

The article largely covers Tim O'Reilly's stance on copyright and piracy (wherein O'Reilly says, wisely, "Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy"). But this is an interesting thought and one we've been advocating for quite some time - yes, Google Print is a violation of copyright law. Absolutely. But does that mean the project should not go forward? Not necessarily. Digitizing the text of every book you can get your hands on and putting it in a search database is of course a very useful thing. But when technology bumps up against deep legal tradition, interesting things happen. And frequently the law gets changed.

InfoToday reports that Microsoft is getting in on the book-digitization act (of course) starting with public-domain works. (Now THERE'S a risk - how many different iterations of Jane Eyre are out on the web? By my count, there are at least 6 on the first two pages of a Google search. How many do we NEED?)

Too Busy Working to Blog

Right, so we won't call October our most productive month ever, blog-wise, though work-wise there's a whole lotta shakin' going on. But there are some good things to report: Muze is looking for a few . Muze is a fun company to work for - I enjoyed my time there considerably.

Google continues its steamrolling of the book industry. On 10/27, several librarians in the CUNY system and I gave a presentation at BMCC, where we each tackled a separate facet of the Google presence in libraries. This is an ongoing project (in other words, more presentations, articles, etc.), but in the short term you can access my bit of it here. (Thanks, Hamid!)

The Charleston Conference is next week, and I will be on the Batphone on Saturday discussing publishers and ISBN-13.

We're treading water here, not suffering from lack of business but from lack of FUN NEWS!  us your squibs, people - Tess and I can't do it alone....

Who's Your Copyright Holder?

Making Mama Happy

8 minutes ago, the AP released this juicy little tidbit:

Internet powerhouse Yahoo Inc. is setting out to build a vast online library of copyrighted books that pleases publishers ? something rival Google Inc. hasn?t been able to achieve.

"That pleases publishers" - good luck. At any rate, the Open Content Alliance is the name of this project, which Yahoo is building in conjunction with a number of other partners. Says the Yahoo spokesman (interestingly named Mandelbrot):

Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors.

Which means the archive will be rather small. But Pat Schroeder is happy, and we all know when Mama's happy, everybody's happy.

Once more around the Google bush

Googliscious

Internetnews.com carries a story that explains more fully what Google's interpretation of "fair use" actually is.

Jonathan Band [an IP lawyer and expert on digital content] said that search engines rely on the concept of implied license for their Web indexing, assuming that webmasters have posted information online because they want it to be found. He pointed out that Web masters could place exclusion headers in their site code, telling crawlers to keep off.

"By giving publishers the opportunity to opt-out of the Print Library Project, Google is replicating the exclusion feature of the Internet," he concluded.

Which makes perfect sense. Except what Google's talking about replicating is not already on the web - which is the whole point of Google Print. What Google's doing is creating that online information database in the first place, and THEN indexing it. The indexing part is fine. It's creating the vast pool of unlicensed data to crawl in the first place that's up for debate.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation equates what Google is doing to creating a card catalog. Which, again, is PART of what Google is doing. The OTHER part of what Google is doing is copying books into digital format so that they can index keywords, subject matter, etc. It's that "copying books into digital format" part that's got publishers' and authors' panties in a twist.

Now, if the publishers and authors were already doing this, and posting that content online for Google to crawl, that'd be one thing. But that is not what's going on here.

Personally, I think the idea of a massive digital database of all the books Google can get hold of is a great idea. I love the idea of being able to locate books as well as journal articles, blogs, personal websites, what have you.

But I do find the opting-out-of-scanning to be a little disturbing. I understand that the entire book won't be posted online and nobody's going to lose out. But that little frisson of "we had to copy your work for our project and we couldn't find you easily to get permission so we just went ahead and did it - if you don't want that, let us know" to be a little...well, it assumes that the value of Google Print is worth more than the value of an author's individual copyright.

And that's not how we operate under copyright law.

If Google were to work with the Library of Congress, for example, that might be a different story entirely. Because all books which are copyrighted must be on deposit with the Library of Congress. If Google were to strike a deal with LC, and work WITH them, then perhaps we wouldn't be in this little pickle now.