Day 1019: Fight The CDMCA!
June 11, 2008 - Filed Under books, digital rights, global, government, public domain
Sweet ghost of Johannes Gutenberg, this is awesome! Gordon Duggan of Appropriation Art has put out a comic book about the ongoing, mostly covert efforts on the part of the Canadian government to lengthen that nation’s copyright terms (currently a moderate life-plus-fifty) and to stifle user rights.
As Cory Doctorow says at BoingBoing, “this is just staggeringly great, the perfect primer on the shameful attempt by Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice to smuggle the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law without debate or public input.”
Day 898: eBook News
February 11, 2008 - Filed Under books, media, project gutenberg, public domain
One million books scanned at U of Michigan
Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.
Google Book Search: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly
Forget everything you believe about Google’s book digitization project. Once you get past the freakishly high numbers bandied about, the two-dozen-plus distinguished institutions that have signed on, the legal paranoia and the ultra-ultra-secret processes and technologies involved, you’ll find that Book Search (from the fifth most valuable company in America) is simply another high-cost effort that is simultaneously visionary and crude. It doesn’t even have to succeed in order to impact the transformation of scholarship activities.
Just a reminder that scanned copies of paper books are not eBooks, they are merely photographs of books (susceptible to copyright). A real eBook is plain, searchable and reformattable text.
NYTimes: The paperless society?
“Paper is no longer the master copy; the digital version is,” says Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit digital library. “Paper has been dealt a complete deathblow. When was the last time you saw a telephone book?”
… After rising steadily in the 1980s and ’90s, worldwide paper consumption per capita has plateaued in recent years. In the richest countries, consumption fell 6 percent from 2000 to 2005, from 531 to 502 pounds a person.
Remind me to email Brewster and let him know that loads of telephone books are manufactured and delivered everywhere in this city. They are then recklessly thrown into the dumpster, thanks to our non-existent recycling effort, but they do exist here in all their mulchy glory. Then again, this is New Orleans we’re talking about.
Day 881: More Evidence Of The Internet Killing Books Sales
January 25, 2008 - Filed Under books, digital rights, public domain
Alchemist Author Pirates His Own Books
… and increases sales dramatically.
[Paulo] Coelho’s view is that letting people swap digital copies of his books for free increases sales. In a keynote speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more.
Day 683: Optimal Copyright Term Is 14 Years
July 13, 2007 - Filed Under books, project gutenberg, public domain
So says mathematics (thanks, D)
[Rufus] Pollock’s work is based on the pr[e]mise that the optimal level of copyright drops as the costs of producing creative work go down. As it has grown simpler to print books, record music, and edit films using new digital tools, the production and reproduction costs for creative work in have dropped substantially, but actual copyright law has only increased.
The result? An optimal copyright term of 14 years, which is designed to encourage the best balance of incentive to create new work and social welfare that comes from having work enter the public domain (where it often inspires new creative acts).
Forever minus a day? Some theory and empirics of optimal copyright
This is exactly what Michael Hart and I have been arguing (him in papers, me on listservs) for years, but now with proof and a not-so-round number.
Day 663: On Lessig’s Makeover
June 23, 2007 - Filed Under public domain
Stanford University law professor, Lawrence Lessig, officially departs from the intellectual property debate. His new area of study is corruption.
I can’t honestly say it’s a big loss. Whomever wrote CopyCense: On Lessig ought to be the new “torchbearer.” They get it.
Lessig has proclaimed before that he was retiring from focusing on intellectual property, and like the rapper Jay-Z and too many boxers, he did not walk away. His latest series of writings on his blog, however, suggest he is, in fact, ready to step out the door.
… We also think the litigation team Lessig lead in the Eldred v. Ashcroft case seriously depersonalized the case into a strictly legal argument that was hard to win. We have opined often that the only way federal courts are going to change their holdings in copyright cases is if the debate is less about economics and law, and more about the simple fact that people — individuals — are getting screwed.
… inside the courtroom, Lessig’s argument generally failed to make apparent what we’ve heard him make apparent in other venues: Disney’s manipulation of the term extension issue means that a 10-year-old girl in Iowa can’t come up with the next great animated character because Disney wants to shackle culture to stuff its wallets. (To be fair, Lessig has conceded he made strategic errors in the Eldred litigation.)
Day 632: Funny Like A Big Stuffed Rodent, I Amuse You?
May 22, 2007 - Filed Under books, public domain
Just in from MSH (and mostly for the enjoyment of Mr. Suds & Soliloquies and JTG):
Looks like Hamas is finished. They just crossed Disney.
Nobody messes with The Mouse and survives.
Related Links:
IP, IP, IP, Find Out What It Means To Me
It’s worth noting that, as someone who would love to earn a living writing stories and such, my mind isn’t 100% made up on, for example, the ultimate desirability (or undesirability) of copyright. But one thing is clear: The current IP regime is completely out of control, and it matters a great deal in terms of our wallets, our privacy, our real property rights, and — ultimately — our freedom. The notion of intellectual property, as presently applied, is fundamentally at odds with a free society.
IHT: In print forever? Sometimes, authors would rather go out of print
Simon & Schuster, Random House, Inc. and Penguin Group USA are among the publishers who say that they are letting fewer and fewer books go out of print because of print on demand, or POD, which emerged a decade ago. Print on demand allows slow-selling titles to stay available by keeping them on a computer database and printing copies upon request, instead of keeping unsold texts stored in a warehouse, a system long regarded as costly and inefficient.
Day 621: Michael Hart Interviewed On NPR Today
May 11, 2007 - Filed Under computing & internet, media, project gutenberg, public domain
Founder and executive director of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart, was interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday this morning. Fellow interviewees are Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive (that “dovetails with Project Gutenberg”) and Michael Keller of Stanford University’s library (representing Google). The topic is Digital Libraries and universal access to all knowledge. This conversation will help those of you who want to understand the importance of and need for the public domain. Also, pay attention to the dialogue between Kahle and Keller about images of texts (Google effort) vs. actual eBooks.
“eBook” is not about format - paper books vs. electronic text. The issue is content over form and “ownership of personal libraries as [people today] own their personal computers.”
“Real men don’t make backups. They upload it via ftp and let the world mirror it.” — Linus Torvalds
To listen to the interview, click HERE.
Day 608: Hart Article In Global Politician
April 28, 2007 - Filed Under books, culture-society-history, media, project gutenberg, public domain
Michael has a great article in the Global Politician entitled Web2.0 - Erudition, Not Hoarding: Response to Sam Vaknin. With computing and electronic media, as with any medium including book, newspaper, television, radio, its value depends on the user. For the person who really doesn’t want to learn, the argument over medium is immaterial.
Older Posts »… Sam Vaknin comments, “the fare served up by the electronic media everywhere now consist largely of soap operas, interminable sports events, and reality TV shows.” Still, he does not give credit to this independent effort by thousands of people worldwide to bring a new kind of library to electronic doorsteps everywhere … If one cannot judge, cannot evaluate, cannot assimilate or chooses not to assimilate, then one is simply awash in a sea of words Sam has described above.
… Vaknin’s final quotation concludes here: “This relativism is dooming the twenty-first century to become the beginning of a new ‘Dark Age,’ hopefully a mere interregnum between two periods of genuine enlightenment.”
… These “New Dark Ages” are not fostered by the masses. They are the outcome of the abdication of the intellectuals, those who could have been great teachers and scholars, great librarians of the Third Millennium’s multi-billion book libraries … If you take neither side, then you, too, have abdicated humanity.
