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Reader's Corner - The Library of Utopia + resource links
Stoic Joker:
What I really wish would happen is if a cultural shift made "the new hotness" to be Creative Commons licensing, then all this copyright stuff would be like wearing bell bottom pants (and not as a retro joke).-TaoPhoenix (July 06, 2012, 11:52 AM)
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But I like bell bottoms, they fit much better over my engineer boots. :)
Besides, now is a bad time to blink on the IoE front. We need to keep pushing for a scorched earth solution that completely evaporates the **AA crowd.
TaoPhoenix:
What I really wish would happen is if a cultural shift made "the new hotness" to be Creative Commons licensing, then all this copyright stuff would be like wearing bell bottom pants (and not as a retro joke).-TaoPhoenix (July 06, 2012, 11:52 AM)
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But I like bell bottoms, they fit much better over my engineer boots. :)
Besides, now is a bad time to blink on the IoE front. We need to keep pushing for a scorched earth solution that completely evaporates the **AA crowd.
-Stoic Joker (July 06, 2012, 01:18 PM)
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(P.s. What is IoE?)
Unfortunately there really isn't a scorched earth solution, because we can't stop that huge list of revolving **AA gang that went into this administration. (Trivia Question - what is Al Gore up to lately? Do we have any indication he would have gone either into the War on Terror or Copyright Mania? Is THIS the true cost we paid when we didn't get him in 2000?)
I was serious about the Creative Commons thing - get the "Cool Kids" to suddenly change vectors and if it snowballs properly it COULD really throw a wrench in things. It's possible in our social media age - it feels to me like the SOPA situation - get just the right players and a few big corporate guns and suddenly it could explode.
I don't know a lot about Mitt Romney but I can't imagine he'll be any great advocate of net freedom - that was supposed to be Obama, and I really didn't see this extent of **aa pandering coming back during the campaign.
Someone with a deep pocket just has to decide that they stand to gain if they go the other way, and then slowly the small events will begin to matter until there's some kind of watershed that people will later point to.
IainB:
In my mind's idea of the The Library of Utopia there would be a special section dedicated to SciFi - which I have always enjoyed reading since childhood.
I just read that Singularity & Co. are helping to recover/revive orphaned SciFi as ebooks...per this post from goodereader.com:
(Post copied below, but do visit the website - if you haven't already. It is very interesting and worth subscribing to.)
Singularity & Co. is Saving Sci-Fi Through Digital Publishing
By Mercy Pilkington
2012-08-14
While current science fiction writers are enjoying the wealth of opportunities that digital publishing affords its authors, last week’s opening of the New York City brick-and-mortar bookstore Singularity & Co. is doing more than giving authors a platform for their new works. Rather, it aims to revive out of print and lost titles through ebook formats.
“We started with a simple but ambitious mission,” said marketing editor Kaila Helm-Stern in an interview with GoodeReader. “The co-founders [Ash Kalb, CiCi James, and Jamil Moen] realized there wasn’t a science fiction orientated space in New York anymore, but also that there was a missed opportunity to use the boom in digital publishing to rescue out of print, older, and forgotten titles. A lot of titles have been undiscoverable outside of used bookstores for decades, if not longer.”
For the staff of Singularity, it sometimes involves tracking down the authors or even their estates, which is actually helpful since they are also interested in the back story of how the book came to be. A Kickstarter campaign helped the founders to acquire the physical space and shed the old-fashioned idea of a bookstore by building it in conjunction with the technology of reading and publishing.
“We’re actually creating all of the ebooks in house. One of our partners is a copyright lawyer and he’s in charge of getting the authors and estates their money for payment. We create the ebook here with exciting new copies of their covers, since one of the things that’s great about these old, vintage pulps is the cover art.”
The ebooks are sold through the store’s website, but the physical space has been built as a haven for old and young science fiction fans, giving them a space similar to those that gaming fans and comic book aficionados have enjoyed for years.
“In terms of the actual physical bookstore, we’re happy to open it up to the community, but for the internet side, it’s kind of the most exciting part of our business model. The internet has really opened up the ability for us to have these books reach thousands, if not millions, of people who might not have seen them before. There’s also a really fast growing group of young people through online communities who are discovering sci-fi and fantasy, but there’s also the old guard of sci-fi fans who are discovering us on the computer. It’s great to cater to both the old fans and the new ones.”
Eventually, Hale-Stern and the founders are looking down the road to incorporating a print-on-demand model in the store to provide physical copies of long lost texts, but for now, the ebooks will have to fill the need for hardcore sci-fi historians’ tastes.
“We’re trying to blend the old and the new in terms of a publishing model, and make something exciting. We’re seeing the hunger for the book as a physical object.”
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IainB:
It seems as though we might not be able to expect publishers to play straight when it comes to prizing their fingers off the old business models and cartels, despite being taken to task by the courts in Europe - at least that seems to be one of the inferences to be drawn from this report from Digital Book World: (copied sans embedded hyperlinks and with my emphasis added)
Mystery in the EU E-Book Price-Fixing Settlement
Categories: Industry News
September 20, 2012 | Jeremy Greenfield
Four major publishers and Apple have agreed to a settlement with the European Commission over the issue of e-book price-fixing.
It’s much like the settlement Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster entered into with the Justice Department, so we won’t go into details.
There is a mystery here, though: Macmillan and Apple are part of this settlement and they weren’t part of the settlement in the U.S. Why did Macmillan and Apple decide to settle in Europe but will go to court next summer in the U.S.?
Macmillan told The Bookseller, “it is in the best interests of our European business.” Apple has been mum.
If the settlement is approved (there is a month-long public comment period), we could have Macmillan playing the agency game in the U.S. and using a different model in the EU.
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So, probably no surprises there then.
IainB:
Whoopee! An interesting and (IMO) positive development covered by Ars Technica: Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory
(Post copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory
Judge rules for Google's library partners in lawsuit brought by Authors Guild.
by Timothy B. Lee - Oct 11, 2012 3:15 am UTC
The Author's Guild has suffered another major setback in its fight to stop Google's ambitious book-scanning project. The Guild lost a key ally when Google settled with a coalition of major publishers last week. Now a judge has ruled that the libraries who have provided Google with their books to scan are protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. While the decision doesn't guarantee that Google will win—that's still to be decided in a separate lawsuit—the reasoning of this week's decision bodes well for Google's case.
Most of the books Google scans for its book program come from libraries. After Google scans each book, it provides a digital image and a text version of the book to the library that owns the original. The libraries then contribute the digital files to a repository called the Hathitrust Digital Library, which uses them for three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who cannot read the print copies of the books.
There are four factors the courts consider in fair use cases. Judge Harold Baer sided squarely with the libraries on all four factors.
Probably the most important factor is the first factor: the "purpose and character" of the use. The courts have held that "transformative" uses are generally fair. For example, it's fair use for a search engine to display thumbnails of copyrighted images in search results. Judge Baer ruled that the libraries' intended uses for its digital copies are similarly transformative.
"The use to which the works in the HDL are put is transformative because the copies serve an entirely different purpose than the original works: the purpose is superior search capabilities rather than actual access to copyrighted material," wrote Judge Baer. "The search capabilities of the HDL have already given rise to new methods of academic inquiry such as text mining." Similarly, Judge Baer noted, the scanning program allows blind readers to read the books, something they can't do with the original.
Also key is the fourth factor: the impact on the market for the works. While a book search engine obviously doesn't undermine the market for paper books, the authors had argued that a finding of fair use would hamper their ability to earn revenue by selling the right to scan their books. But Judge Baer rejected this argument as fundamentally circular. He quoted a previous court decision that made the point: "Were a court automatically to conclude in every case that potential licensing revenues were impermissibly impaired simply because the secondary user did not pay a fee for the right to engage in the use, the fourth factor would always favor the copyright owner."
The libraries' fair use argument is somewhat stronger than Google's because they are non-profit organizations with fundamentally educational missions. But significantly, Judge Baer did not rely heavily on this fact in siding with the libraries. Instead, he focused on the transformative nature of the libraries' use. And since Google is making virtually the same use of its own scanned copies of the books, it's a safe bet that there are some happy lawyers in Mountain View this evening.
The copyright scholar (and sometime Ars contributor) James Grimmelmann called the ruling a "near-complete victory" for the libraries. Indeed, he said, the decision "makes the case seem so lopsided that it makes the appeal into an uphill battle. Perhaps together with the AAP [American Association of Publishers] settlement, this is a moment for a reevaluation of the Authors Guild’s suit against Google. My estimate of the likelihood of settlement just went up substantially."
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