Because They're French!

The Bookseller reports today that France is launching a competitor to Google Book Search.

Of course they are.

Barbara Cassasus writes:

The project, to be unveiled at the [Paris Book] fair, will offer more than 60,000 digitised works from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and 2,000 from about 50 publishers, some of whom received subsidies for the purpose. The BNF plans to add another 40,000 books imminently, with those copyrighted books supplied by publishers expected to quickly exceed 10,000.

Because why use something already in existence when you can reinvent your very own French wheel?

Peter Brantley on Google

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an interview with Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Foundation on the possible settlement that Google is preparing in response to lawsuits from publishers and authors. The Chronicle, unfortunately, requires a subscription for web access. But Peter Suber posts a fair-use excerpt on his website.

NYT: New Media is complicated

The writers are striking, and it's about YouTube.

Well, actually, it's not about YouTube exactly, but it's about writers reminding producers that they, too, are entitled to a cut of what the New York Times is calling "so-called-new-media revenue":

Screenwriters argue that their labors generally create programming that has very high value — value that would seem to multiply as it spread over more platforms.

Media companies have a story to tell as well: If they are about to make jillions on new media, the markets don’t seem to think so....Writers, still smarting from giving away the store in terms of video and DVD before the true value of those businesses became apparent, are not about to cave in. Producers, who have yet to find a revenue model for digital content, do not want to be hamstrung by a costly deal with writers while they try to figure it out.

"Exaggerating" Copyright?

The Times is chock-full of book-industry stories today (were they saving them all up?) and of course in the business section there was the article about Yahoo, Microsoft and Google - in the guise of their trade association, CCIA - filing an FTC complaint against the NFL, Major League Baseball, NBC, Harcourt and Penguin, stating that these companies

display copyright warnings that are a “systematic misrepresentation of consumers’ rights to use legally acquired content.”

The complaint alleges that the warnings may intimidate consumers from making legal use of copyrighted material, like photocopying a page from a book to use in class.

“It is an attempt to convince Americans that they don’t have rights that they do in fact have,” said Ed Black, the association’s president and chief executive. “This is part of the larger context of what should be and what are proper rules for copyright in an Internet age.”

 

Legal blog urges poaching of BISAC codes

I ran across a weird little post today on the legal blog Slaw, a Canadian site devoted to "Canadian legal research and IT":

If you're working on a simple taxonomy of legal topics, you might take a look at the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) subject headings for law....I imagine, not being a copyright maven, that this sort of list is in a grey area, keeping company with compilations and tables of contents. I understand from some personal experience that it takes effort and creativity to elect a set of terms within a discipline and to order them. You'd be hard pressed, though, to prove that with a few twists here and there a list wasn't arrived at independently — and, more to the point, perhaps, these are such broad terms and so basic to legal work and promulgation no one should be able to stand in the way of their free use. Which is why I think the routine overreaching of copyright notices like this one are silly and maybe harmful: "No part of the attached documents may be… reproduced in any manner whatsoever…"

Well, if this guy had sat in on the meetings during which these subject lists are composed, along with all the publishers, booksellers, librarians, and others who fly to New York once a month and bust their butts on this, perhaps he wouldn't see the copyright notice as being particularly "overreaching". 

 

Kakutani Gets Advance Copy of HP7, Reveals Nothing

God bless her.

For several moments, I was afraid my pre-order for Saturday morning was in peril. 

 

Spoilers Go Viral

Following on the heels of yesterday's release of HP7, painstakingly photographed page by page, over BitTorrent, spoilers have strafed across the web faster than Stealth fighter jets. Scholastic is vigorously sandbagging leak sources, a phalanx of Bloomsbury lawyers have swung into action, and those who want the full Potter reading experience are hunkered down in basements without internet access, wearing blindfolds and noise-reduction headphones.

Or so the media would have everyone believe.

Defense Against the Dark Arts of...Photobucket?

The Times reports that Photobucket.com (a subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp) has been asked to provide certain web pages to Scholastic that may violate HP7's copyright. Additionally, Scholastic has subpoena'd Gaiaonline.com for the name of an individual who posted pictures of the pages of HP7. Scholastic has said there are at least 3 different copies (or partial copies) of the book online with what they call "conflicting content".

It's kind of like watching a plague of mosquitos attack a bear.

Bloomsbury Lawyers Unplug TorrentFreak

New York magazine reports that the website streaming the new Harry Potter book prior to publication has been, uh, zapped with Petrificus Totalus. See for yourself here.

Meanwhile, they warn to "click carefully" for the next few days. They don't call 'em spoilers for nothin'. 

Harry Potter hits BitTorrent

TechCrunch reports that the new Harry Potter has been leaked on BitTorrent. In their words: "Simply where there is a fan with a will, there is a way."

Digitization for the Disabled

Robert Martinengo, of the University System of Georgia, has an interesting job. He works on converting textbooks into formats accessible to the disabled. In this day and age, that means a little more than just audiobooks - although audio certainly plays a huge role. It means "assistive technology" - which helps students with cognitive disabilities (as well as the blind and deaf) read differently.

Bob recently gave an address at the O'Reilly TOC conference about the ways assistive technology and developing book technology can work together for consumers as well as the disabled. He brought up an interesting copyright point - that the need for accessible materials for disabled people is so pressing, getting permissions to create these "derivative works" is often an obstacle. He's proposing a change in copyright law to allow educational institutions to create accessible media for their disabled constituencies, without having to defy copyright law to get these folks the materials they are entitled to.

More info is here.

Google/CIC contract gets legs

PW reports on Peter Brantley's discovery (reported here on Thursday) that the CIC libraries' contract with Google doesn't give the libraries their own copies of in-copyright material:

The terms of the CIC deal reflect a growing change in Google's attitude toward the publishing industry. Mark Sandler, CIC director and former collection development officer at the University of Michigan University Library, pointed out that the CIC deal differs not only from Google's deal with Michigan, but from its other library partnerships as well. "I think there's just been a lot of discussion over the last two years," he said. Sandler said he didn't disagree with some of observations by fellow librarians concerning the deal, but said that, without the funds, time and staff to undertake their own major scanning efforts, CIC libraries are satisfied to have Google provide some measure of access.

Brantley Calls Out Google

And that to me is potentially the saddest loss, should such an arrangement come to be realized. Because in real terms, across this vitally important collection of humanity’s literature and thought, of all the ways of thinking about books and working with ideas on the Web, we might be left with only one way.

Google Keeps Reelin' 'Em In

Google continues its Sherman-like march with the absorption of the Community on Institutional Cooperation into its digitization project. The CIC is a consortium of 12 academic libraries - the Big 10 plus 2 more - in the Midwest. This brings the total number of Google Book Search partners up to 25.

Windows Live Search is...Live

The big news, of course, is that Microsoft's Windows Live Search is live. Cliff Guren explained all the features today, and it's very similar to Google Book Search except for this important differentiator - no scanning of books with dubious copyright status. Microsoft scans books that are out-of-copyright, and publishers submit in-copyright books for inclusion (giving their permission for scanning).

There's no cost to publishers for the service. And there's no print functionality, or even cut-and-paste functionality, in the search: "As we all know," Guren says, "hacks run amok." So expect a few wiseasses to create end-runs around the protections that Microsoft has installed.

Publishers are able to control how much of a book they want consumers to see - including blocking certain pages from view altogether (in the case of a mystery, for example), or images to which they don't have the rights.

Guren admitted that the primary reason behind Windows Live is competition with Google for "query share" - which has a heavy influence on ad revenue. Look for a Windows Live demonstration at the Crystal Palace - which sounds like a brothel but is really a section of Javits.