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It must be February

Category: Copyright Law, E-commerce, Metadata
The Chinese are buying things online, the fair use debate continues….Nothing new under the sun here….

The divine brings to our attention a new site, Book Catcher, which offers free PR for writers and publishers….What I can’t figure out is who these folks are, where they came from, and how they support their site. If you have any info, let me know about it….

In metadata news, while Joho the Blog is peppered with comments about his Italian vacation, David Weinberger does refer us to an interesting idea here. The idea that keywords can be aggregated and almost naturally organized into taxonomies is something I’ve been working on for nearly a year. While a lovely hypothesis, particularly when multiple users are involved (folksonomies, wikkisonomies), it certainly isn’t perfect. But I do think that a bottom-up approach is much more organic and the results do come out better. What makes me nervous is the participation of too many people in creating a taxonomy that is meaningful – eventually you run the risk of category-bleed and…as David says, "Everything is miscellaneous."

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Posted by Laura Dawson, 9:08 am, Comments (0), permalink

Magical math from Amazon

Category: E-commerce

announced today that its earnings for the 4th Q 2005 were down 43% from last year…which naturally made several jaws drop here at Fort Brooklyn – it’s Christmas season…WTF???

Then one reads, a little further into reports, that last year Amazon took a $239 million tax benefit during the last quarter. A one-off.

Stock dropped a little bit…but it’s the usual smoke-and-mirrors finances we have come to expect from a company that runs its accounting department like a game of 3-card monte. In other words…shrug.

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Posted by Laura Dawson, 9:47 pm, Comments (0), permalink

Information Wants to Be Paid for By Advertising

Category: Google, Metadata

Silicon.com reports today that the World Association of Newspapers is going to "challenge the exploitation of content" by search engines by…well, they haven’t decided what they’re going to do yet. They’re French.

But their argument is similar to what a lot of publishers and authors are arguing regarding Google Print – that even the metadata required for listing a product (whether it’s a book, a news story, or any other piece of intellectual property) is worth something. A headline (or book title), a photo (or a picture of the book jacket), a little blurb on what the thing is about – that’s enough to get an advertiser interested. Will publishers and authors see any revenue from ads on Google? Will newspapers likewise see any revenue from ads on search engines?

The search engine’s argument is that it provides "exposure" for products like books and music and news stories, and it’s up to the publisher to actually SELL the stuff and make THEIR share of the money. The cost of listing is paid for by ads. In other words, what Google does with your metadata is their business.

This comes up at meetings with publishers periodically – can anyone claim ownership of metadata, or is it in the public domain? The fact that a news story is about orange groves – can someone make that determination and say, "I own the relationship of this news story to that subject of orange groves"?

Or is making that relationship considered creative and copyrightable work? Someone else could read the story and say, "That story’s about the effects of hurricanes on local economies."

The more search engines are capable of doing, the more interesting copyright law is going to get.

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Posted by Laura Dawson, 1:46 pm, Comments (0), permalink
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