Watch the blog for more on this topic. From a somewhat more radical standpoint. (I now tend to think COCOA is flawed, albeit not so flawed as to be flat-out useless.)

(As for me, I'm signing the petition -- and granting Google blanket permission to index my works and make them available to readers. Because, y'know, I'm happy for people to be able to find my work in the library; but it'd be nice if they asked for permission first.)

I agree with your sentiment, and I signed the petition as well. Have you formally granted Google permission somehow, and if so how? I would be interested in doing the same. I need to talk to my publisher (O'Reilly) to make sure they are clear about the indexing rights question as well, but they have always seemed more than reasonable about this sort of thing.

Is this the place for this?

October 17, 2005
This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 222)
John Baez

"... Actually, just for fun, let's start with this science fiction novel I picked up in Heathrow en route to Berlin":

Charles Stross, Accelerando, Ace Books, New York. Also available at http://www.accelerando.org/book/

"This is one of the few tales I've read that does a good job of fleshing out Verner Vinge's 'Singularity' scenario, where the accelerating development of technology soars past human comprehension and undergoes a phase transition to a thoroughly different world. This is a real possibility, and it's been discussed a lot":

Wikipedia, Technological singularity,

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity,

Anders Sandberg, The Singularity,

"However, it's not an easy subject for fiction - at least not for mere human readers! Stross makes it gripping: sometimes goofy, sometimes thrilling, and sometimes rather sad. Characters include a robot cat with ever-growing powers and some space-faring uploaded lobsters.

"The hero, Manfred Macx, starts out as a freeware developer, futurist and all-purpose wheeler-dealer. Here's a scene from the beginning of the book, before all hell breaks loose":

[quote within quote within quote trunacted]
 
"An idea a minute - and the book is free online: what more could you want?"

Reading John Baez's stuff is mind-expanding itself, even if most folks (exceptions include Greg Egan, who's been cited there) have to skip the equations.

The question remains: under Google's plans (and see also today's New York Times book reviews of two differing books ABOUT Google), would we see more or fewer new works such as the following? Who would benefit? Who would suffer?

2928 Ways to Define Science Fiction
by Gary Westfahl

"... In December, 2000, Fred Shapiro, an editor working with Yale University Press to compile a definitive collection of quotations, asked me if I would be interested in editing a book of science fiction quotations, as a side project to his own book. After four years of labor, the completed book, Science Fiction Quotations: From the Inner Mind to the Outer Limits, has now been published. It represents, I believe, the first example of a fourth method of defining science fiction — not with a representative collection of complete works of science fiction, but with a representative collection of brief excerpts from various texts. To be specific, the volume offers 2928 passages of prose, and a little poetry, taken from 1208 works by 530 authors. These quotations, primarily intended to offer entertainment and insights, necessarily present as well a new sort of portrait of science fiction...."

For what it's worth, Holly Lisle has removed her books from google:
http://hollylisle.com/writingdiary2/index....-the-google-affair/

Andrew: True, Google should probably buy two or three copies of each book they index, at least when such books are available--that's how many copies they'll be keeping on their servers. We're talking, what, a couple of dollars in royalties? Remember, Google, unlike a library, won't let anybody read the book; they'll just quote a couple of sentences and link to a bookstore. They're an automated book reviewer (at least in their "30 words" incarnation), not a lending library.

It should be noted, though, that only a vanishingly tiny percentage of books in an average university library will still be in print. Once something drops into the backlist--especially 30 or 40 years into the backlist--it's frequently impossible to contact the author (without, perhaps, hiring a private detective). For every book that anybody remembers, there's a hundred more that sank without a trace. I want to search those books. I want to buy those books, used.

How much money would this pump into the backlist? In a good year, I spend thousands of dollars on books. Science fiction, technical manuals, you name it. I own almost every word our host has ever written, most of them in hardcover.

Serraphin: Book reviewers also quote ~30 words of your book, charge money for their reviews, and pay you no royalty. Sometimes they sell ads on the same page. Are you going to tell the New York Review of Books they're stealing, just because they quoted a couple of apt sentences in the course of their commercial venture?

With a little bit of organization on the part of authors (I know, I know), opt-out through COCOA could be as easy as looking up your ISBNs, verifying your identity, and calling it done. It could apply across Google, Amazon, and any future services. And such an opt-out process would allow the backlist to be indexed, which would never happen with any opt-in approach.

Mark, if you want to keep archive.org from recording your sites, you need to create a robots.txt file at the root level of your server:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion.html

If that's no longer possible, I think you need to contact them directly. Generally, they'll pull anything if you can prove you control the domain.

Realistically, if Google Print is going to be opt-out rather than opt-in, Google should at least make the effort to check established COCOA-style databases. This is a reasonable compromise, and one that would (a) respect the wishes of any author who's willing to make a token effort, and (b) save the Authors Guild from fighting Google in court over the legality of indexing.

Eric - I agree on why the google plan could benifit all of mankind. I'm all for freedom of information - but that's as in (to quote the Man) Freedom of Speech, not Free Lunch.

This is a commercial venture by Google, using another 'businesses' tool (i.e. book). Ergo you should opt in not have to opt out.

Goggle would kick the living shit out of me if I robbed their engine for a website of mine, that allowed you to search for keywords in my books...They'd make me pay.

A big difference between Google Print and libraries is that physical libraries have to buy a copy of the book they loan out. The American Library Association states there are 117,664 libraries in the US, so you could sell thousands of copies of your books just to libaries. Of course, over 93,000 of them are school libaries, so if you don't have a book they'd want to stock you're out of luck.

I think Google might be better off if they took the approach they're using with Google Scholar for copyrighted books.

Edited by author 11-15-2005 09:53 AM
Although an opt-out is good I think COCOA would help strengthen it more.
Also a great example of this:
http://www.archive.org/

I hope archive.org has an opt-out because I really don't want some of my old stuff up there, that I chose to delete.

In the U.S. I think it's: If I throw it up on the web and it's dated it's auto-copyrighted, but that's only related to my own jurisdiction so really more useless i think. I dunno.

Serraphin: But you have to allow someone to cache your site to let the www in its current incarnation work :)

True, but this is an argument about fair use: The web--and especially search--would be useless if people couldn't make copies and keep them on a server for a few months. (That's what Google does; they make multiple byte-for-byte copies and store them until the next scan.)

But what's the connection between copying being good for the web and copying being legal?. Not much, unless you believe in fair use. Fair use allows small infringements if they benefit society enough.

So why should we, as a society, allow Google Print to fudge copyright rules enough to scan books, index them, and show 30 words at a time? Because it would cost the average author little, it would increase sales of the backlist, and--most importantly--it would make most of human written knowledge available within a two-second search.

Huge benefit, little cost.

Again, this is an argument about defaults. I think that any author who objects should be able to (1) send a form letter to Google (and their competitors) telling them to leave certain ISBNs alone, or (2) post such notices in a common database. But if we actually require Google to perform copyright searches and secure individual permission for each book, we'll loose about 80 years of backlist, and a lot of minor works in the frontlist.

Yeah Bill - but think of the tech' of the time :) How much did your average book cost circa 1850? It wasn't worth plagarism as mass book publishing wasn't the norm!

I agree some copyright alterations over the years are mad, but I think that if you look deep down - this is more likely to be the music/film industry screwing the laws to their own devices.

Serraphin,

actually, reading about copyright recently - apparently back in the 19th C. when British authors were not covereed by copyright laws, they still managed to turn a tidy profit (selling exclusive rights to first prints, tec.)

Originally, copyright was supposed to last only about 5 years, but that has been gradually increased by intellectual rentiers to our ludicrous 70 years after the author's death (Bernard Shaw plays from 1890 are still in copyright!)

The balance is between the incentive to write and publish and the benefits of information dissemination. There are other models than copyright.

Hey Eric - I'm really getting into this one :-)

Right - Google Cache your site, not copy it. Very very slim (more or less undefinable) difference. But you have to allow someone to cache your site to let the www in its current incarnation work :) You can't view cached pages that are behind a secure site, for example, or my personal webmail.

UK libraries don't pay royalties to writers (Charlie's comment was that he gets a percentage of what they charge, which in the UK is nothing, so he gets - nothing).

But back to the real important thing that seems to be worming out of grasp on the Google plans. They are not indexing the books with 30 word snippets... Google plan to scan/OCR the Entire text of a book.

I'm sure no-one complains about having the cover-blurb published anywhere, or even a few paragraphs of flavour for a reviw.

But Google don't own my work - if they want to use it, they can damn well ask me. Even Bewildering Stories, a free e-zine who hold a few of my paltry efforts, ask me if they plan to anthologise or re-issue something.

I know for a fact Charlie's not against publishing stuff free (You do recall that you can get the entire of Accelerando, including cover art, free from the web thanks to Mr S?).

Copyright is important to writers, it's the thing that lets them get paid for their work and not have entire books snaffled by some smart arsed publisher with a printing press out back. Google, if allowed to copy entire texts without regard to copyright, are setting a dangerous precedent for those who would profit by stealing the work of others (which purdy much amounts to exactly what Google are doing).

Serraphin: I'm aware that Google would need to keep private copies of the books on their servers. But they already keep a private copy of the web, and nobody seems to think that's wrong. I'm happy to let them copy my (copyrighted, non-CC) websites.

But I'm also noticing some US/UK confusion in this thread. Apparently, the UK has extremely restrictive laws about fair use. For example, UK writers receive royalties from public libraries, a policy which would be laughed out of court on our side of the pond. And under US rules for backups, you presumably could make a private photocopy of a book.

Fundamentally, though, this is an argument about defaults: Should the Google Print's indexing be opt-in, or opt-out?

I've volunteered for the Gutenberg project before, so I have a good idea what it takes to get copyright clearance on older works. If you're dealing with more than a few books, it's basically impossible.

My argument: Claiming that, "Google can only index books with the author's permission," is equivalent to saying, "We shouldn't have a full-text searchable archive of anything besides pre-1920s books and the current front-list." And in the eyes this bibliophile, losing the ability to search obscure fiction from 1954 (say) would be a terrible crime.

Under US law, the solution is simple: Simply decide that indexing books and quoting 30 words is covered under fair use, and call it done. To appease those authors who can't _stand_ the thought that somebody, somewhere might read 30 words without paying, offer a way to opt-out. This approach worked fine on the web.

For me, the argument against building Google Print (at least the "30 words" version) is a time-reversed version of the argument for burning the Library of Alexandria. And if I recall correctly, the Library of Alexandria was built by impounding books at customs, making private copies, and giving them back. :-)

Once again, I agree that Google needs to offer an opt-out, and deal directly with the actual copyright holder.

Wow I have a headache here: I understand now. I am trying to figure out the loophole Google is crawling through. Maybe they think people can't prove they have an entire book online at the same time or something like that. After all, consumers only see a "Fair Use" version of the book. So how could one proove that they had copied an entire book all in one piece.

According to the Wall Street Journal, it looks like Google might be planning to offer digital rentals of new books in the near future: http://spadassin.blogspot.com/

That should throw a little more fat on the fire.

Eric - I think you may be missing the point. According to Google's plan, they're not copying just a few sentences.

They're copying the entire book, Google intend to scan the entire work of every book into a database.

So yes - mucho greatness to the people, as we can search for a word in the entirety of any text. However Google are reproducing the entire text of a book without the premission of the author.

I can't go and photocopy an entire book, no matter for what use. Neither can Google. That's what copyright is about.

It's not being anal, I've got a short story or two up on the web - they didn't make me any money (I'm self admittedly not good enough). But if someone else wants to reproduce the damn things, they had damn well better ask me! Even if you will "Make me money" I want to know about it first - remember your good idea, might be my ideological hell.

I agree with Charlie about the basic problem of whether Google are getting permission from the people with the right to give it. And, sepending on contracts, that might sometimes be the publisher. Arguably, the publisher is the obvious person to ask first.

A library is buying, and indexing, and lending, physical copies of the book, or physical objects generally. It's the same with DVD rental, and often the DVDs a different editions for rental and purchase.

Google may have to buy the physical copy to scan-and-index, and the index is their work, but after that they are in the business of creating new copies. "fair use" gives limited statutory permission.

I'm afraid I see a rhetorical pattern in all this, common in the propaganda of organisations such as the RIAA, which presents copyrights as something which only corporations have. And some of the processes advocated effectively exclude small copyright holders. They're not unlike some of the effects of the UK's video classification laws, where the fees for the certificate are based on running time, a cost of Pounds per copy for a short production run, and pence per copy for the movie undustry.

Jonathan -- it took a second for me to realize your post was predictive, but if that's what's to come it sounds great.

Anything (legal) that makes information easier to find and at the same time helps you discover new things you wouldn't have found on your own is good in my book.

So I asked the 2006 release of Google, with my voice interface, "Who used the word Chaos most often in the Jan/Feb 2006 Analog?"

Google flashed on my HDTV and told me in Brin-voice:

"Sun of Suns, Part III" by Karl Schroeder, illustrated by George Krauter, 6 links.
* "Images flashed across these squares like heat lightning, and everwhere, there was a CHAOS of noise." [p.189]
* "Whatever the CHAOS of its facade, inside at least the library seemed remarkably well organized." [p.204]
* "A CHAOS of screaming men and clashing swords surrounded her." [p.209]
* "They made enough CHAOS that we were able to get away." [p.213]
* "She fell off the gallery into th CHAOS of broken furniture and Hayden turned in time to see Travis, clutching his shoulder, stagger into the embrace of the wind and be snatched away by it." [p.214]
* "Through the closing hatch he could see the lights of the Unseen Hand flickering through a CHAOS of whipping branches." [p.219]

[#] subscribed HERE to Analog
[#] download these books by Karl Schroeder
[#] bid on art by George Krauter
[#] enter interactive "Kings of Chaos"
[#] download CHAOS: INFINITY [Science Fiction Poems], $10.00
[#] track Xanadu Micropayments to Karl Schroeder, George Krauter, and Dell Magazines (a division of Crosstown Publications]
[#] stock quotes for GOOG, DELL, XNDU, XAOS

I guess it depends on what the definition of 'money' is. Google is not ‘directly’ charging for their service. Plus ‘fair’ use is used by, for instance, reviewers, educationists, and the government controlled libraries; but they have their charges as well. I’m just trying to figure out how Google is any different then a magazine other then - it’s more useful.

Creative Commons is more the authors’ rights to where COCOA would seem more fluid concerning the technical aspects of how it is carried out. Maybe a COCOA wiki? I will sign it. There are definitely allot of concerns about how this new ex. Google service could/would be compromised, but I really think it will give a boost to CC.

NOTE: Just got ‘A Feast for Crows’ and it really is great after first two hundred pages. (I’m still doing paper because - don’t have a decent flat panel yet. Maybe the new ‘electronic paper’ will help me switch. Can’t hurt though)

Oh,

just for the record, fair use according to the copyright societies in the UK is paying to copy anything from a work, no exemptions. More generally, it is accepted there is an educational/research exemption which permits the reproduction of 5% or 1 chapter, or 1 article from 1 magazine, as long as it is not done for profit.

So, any of us could copy a chapter of one of Charles' books to go and write an essay about, for example.

I have to agree with the conclusion that the 'default' display Google intends for copyrighted works, with ~30 words of text containing the search term(s) and basic bibliographic information, is parallel in use and purpose to library card catalogs, book reviews, and indexing of web pages. On the face of it, it's fair use, doesn't require prior permission, and I'm not even sure about an opt out being required.

The fact that Google may make money from producing this index doesn't determine against fair use; if that were the case, any publication which charges readers for purchase and contains book reviews, and especially those that are *all* book reviews, would be in violation of copyright. I think it's pretty obvious that things like the New York Review are kosher, ergo short quotes are cool whether or not you make money off providing them.

For the extended viewing of multiple pages available under the Publisher program, however, you are absolutely right that it is not the publishers alone that need to be consulted - permission for these greater excerpts to be shown needs to be obtained from the actual rights holders. This is a large potential liability for Google, and your concerns here about the treatment of authors seems fully warranted. In short, I think in the long run they may run into more problems with assuming that any publishers contacting them actually have the rights they claim, than with the more limited fair use excerpts.

Actually, it seems to me like Google is almost bending over backwards too much for publishers. In trying out the beta, I did multiple searches for items known to be in the public domain, such as _Alice in Wonderland_. However, the top search results are invariably newer editions, still in copyright, with all the copyright restrictions in place, and it's very difficult to locate older editions that don't contain those restrictions. They really need to add a utility, at least in the Advanced Search, that lets you specify not just publication date but actually which program they've scanned it in under - public domain, regular copyright, or with rights holder's explicit permission - and filter your searches accordingly.

The lack of this kind of filtering mechanism actually favors publishers' newer editions over public domain editions, and while I certainly want to see publishers like Wildside Press rewarded for bringing back the works of James Branch Cabell, for purposes of doing research Gutenberg ends up remaining the better resource.

As an information professional I'd question whether any copyright clearance is needed to produce a separate index to a work.

The works I've seen on the indexing field assert the index belongs to the originator of the index - i.e. it is a new peice of work.

As a reader, I'm not convinced that showing roughly three sentences from a copyrighted work does the author any harm, at least under American copyright law. This is a service I'd very much like--and it would cause me to spend hundreds of dollars more on books each year.

Basically, full-text search of books--especially out-of-print but still-copyrighted works--would be the best thing for bibliophiles and readers since the invention of the public library. But as a practical matter, securing official permission for obscure books more than a few years old is simply impossible. So if you tell me that Google can only index books after securing written permission, you're telling me I can't have this wonderful, amazing service.

And if you tell me I can't have this wonderful, amazing service because you won't be getting royalties for three sentences, I'm going to side with Google. I will also submit public comments the next time the US Library of Congress reviews the relevant fair-use exemptions.

Now, I do agree with you on several things:

  * Google needs to offer an opt-out to individual authors--something along the lines of robots.txt. The proposal our host mentions seems like a step in the right direction.
  * For anything beyond a few sentences, Google does need to secure permission from the copyright holder, not the publisher.

(It should also be noted that if fair use does not permit indexing and showing 3 sentences, Google web search is completely illegal, too. Expect Google to fight *that* conclusion to its bottom dollar.)

I rather like Andrew's typo or joke: "untility" as the antiparticle of "utility."

Note also that the U.S. Government handles copyright registration through the Library of Congress, but two other forms of IP (intellectual property) through the United States Patent and Trademark Office whose home page is www.uspto.gov/

I wonder if Google is actually confusing copyrights and patents, or deniably pretending to. I deeply agree with Charlie in this matter. I own the copyright for what I write, when I write it. I may choose to assign part of it to someone else, for compensation, or to open source it in various ways, or to register the copyright. I am not as clear on how the EU apparently refuses to let you pretend that you are not the author of what you write. In the US, Isaac Asimov was correct in telling me "in a contract, anything is negotiable, including your name, and the date." Brussels and timestamps make that a provincial theory -- or is it?

Since the writing2 thread was closed, I don't know where to mention this, but my son loved "The Family Trade" as much as I did, and is equally eager for sequelae. Mr. Stross has at least two generations of fans in my family; I regret that I do not know what my father thought of his recent work.

I'm not so sure Google will do a good job handling copyright either. For instance, when I did a search for Ambrose Bierce, all the results that came up were for books in print, listed as under copyright , from multiple publishers -- even though his stuff is all out of copyright.

Since Google is scanning the actual pages rather than text, I can understand why they'd have to go by the copyrights of the edition the scanned, but it seems pretty shoddy of them to not scan any of the original texts that are out of copy right. After all, Project Gutenburg has hand them for years.

In short, I guess I'm questioning the untility of Google Print given the incompleteness of the database.

http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/definition.htm (Note this is the UK site - some differences may be found in US CR).

The minute you publish it - it's copyright. You can proclaim it copyleft or open (if you have the authority to do so), but still.

Mike - You CAN'T give google premission to scan and publish anyone's work other than your own, and then as long as it's not under contract to a publisher.

"Fair use" infers the right to print small amounts of the text as examples, for use in reviews - legal documents - etc. There are very specific realms of fair use. They nearly all involve not making money of the reprint of your work.

Also note - scanning the work is not fair use. As you've just used the publishers type-setting, font, etc. Any one of which may not be public domain (as a very unlikely but possible example - a publisher may use their own in-house type set. Which they would own, and you have to pay to use).

Copyright is a very interesting little beast - often abused by the wrong people, and very much misunderstood by others.

Oooooooooh...

Hark at Harlan Ellison.

Mr. Stross is correct that [in USA at least] "copyright inheres in a work automatically." There are many places online where one can learn more about the difference between having a copyright and registering a copyright.

There are experts in SFWA and the National Writers Union who have online explanations, and NWU has a printed booklet which is rather nice.

For cyberhistorical reasons, I refer also to the nonfictional 1993:
WRITERS RIGHTS DAY, L.A. Speech

The people whom I introduced and thanked mostly have new cogent things to add to the ongoing debates.

Finally: speaking personally, I'm not too hung up on copyright -- as long as I get paid money for writing, I'm not too fussy about how I get paid. By the same token, if someone else is getting money for my writing, I want my cut of it.

Normal lending libraries don't charge for access, they're a public service. I expect my cut of their profits, which should ideally be zero percent of zero.

Profit-making library services are another matter.

(Note that this is not the way the law works at present, but almost the opposite: I get a payment from normal lending libraries via PLR, but probably nothing from a hypothetical private profit-making library that's eating into my sales!)

Loss of earnings: academic in my case, but some folks within SFWA have opined that in the case of Amazon's "read inside the book" they're going to lose earnings because short stories they've sold to anthologies will be available in their entirety to people using Amazon.com.

Again, it is possible to consider works where a large chunk of the value inheres in their index; for example, reference works. Martindale: The Extra Pharmacopoeia retails for £400 a copy on dead tree, or as an online service for £25 a month. If Google index the dead tree edition they'll (a) be cutting the online service off at the knees, (b) be cutting the dead tree edition off at the knees (because it's not what you'd call recreational reading!) and (c) possibly have nasty medical liability consequences because people rely on the M:TEP drug monographs being up to date, and cutting corners by using Google search would be a really bad idea (but someone will do it to try to save a penny or two).

"Fair use" (US term) != "Fair dealing" (UK term). Certainly in the UK what they're doing is right out, and I'm pretty sure it's questionable in the US, too.

The issue isn't whether Google can scan and index my work -- they can -- but whether they can then let other people search the index and read pages they retrieve from Google's scan. Without being able to do the latter, the index isn't much use, but at that point Google is into the business of republishing the work for other people.

Incidentally, unless I'm very much mistaken copyright inheres in a work automatically -- there's no actual requirement to claim copyright over something you created. And the range of fair uses permitted is rather more tightly constrained than you appear to believe.

Finally, do you think that someone should ask your permission before putting your works in the card index for a normal library holding paper copies of books that is run on a for-profit basis instead of as a free public library?

Also, when you refer to your "potential loss of earnings", to what loss of earnings do you refer? What money are you making in a world without your works in Google Print that you will not make if your works *are* in Google Print?

But you've already lost all sorts of rights to your work, by claiming a copyright on it. Copyright is a quid pro quo kind of deal -- you get to exercise extraordinary control over what people can do with physical objects that they own, and in exchange certain fair uses are permitted and you can't prohibit them. If you want to keep full control over your works, issue them under individual NDAs specifying what uses are and are not permitted, and ensure that people get legal advice and sign the NDA before buying a copy of one of your books.

The only question is whether Google's use of copyrighted works falls into the "fair use" category or not. I believe that it does. If it *is* fair use, then of course your publisher can give Google permission to do this. *I* can give Google permission to scan and index your works. Because, in fact, they don't need it.

Note, in any case, that Google are very clear that publishers must hold the relevant rights in order to submit books, so if your publishers don;t hold those rights they can't submit your books in any case.

Sorry, trying to figure out a sound bite to express how I feel is a bit beyond me (recovering from my second nasty chest bug in one month right now). What I meant was, Google, Amazon et al are not public libraries in the conventional sense, they're profit-making businesses and they're not building these indexes purely out of altruism; they expect to use them to make money. They're also asking the wrong people for permission to make use of the works they plan to index. I'm (obviously, I hope) not planning on starting a shooting war with my publishers if someone in the rights department says "yes", but it's an area where the rights position needs to be disambiguated, and fast.

And I'm a bit annoyed that Google and Amazon are spinning this as an issue between them and the publishers rather than them and the copyright owners.

"I'm happy for people to be able to find my work in the library; but it'd be nice if they asked for permission first."

Not the best imaginable figure of speech, since of course a non-virtual library doesn't need your permission to shelve your book, nor to include it in their card catalog.

Edited by author 07-03-2004 07:08 PM
So a "1911 British imperial copyright law" reverts copyrights to the creator's estate, 25 years after death?

Is that the 1911 Copyright Act, and did that feature ever get amended by later Copyright Acts.

I don't recall the dates off the top of my head, but Tolkien Enterprises, that fine and respectable bunch of Hollywood Lawyers, bought the film rights before Professor Tolkien's death, which was rather more than 25 years ago.

Yep, that's about the size of it. As a result, the peanut gallery mostly vanished into a flame war about the evils of Piers Anthony rather than staying on topic. All a bit discouraging ...

The review was indeed quite positive, which is good. But what kind of idiot starts a review by insulting most of a book's potential audience?

"Most SF is crap and people who read it are stupid, but...".

That'll really make people enthused about Charlie's work. Feh.

Slashdot just posted a review of Singularity Sky, Charlie. For me It's always as much fun to see what the peanut gallery has to say about the review as it is to read the review itself. Looks pretty positive so far.

I don't think that guy who wrote the essay on game characters is all that well-informed (and there are earlier versions buried in the file too). I've been playing on multi-player on-line role-playing games for most of the time I've had a connection to the Internet. My characters have been described by a series of text entries in a database, and it would be simple for me to create printed copies.

He seems to be looking at a rather narrow range of games, where the onjects which are tradable are actually created as much by the game (and the operating company) as by the players. I think that there is room to argue about who owns the copyright, but if a game object cannot be owned by a player because there is no legal framework, as he argues, than how can the game company own the similar items which make up the universe.

He seems to be arguing that a book can be protected as a system to store words and present them, but the arrangement of words cannot be protected.

And that sounds crazy.

Edited by author 10-03-2003 09:05 AM
Gee. I naively thought that US companies were outsourcing software development to foreign companies because they could then pay developers one-tenth of what used to be the going American rate.

Several decades ago, an obscure US political magazine had an article on the ten dumbest members of Congress. The one they named as the dumbest called a press conference to deny the accusation -- which, till then, very few people had heard of. It ended his career.

That won't happen to Fox News. But, judging from the article in the New York Times, they've set themselves up for a libel suit. They've made allegations which are irrelevant to the case. It's very difficult for a public figure (which Al Franken is) to win a libel suit in the US; but I believe the major obstacle is proving malicious intent.

Actually, giving them a percentage creates an incentive to approve extremely broad patents. Really, I'd just pay patent examiners on a salary, and fund the Patent Office like a normal goverment agency. I'd also just abolish software and business method patents as a category, but that's a harder reform.

Fannishly quibbling: Last time I looked, "Thorazine" was the brand name for chlorpromazine.

Neel: you want incentives for patent examines? Trying adding a stick to the carrot. For example: give them (a) a percentage royalty of profits made from a patent while it is in force (even if it's only something like 0.01% that'll be substantial in some cases), and (b) fine them for passing too many patents. (Not a direct monetary fine, but something that gives them a disincentive from passing too many.)

Even if you just re-jig their performance reviews along these lines rather than giving them money, that should work.

But the real problem seems to me to be that patents were originally conceived of as a concession to allow inventors some defensive space; these days they seem to be seen as a natural right and they're used aggressively by companies that can't compete on the basis of their ideas.

It's not just the computer-related patents that are upgefuckt.

For instance, the most extreme example of USPTO incompetence is, amazingly, not software patents. It's the "business method" patents which are the most destructive and ill-conceived. I mean, you *want* innovative new business methods to spread through the economy as quickly as possible. And not granting monopolies on business methods creates no disincentive to innovation, because companies have to innovate to beat their competitors anyway.

The real problem at the USPTO is that patent examiners are (IMS) paid according to the number of patent applications they approve. This sets up obviously bad incentives....

On the Shamen album "Axis Mutatis" there's a track sequenced from one of the band's DNA. In fact, they've been offering a free download of the software for ages from their Nemeton site:

"There's also a piece of software on Nemeton devised by Colin that's designed to turn DNA sequences into midi code. It basically transforms the protein structures that determine human life into electronic music. There's a track, "S2 Translation" featured on their new LP that's been generated by this software. "The program is really for molecular biologists", Colin explains, "allowing them to download any DNA sequence from Genbank and 'listen' to the resulting protein"."

(quoting from http://www.nemeton.com/axis-mutatis/biog.html)

There's certainly "prior art" on the idea of protecting computer data/programs by calling the recordings "music". The idea was floating around in the early days of home computers, when they usually used ordinary cassette tapes for storage, and it's certainly been published. Back then there was some doubt about the application of copyright law to computer programs, which was when the wnole concept of licenses started.

Late 1970s.... If the patent examiners were competent, the current idea would be pretty heavily restricted, like to a particular encoding method, But patent examiners dealing with computer-related patents seem to be pretty ignorant pf the field.

Actually, I'm not optimistic -- but there's a big space between optimism and total despair. I'm certain that the democratic process will protect us from a future like RMS's "The Right to Read". I'm not at all certain that it will ward off a future where copyright regulations have turned the IP industries into cartelized giant ground sloths. But "not certain" cuts both ways: I'm also not certain the bad guys will succeed because individual action can make a difference. Giving in to despair means giving up to the security-entertainment complex.

Neel: your faith in democratic processes is touching, and I wish I shared your optimism.

I really don't think that the "fascism" tag is appropriate, because that implies anideology and worldview. Instead I think the IP conglomerates are motivated by plain old money.

If computers and CBDTPA-style DRM were pervasive, an IP supplier could charge each customer a different price for each view of the data, carefully tuned to extract the maximum amount of money. In economics, this is called a perfect price-discriminating monopoly, and represents the theoretical maximum amount of monopoly power a business can possibly have. So what our IP barons see is that with a few tweaks to the law they could enter the B-school nirvana of legally-protected monopoly. Now, any Chicago-school type would tell you that this means that Disney & co. should be willing to spend as much money influencing Congress as they can potentially receive as windfall profits -- and this is a BIG number. In terms of lobbying we ain't seen nothing yet.

This fact should not inspire despair, though: they have a ton of money but the democratic process really honestly does mean that the little guy's voice isn't drowned out. (This is one of the big surprises the public choice literature had for me: calling your representatives matters. The astonished tone of the papers describing this phenomenon is really funny, too.)

Edited by author 05-17-2002 03:32 PM
I remember reading, way back when, some of Thomas Jefferson's writings in defence of what was then called "freedom of conscience," in which he specifically mentions the idea of a government cataloging one's library as a egregious endangerment to liberty.

Someone ought to dig that quote up. I'll poke around and see if I can find it.

Edited by author 05-14-2002 06:49 AM
Regarding advertising, there is an interesting article in the FT. It discusses new research on what people actually do in TV ad breaks: "people spend most of their time actively avoiding ads".

Re: RFID tags in books.

 Meet the TagBlaster! for 9.95 you can fry your book ID tags so that they will never function again! Be discreet! Be safe! Be destructive in a good cause!

 Alternatively just put your books in a microwave oven for thirty seconds or so on "High" and Hey Presto! Problem solved.

Oops! I didn't register the fact that you can't use <br> tags. Sorry!

"I am, I admit, not typical. But if you take me as a representative sample of a subculture, you might suspect that a visible percentage of the population are consciously resisting the ever more intrusive marketing attitudes exemplified by Jamie Kellner's attitude."
<br>
<br>I suppose that I am pretty atypical too, but spam definitely makes me feel kinda sick inside, and I can't stand TV/radio advertising. I basically never watch TV anyway, and can avoid commercial radio except in shops and taxis... But I really find the culture of commercials deeply disturbing. I worry about what it's doing to future generations' perceptions of the world. Whenever someone goes "oh you know, the music in that <insert product here> ad, and I don't have a clue what they're talking about, people react with astonishment. And when I see street ads, bus ads, or whatever which make no sense to me, I feel really... violated maybe, when I realise that they're part of some cross-media campaign and I haven't seen the TV ads.
<br>
<br>When such huge amounts of money are poured into what is basically a big con job - getting people to buy a product, not on its merits, but on the success of the rhetoric of the advertising campaign - something's really wrong...

Hi Charlie - I haven't posted here before, but two of your diary entries got my attention. The first was on putting RFID chips in books. I pretty much agree with your view on the matter, but it's unfortunate that the big brother implications of these chips overwhelm what could otherwise be quite a useful tool. I was discussing this with a librarian at the Western Australian State Library yesterday, and apparently they recently investigated using RFID chips to locate misshelved books. Seems a good, benign use of the technology (though there are probably other solutions), but I think they balked at the cost.

On advertising and spam: I find that increasingly I'm involved in try to not only filter it out, but to filter out our whole mass communications culture. I don't use a mobile phone (though they are enormously common here); I use an answering machine to filter messages; I tape television shows so that I can skip the ads; I read newspapers, but don't watch tv news usually; and so on. While mass communications can be a wonderful thing (I run a government website and have my own webstuff), I think a little distance is important too. -- Jonathan Strahan


PS: Apologies for the error with the previous post, which appeared in error as by Arthur Hanlon. It was me. - J

The system you're talking about gives you one bit of information -- is the acoustomagnetic tag magnetized or not. You can then use this bit to answer the question "Has the clerk checked out this book or not?" to detect shoplifting.

According to Charlie's report, this is not what the UK Bookseller's Association wants. They want an RFID chip to track each book individually. Think of it as an individual license plate for every book sold. This is vastly more information, and opens the door to many more uses -- like tracking exactly who bought which books. There are good uses for this information, like bookstores developing better customer profiles: imagine moving into a new town, and the local bookshops automatically updating their inventory to cater to your tastes. But there are also really terrifying uses, like the police subpoena-ing those profiles to find out what subsersive literature you've been buying.

Cathy: exactly the same inventory control tags are used in British shops, too, to prevent shoplifting. (They're passive antennae that re-radiate EM when you try to leave through the gate without them being removed or degaussed
or something).

That's why I'm so suspicious about this move.

But why can't they use systems already invented? In the US we have security systems that insert a tag in the book. It sends out an electronic impulse which is turned off or bypassed when you purchase the book. The only major problem is that our college bookstore buys books with this system and doesn't turn it off (they don't seem to need security). When the students bring the book into our library, bells are ringing for the first two weeks of the semester, as we turn them all off.

There are easier and cheaper solutions than this one!

Nope, sorry, I can't convince you you're wrong -- because you are entirely correct. I'm of the opinion that the only hope for free electronic communications is if Linux can grow too large to kill before the copyright barons are able to convince the national legislatures to mandate tagging everything. The path they are trying to push us down is entirely as disastrous and ill-conceived as anything Juan Peron could come up with.

My current threshold for dropping everything and becoming a full-time crypto-hacker is for a CBDTPA-like bill being enacted into law. When that happens it's time to man the barricades. I don't think I will have to do it this year, but I wouldn't bet a whole lot of money on my doing anything else five years from now....