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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

"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.

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).