derivative work

Or rather, the phenomenon that is Google cries out for Tom Lehrer. Come out of retirement, Tom! Political satire is not obsolete, notwithstanding Kissinger’s Nobel …. A colleague posted on a listserv a brief note about an article on “Google’s planes”. I thought, no, really? Google is buying planes? for streetview, I imagine — holy [...]

The ALA’s Copyright Subcommittee (Committee on Legislation) is hosting a panel on the Google Book Settlement at ALA Midwinter this year — Saturday at 1:30 at the Grand Hyatt. (I’m on the committee and on the panel.) Should be interesting. Come to the Google Book Settlement Session at ALA Midwinter Conference January 24th, 2009, 1:30-3:30, [...]

I hadn’t previously heard the word “googlegängers”, which the American Dialect Society deemed “most creative” word last year. But I love the concept, which Stephanie Rosenbloom explored in the NYT today. Apparently lots of people follow the lives and careers of people with the same names as themselves.

open source install fest at Bay Area schools, Sat March 1 (linked at badgerbag) Liz Henry, Annoyingly sexist framing of Google VP Marissa Mayer Heather Morrison, No to author’s rights? Let your librarian know!, Poetic Economics (link from open access news) Jonathan Eisen, Editorial: PLoS Biology 2.0, 6(2): e48 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060048 (2008) – a moving essay [...]

The Ninth Circuit has weighed in on Perfect 10 v. Google (captioned Perfect 10 v. Amazon.com on the 9th Circuit case download website). The opinion is by Ikuta, who (IMO) got it right on the Fair Housing Council decision yesterday. It’s a long opinion, and I’m still working through it. But here’s a summary of [...]

The WSJ editorial page is not something I ordinarily frequent, but they recently wrote an editorial on the DMCA. Aside from a reflexive and simplistic “intellectual property is good so don’t bother me with nuance or details” attitude, this paragraph struck me: Google claims “a legal safe harbor” from copyright infringement under the 1998 Digital [...]

so, interesting things are going on right now that I have plenty of valuable, earth-shattering comments to make (google’s resistance of the DOJ subpoena, the new google 512 decision, siva’s latest article about google in the Chronicle, a recent discussion about personal releases & permissions culture, an exciting conference I just attended), but so is [...]

As a former medical librarian I thought this editorial by a medical librarian in the BMJ was fascinating. First this amazing information: Within a year of its release Google Scholar has led more visitors to many biomedical journal websites than has PubMed (J Sack, personal communication, 2005). … which certainly lends credence to the pro-tagging, [...]

I like the flow of the google / library discussion: what’s the essence of library? and suspect I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time to come. (It sounds like a delightful perfume: a bit musty with an sweet undernote of decaying paper and an overnote of astringent preservative, maybe.) Just picking out [...]