random quotes ... to amuse, inspire, enrage:
He was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy. And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy. "Mister!" he said with a sawdusty sneeze, "I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues."
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, [...]
siva linked to “scan this book!”, a NYT magazine article by kevin kelly, with a promise to post comments about it soon. i look forward to them, and in the meantime will post my own (hurried & no-doubt flawed) quick reactions to one point: Authors and publishers (including publishers of music and film) have relied [...]
More Google Print … Although the media coverage is only picking up, to me, it seems that some of the most interesting discussions have died down. So, here’s a very few that caught my attention for one reason or another: Google Kills Children, A Whole Lotta Nothing, 2005/11/5: Link and complaint about interview with spokesperson [...]
Oy. The Google Print discussion just keeps going on, and on … Karl-Friedrich Lenz makes the point that Yahoo!’s opt-in only venture, and older search databases that licensed content, weaken Google’s case. Yep. As a copyfighter, though, I resist the idea that copyright-holders already legally possess that level of control over copyrighted works, and can [...]
I just got around to reading the weekend’s Washington Post Google Print editorials, pro (Mary Sue Coleman, UMich Pres) & con (Nick Taylor, Authors’ Guild). Short editorials, and I suppose the format limits their ability to go beyond rhetoric (“access to vast libraries of content” … “this is a socialist plot!”) into any actual legal [...]
I’m pleased to see the Google Print issue spurring discussion of the role of corporations in controlling access to information. See, e.g., today’s post @ Gnuosphere [link from sivacracy] Gnuosphere, Siva, and others point out that Google isn’t doing Google Print out of the goodness of its heart; the company is scanning, indexing, and providing [...]
Meghann Marco, a new author, would like to have her book indexed by Google, but her publisher says no, they’d rather sue. [link from kottke.org] As a person who spends a large part of her day trying to get people to read her book, I asked my publisher to include me in Google Print. They [...]
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 [...]
More on Google and Siva’s response (and my responses to Siva): Recap: In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is implementing an opt-out provision in its scan-copyrighted-library-books program, and delaying scans of copyrighted books until November. [google blog] This has been widely reported as Google backing down. See, e.g., “Chilled by [...]
Up early for my spouse who caught a red-eye. Now she’s resting peacefully and I of course can’t get back to sleep. But that’s okay, because there’s the Internet! Positive outcomes of BlogHer: Mary Hodder at Napsterization is establishing a Speakers’ Wiki. In response to publisher anxieties & thinly-veiled threats of litigation, Google is implementing [...]