I really don't understand why Google's plan to digitize the text of thousands of books and make them searchable is controversial.
France didn't like it because they think it will be U.S.-biased. Get over it, France. Google is a U.S. company. What language do you think they'd do first? Hungarian? But I understand that. That's just France being anti-American.
Now some U.S. publishers are complaining too, and that's what I don't understand. They should be loving this.
Wikipedia made it. Half a million articles. 1.25 gigabytes of raw text.
That's a lot. I remember when I first read about CD-ROMs, one of the best examples they included to talk about its 600-megabyte capacity--which was unthinkable in the days when 40-gig hard drives were mainstream--was that it was enough to hold a whole encyclopedia with room to spare.
If you haven't heard of the hilarious JibJab parody of "This Land is Your Land," starring George W. Bush and John Kerry, click on that link, then come back here when you're done laughing. I'll see you in an hour or two.
Well, the supposed owners of the copyright on the original song weren't amused, so they threatened a lawsuit. But the good guys struck back. Not only is parody permissible (are they gonna sue Weird Al Yankovic next?), but the good guys made a convincing case that "This Land is Your Land" is public domain!
In case you haven't yet, you really need to read about The INDUCE Act. The potential is for any device that could be used to illegally copy copyrighted material to become illegal, and the manufacturers of said devices liable for their use.
This is wrong for so many reasons. Take the example of the crowbar.
I attended a sneak preview a couple of weeks ago of a movie that was released last week. The movie title isn't terribly important--it was a ho-hum flick that no one will remember in six months--but the measures, well, they gave credence to a comment I made recently in a conversation.
When my girlfriend said the United States is a free country, I said that at least when it comes to copyright, it's not.
The Public Domain Enhancement Act, which is the result of the Eric Eldred petition, has been introduced to Congress by two representatives from California. It's now known as H.R. 2601.
