Thursday, September 24, 2009

Google Books Settlement Delayed Indefinitely

Read all about this --> here <--

I think that any delay is a waste of time - millions of books have been scanned and most of this is either out of copyright or orphaned works.

from the article by Miguel Helft of the New York Times;

"..Judge Chin also echoed comments made by the Justice Department last week that the settlement, if properly revised, could offer great benefits, most notably, by providing broad access to to millions of out-of-print books that are largely locked up in a small group of university libraries.

“The settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as D.O.J.,” he wrote, referring to the Department of Justice, which filed its own brief in the case last week. “It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit.”

Horrible! A Waste of time and lawyer fees. Google is the new library, and this case has now been pending for more than four years - enough.

How is it that Apple was able to get the artists to see the vision of iTunes and the iPhone, so anyone can listen to anything anywhere - and here we have greedy fools like the heirs of authors, including representatives of the estate of John Steinbeck, all stopping what cannot be stopped - it is not about Google Books, it is about enabling the world access to books. What has the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers done to help with THAT ? NOTHING. They are as bad - if not worse - as the RIAA.

Friday, September 11, 2009

For the record - I am all about reducing using paper as a method to exchange data / information. It is slower, takes up more physical space, can't be mirrored easily and more often than not ends up in some landfill.

I am a contributor to the CATO institute. That should help explain a lot of things to you about my views, but perhaps this post might seem contradictory to the first part of this blog post...

I had always thought that Books and Newspapers are legally different than any data or information distributed using a cable, broadcast and satellite - and it seems that they may not be !

This is one of the questions being answered in Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission


Important stuff to us all...

http://reason.com/blog/show/135999.html

In the above link there is a Cato Institute video, based on the first round of arguments in Citizens United, highlights the lengths to which the government has been driven in defending Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) speech restrictions.

Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested (link is a PDF) that books are already covered by the electioneering communications ban, which applies to messages carried by satellite as well as cable and broadcasting, when they are read on devices like Amazon's Kindle.

Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart agreed.

This is totally insane.