Google and the Orphan Brats

Had I but world enough and time.... I'd write a LOT about the Google Books Settlement! Especially since it's all over the news (well, the kind of news feeds and newsletters I subscribe to), so there's a lot to think about and comment about. But I do find this piece especially interesting, which was in the most recent New York Times Book Review. It discusses the Google Books issue in the context of orphan works, a copyright-related topic that fascinates me.

One of the most fascinating parts of this article is just how many orphan works are out there. And even more fascinating is just how many of the works Google has scanned happen to also be orphans. Read the essay through to the end and you'll see just how cunning Google really is in terms of establishing a monopoly, especially in regards to these orphan works.

To this day, I still don't know how I feel about Google digitizing all these books. I love the idea of a universal library, but I want authors to be fairly compensated. I've listened to Google reps talk about Google Book Search and how much positive outcome it has for authors, but I'm still wary. I still feel uneasy. As someone who writes (granted, not currently for an income, but perhaps someday!), I just don't know how I feel about my words being out there on the internet, in perpetuity, accessible and usable by anyone in any way. I know that there are restrictions to what people can see and use in the Google Book Search for copyrighted works, but still. Just can't shake the uneasy feeling, just can't feel 100% right about it all. We'll see what other interesting tangents develop in this sordid tale!

When software contracts bite back

Oh, those pesky software contracts!

Can Gmail users sue Google for bad service?

Not surprisingly, no.

I did notice the lapse in Google service on Tuesday, and I figured it was just the cosmos working against me. Maybe it was really a blessing in disguise to get me to stop checking email obsessively.

Theft vs. Piracy

I don't really have the time to regularly update this blog anymore at the level I'd like to--when I was upkeeping it, I really put a lot of time and thought into what I wrote and wanted to provide as much interesting and useful information as possible. I wish I had more time because I really enjoyed writing in here. But I just found this image and had to share it.




A rather simplistic guide, but it's pretty much accurate (and pretty accurately depicts a lot of what goes on via the web, like file sharing, and even what goes on during an average workday at the photocopier). Some would argue (myself included, perhaps?) that piracy is a FORM of theft, but it is not exactly the same thing as theft itself. Thoughts?

Debut novel Beautiful Children released for free, sans DRM

There's a new book that was recently released called Beautiful Children by Charles Bock. I found out about it through one of my classes because it's this ridiculously hyped book, receiving the kind of hype from the publisher (Random House) you don't really see these days. We were mostly looking at it to examine its website, which is really flashy and splashy and visual but overall hard to get around. But today we started talking about it again because Random House is allowing people to download the book for free, from today through Friday, from their website as a PDF. (You can access the download site from the site I just linked above.)

The most interesting thing about the fact that the book is available for download without any sort of DRM (digital rights management) on it, so once it's downloaded, users could ostensibly do whatever they want with it. Of course Random House makes you click this little box on their site saying "Copyright: This book is protected by copyright and is reproduced here by permission of the author and Random House. I read/understand the above copyright." But I'm sure many of the people clicking on that box don't actually understand what they're clicking into at all, since Random House provides no further explanation anywhere on the site. My instructor showed us how he was easily able to convert the PDF of the book into a text file. This means the file can now be manipulated any way the user wants, which violates the brief, vague copyright agreement downloaders opted into by checking the box.

I wonder why Random House chose to do this; perhaps they're riding on the coat tails of the recent success of the Oprah website offering a free limited-time PDF download of Suze Orman's latest book. Beautiful Children has hit number 14 on the New York Times Bestseller List, so perhaps RH just sees this as one further step in promoting the book to new readers. Plus, it's a long book and people aren't yet accustomed to reading long texts on the screen, and not that many of us own electronic readers. Perhaps RH is banking on the PDF being a teaser to lead people into purchasing a print copy of the book.

I did download the PDF, which took only seconds to do, but I have no immediate plans to read it. I really had no desire to read the print version of the book, after looking at the obnoxious website, and I downloaded the book mostly out of curiosity. I'll probably page (cyber-page, rather) through it at some point, but I'm in no hurry. We'll see if I actually delve into it deeply.

I just wonder what will happen now that there will be all these free, downloaded, non-DRM-ed PDFs of the book floating around in the ether. Not that there's a great deal of value in pirating something that's already available for free, but still. Time will tell.

What do people think? Are free electronic versions of print books a good idea? Are they a good way to promote an author and boost his or her print sales, or are they just paving the way for people to pirate?

The Pirate's Dilemma: A Look at How to Work with, Not Against, Media "Pirates"

I've got good reason to start blogging on this site again regularly, because this semester, I'm enrolled in a class at Emerson called "Know Your Rights" that covers contracts, rights, permissions, copyright, and all things intellectual property. This means I'll be finding juicy stories once again as well as having fun and fab and just plain bizarre factoids to wax poetic about.

Tonight in class we watched a great slideshow presentation called "The Pirate's Dilemma" that talked about how digital media is changing the way people consume media in general and why the law should work with these "pirates" instead of against them. Granted, the slideshow is ultimately an advertisement for the creator's book, but it's enjoyable to watch and quite informative. I tend to agree with a lot of what he says. And who am I to criticize someone for marketing his book using the internets?

Check it out here or watch below.

| View | Upload your own

Ah, it feels good to be back in the CopyRighteous blogosphere!

UPDATE: I just spent over an hour going through previous entries and tagging them to hopefully make it easier to find information on my blog. My sudden desire to tag was brought on because I am also taking an Electronic Publishing course this semester, and I'm giving metadata a nod. Plus, I love being organized. When I originally created this blog, I didn't really understand what tags were. But now.... oh, the wonders of the internet!

Great Videos on the Writers' Strike

I have dropped off the circuit for most of the semester, due to... well, the semester's existence. However, a friend did share this gem with me.



This video about the writers' strike is funny, and fitting.

Find the original page here.

Here's a video explaining why the WGA is on strike.



Find the original on this page.

For more information on the writers' strike, visit the WGA website, United Hollywood, and check out this site made by fans to support the strike too.

I miss the Daily Show.

Napster All Over Again

A recent story in the local Boston paper Boston Now about students at MIT illegally downloading and sharing music caught my interest, partly because of the copyright infringement aspect and partly because of the fact that this behavior seems to be so widespread because people just don't think it's wrong.

The story says how students at Boston college and universities (MIT is the main focus of the story) are being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for copyright infringement. The students are downloading music files using peer-to-peer file sharing networks like LimeWire. I'm not talking about things like iTunes, where you have to pay to download tracks; in the eyes of the RIAA, those sites are totally legit. I'm talking about the types of sites that are the children and grandchildren of the original downloading site, Napster. Some students who have been sued are settling with the RIAA and paying about $3,000 in settlement, while others are paying a lot more in attorney's fees to fight these lawsuits.

You can see the pre-lawsuit letter from the RIAA to targeted college campuses here.

The way in which the RIAA is going after the students, however, is considered suspect. Their method for gathering evidence against the students consists of an investigator downloading a user's song at random from one of the peer-to-peer networks and listening to it. And apparently by listening to it, the investigator can determine if it was illegally downloaded or not.

Huh?

Okay, so I'm not sold on this methodology; how would just listening to a song determine if it's illegally downloaded or not? Do these songs sound different in some way? It seems suspect to me. But I feel like the real issue here is the copyright infringement issue.

Yes, it's legally wrong for a person to download, use, and share copyright-protected music without paying for it. Despite its creative, somewhat intangible nature, a song is a consumer product, and thus by its very nature it needs to be paid for. Unless an artist or band decides to make its songs available for free download and distribution (which some upstart bands do in order to promote awareness about their music), it is illegal to distribute and acquire their music without paying for it. Obviously people who make their livelihoods from producing these creative products find it grossly unfair for others to, in essence, steal their work (stealing is, by definition, "to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force" [dictionary.com]). But the people doing the stealing (in this case, downloading and sharing music files) don't usually consider what they're doing illegal or wrong.

I think this is because of the very nature of the internet. On the internet, millions of users worldwide exchange and access such a breadth of information for free already that it almost seems logical for these people to do the same thing with music files, or with things like the texts of books or copies of digital images for instance. The internet's very nature makes it difficult, though not impossible, to police its millions of users as well as what they're using and how they're using it.

And the fact that the RIAA is going after people, many of them college students who don't fully understand the nature or repercussions of their actions, makes a lot of people really angry. It pits these people against the RIAA. And because of this, it actually makes people more prone to engaging in the very behaviors (illegal file sharing) that the RIAA is trying to discourage and put an end to.

The problem isn't going to go away, especially as increasingly more parts of our lives become digitized: cell phones, laptops, MP3 players, and more. A quick look around the RIAA website shows that they're continuing to go about this in a dissuade people from downloading illegally and going after those who do kind of way. I'm not sure that this is necessarily a good solution, or a solution at all, but I can't really think of any other solution, to be perfectly honest. How can you stop all people everywhere from doing what they're doing? I acknowledge that illegally downloading and sharing music is wrong, but I also admit that I myself used to do so many years ago in college (and by "many" I mean "five," back in the days when Napster was still a newborn and still free). I can see both sides of the coin here.

What do people think? Is there a better way to police the use of music? Is there really anything the RIAA can or should do after a CD is off the store shelves and in a consumer's hands? Technically a person can make a copy of a CD onto a personal computer or MP3 player for personal use, but they can't distribute it--such as making it available on the internet for others to download or giving the copied CD to a friend. But is this preventing people from hearing new music? For instance, I've just asked a friend to copy an album for me that I already own but have lost the disc of and which I didn't have any other copy of. I already paid the band, many moons ago, for the disc; I already know the songs. I miss them. I want to listen to them again. But I am annoyed at the thought of repurchasing the CD because as soon as I do so I'm sure I'll find it somewhere. So I asked my friend to make a copy of her copy of the CD for me. Is that a horrible thing? Does that make me a criminal? I admit that I no longer use peer-to-peer networks to download music; in fact, I haven't downloaded music using a peer-to-peer network since I graduated college in 2002, just as the Napster issue was starting to come to a head. The only music I've downloaded since then are songs written by a friend of mine who allowed me to download them for my own use and songs that were available for free download as part of some sort of band promotion. While this keeps me from discovering new music (my musical tastes and collection halt abruptly in 2002), it just doesn't seem worth the risk to engage in peer-to-peer file sharing, because I don't want to get sued.

Should the RIAA just leave people alone? Is downloading really hurting the music industry? What do people think? Are downloaders criminals or just doing what comes naturally when you use the internet? Leave me your thoughts.

Check out the RIAA website here.

Copyright Conundrum: Nancy's Poetry Website

During my studies I was fortuitous enough to not only have friends of mine read my blog and tell me that it was helpful but also to have friends who experienced some of the very issues my blog entries touch upon. I’ll be presenting their stories here (with names and details changed to protect the innocent!) along with my thoughts. I’ll put each story in a separate entry to make them easier to read.

My friend Nancy is a lover of all things literary. She’s a big supporter of the arts and of emerging artists. She has a master’s degree in literature and taught the subject at the undergraduate level. And she’s also a great writer herself. So when it comes to the written word, I’d have to say she’s a pretty big proponent.

She’s also relatively web-savvy. She’s got blogs and websites for her various publishing and writing projects. I was perusing her online projects recently where I came upon one of her sites where she has posted poems. At first I thought what a neat idea it was—making poetry easily accessible on the web, especially since many of them were lesser-known poems that people might not otherwise have the opportunity to read. As I looked through them, I recognized some as older poems published decades—or even centuries—ago. But there were other poems I didn’t recognize. After one of these poems was a link, which I clicked. It led me to a website for an online magazine in which the poem had originally been published.

Had Nancy gotten permission to reprint the poem on her site? I went back to Nancy’s website to see if there was any information on there about getting permission to reprint, but there was none.

I was concerned. While I agreed with what Nancy was doing—exposing more people to poetry, the sadly most-overlooked form of literature out there it seems—I also knew that she could get into trouble for copyright infringement. Some of the poems she printed were old enough to be in the public domain, so that was no problem. But some other poems were recent creations, meaning that they were still protected by copyright.

Does this even matter? I thought. Nancy’s site is still in its infant growing stages and isn’t visited by a relatively small number of visitors each day, as compared to other websites. Who’s going to notice? Who’s going to care?

But then I thought further about the nature of the internet. The whole point of the internet, and specifically search engines, is to find the information you’re looking for quickly and easily. The internet’s biggest strength and weakness is simultaneously that information is so easy to access. It means that anyone can publish anything—which means copyright infringements flying everywhere. How much these infringements are enforced or even noticed is questionable; but I do think that creators of copyrighted materials are becoming more aware of the issue and are increasingly acting more upon it.

As I thought about who would notice Nancy’s site and its infringements, I imagined one of the poets Nancy had reprinted typing his own name into Google (admit it, we all do it!), and finding not only his poem “My Poem” on the original online magazine site but also on Nancy’s site.

“Wait a minute,” says Mr. Poet. “I know I sold this poem to Website X, but I don’t recall selling it to this Nancy character.” So he contacts someone from Website X, to see if perhaps they sold reprint rights to his poem and just neglected to tell him.

“Huh?” say the editors at Website X. They go to Nancy’s site. Trouble could thus begin. It could begin even if Mr. Poet never got paid a dime to publish his poem initially on Website X. He still probably gave the right to publish to Website X, and if Website X didn’t give anyone else permission to reprint the poem elsewhere (namely Nancy), that spells trouble.

I was in quite a quandary. What to do? How could I protect Nancy from possible infringement problems while still preserving the integrity of her site and helping her spread poetry to a greater audience of readers? (A lofty notion, perhaps, but one I find worthwhile.)

I knew that Nancy could use older poems that are in the public domain with no worries. But what about the poems still protected by copyright that were published on other sites? First I considered urging Nancy to seek permission from all the original publishers of the poems she wanted to post. But after considering this idea, I ruled it out as impractical. First off, Nancy's sole job was not this website; she worked full time and also managed several other projects that took up a considerable amount of her time. Seeking out the permissions would be quite time consuming, not to mention the lag time that would come between Nancy's request and the request being granted. Secondly, Nancy did not make any money from this project (or from some of her other projects) so she was in no position to pay for permissions should some of the original publishers request compensation. So that was out. As I thought about Nancy's problem further, I realized that the very medium she was working in provided a solution that would lessen her risk and allow her to continue with her project.

Nancy could provide the links to the original websites where the copyrighted poems appeared. Providing sources to copyrighted material, without actually reprinting the copyrighted material, is fine. Under fair use, I suggested that she write one or two lines of the poem and then provide the link to the original source. While not 100% fail-proof (remember how sketchy the “guidelines” for determining fair use are?), it was certainly safer than just reprinting the entire poem.

While Nancy was disappointed that she couldn’t just reprint the entire text of any poem she wanted, she was grateful for what I pointed out. “I was wondering if anyone would notice what I was doing,” she admitted. She was a little confused about how else to present her content—she knew she might get in trouble, but she loved poetry so much that she didn’t want to stop doing it—so she appreciated my suggestion and took me up on it.

Even though she no longer reprints whole poems and her site visitors now have to go through the extra step of clicking a link to go to a new page, I think she feels a little safer. And I don’t think it’s such a bad thing to have to take that extra step. The beauty of the internet is that we can present information in nonchronological ways. The way we read and access information is no longer constrained to conventional page format. We can click links to be taken to new pages, have more than one webpage open at a time, watch a video halfway through a story, and even listen to things while we read. What could have presented a problem for Nancy in another format is thankfully solved rather easily and simply due to the nature of the medium she’s using. Copyright conundrum solved.