Intellectual Property

In his first two days in office, President Obama has definitely given a lot of us the impression that he intends to be President 2.0. Obama's campaign famously used online social networking to tremendous effect, he has since been giving weekly addresses via YouTube and now the new White House Web Page includes a blog.

Now that the President has taken office and new policies are being enacted, what changes will we see in national policy towards libraries generally, and technology specifically?  Read More »

Wowio, an LLC based in York, Pennsylvania, recently launched a free downloadable e-book service. The company's collection at launch is pretty sparse, but it does include both public domain and copyright-protected e-books. During my first use of the collection, I downloaded both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—if for no other reason than to relish Emmeline Grangerford's mournful Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots—and Slaughterhouse Five.
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Soon after Google announced in late 2004 the collaborative project—currently called the "Google Books Library Project," involving the five research libraries of Stanford, Michigan, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library—to scan millions of books, the five libraries became known as the "G5 Group."
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Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal reported that Google and an unnamed publisher were having discussions about leasing access to e-books. The general idea is that users would pay approximately ten percent of the list price for the printed book to be able to read the e-book for one week. In other words, they're talking about a pay-per-circ digital lending library.

When it comes to new (and recycled) schemes for pricing e-books, November has been a "Katy-bar-the-door" month. Amazon and Random House announced separate plans to sell e-books in less-than-complete chunks, such as chapters. If we manage to get through the remainder of the month without any more turkey announcements like this, we'll have another cause for thanksgiving. Read More »

Lots of folks are sour on snippets. Google has made lemonade out of the old word "snippet" by using it to describe what will be presented to users when they perform a full-text search in the Google Print Library and retrieve hits for the search term in a work still protected by copyright. Here is Google's brief (and a little vague) description of how this works on the "common questions" page about the Google Print Library Project (http://print.google.com/googleprint/common.html): "For library books still in copyright, you'll be able to find the book in your search result, but we will only display bibliographic information and a few short snippets of the book." Read More »

I don't know what possessed me to write a blog entry about copyright. Hasn't enough been written about copyright already—even if the future of copyright, fair use, the right of first sale, and intellectual property in general is arguably one of the essential issues currently confronting society and culture?

Here's how it happened. I was walking our dog Max in the pre-dawn darkness. Overhead, the slightly past-full moon was beginning its decline. The warm breeze reminded me that today probably will be the final day this year of summerlike weather in beautiful Blue Springs. Read More »