Update: Later today, I found that the PDF's on my phone had indeed downloaded, and could be opened with the phone's own reader. Rather inconvenient.
Friday, November 15, 2013
Book search wins important copyright fair use case in New York
The Book Search by Google won a major case in the
southern District of New York as Judge Denny Chin ruled in favor of Google Books, to
the effect that book search fell within fair use, not requiring copyright
permission. Timothy B. Lee has a story today on the Switch Blog of the Washington
Post here.
Securing permissions for search displays would have
been logistically impractical, and in many cases the original copyright owners
aren’t known, although companies could be set up to find them.
More significant is that the “copyright owner’s”
case was seen as facetious. In general,
consumers are very unlikely to try to “reconstruct” a book from search results
without paying for it. In fact, I
generally place a lot of my non-fiction book contents online anyway. I realize it’s possible to load chapters of
my books free onto mobile devices (tablets or phones, not Kindles and Nooks)
and read them. Actually, I just tried my
pdf’s from “doaskdotell.com” and couldn’t get them to load on my Droid phone,
but they do load fine on the iPad. I’ll
have to check into why they didn’t work on the phone. I do trust that someone who really wants the
book will pay for it with normal e-commerce channels. Non-fiction policy writing doesn’t work the
same way as entertainment fiction; one shoe does not fit all feet, including
Hobbits’.
There’s another issue: search engine placement. Since about 2002 or so, most books published
by on-demand companies do get indexed, and there is no opportunity to suppress
a search result as there would be with a private online PDF or HTML file that the
author maintains himself, to answer some unusual sensitivity (and this happened
maybe three times in fifteen years, in each case because of unusual,
non-repeatable circumstances. So online
reputation could become a subordinate issue here.
Update: Later today, I found that the PDF's on my phone had indeed downloaded, and could be opened with the phone's own reader. Rather inconvenient.
Update: Later today, I found that the PDF's on my phone had indeed downloaded, and could be opened with the phone's own reader. Rather inconvenient.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment