In all seriousness (if that's possible in this comments section), isn't there a Due Process issue involved in the scooping up of arbitrary amounts of random people's money, with no procedural way of getting back if the scooping operation is found to have been in error?
Beg pardon? Open source offers the source code. No one need go to huge efforts to get it, as it's freely available. The text of the agreement seems to me to block the "requiring" of access to the source code, which is pretty irrelevant when the code is already available.
A statement that a document may not be used in court does not exempt it from being used in court. What utter nonsense. Do they pay the DOJ lawyers in actual money? If so, we should demand a refund of our tax dollars.
OK, so why aren't those 54 companies suing Lodsys for fraud? Presumably the contract they signed for patent rights (or to keep from being sued) includes a proviso that they give up their right to sue later on. But a clear case of fraud obviates the terms of the contract, if they can prove that Lodsys fraudulently obtained their signatures by their fraudulent patent claims. While they're at it, they should see if they can sue for punitive damages.
Is there some reason why we can't just follow the money and put the robocallers out of business? If the government can't do it, there's always direct action. Somewhere along the line, someone has to meet you face to face. That's when you and your friends hold them upside down and shake until the keys fall out of their pockets. Further details left as an exercise for the reader.
Gee, $25,000 is mouse nuts to an advertising budget like they run. So is $100,000, which is same order as a color ad page in the San Jose Mercury-News.
Furthermore, if you aren't extracting revenue from the contract, you don't have to spend much on accounting, program management, or insurance. It's all the Band's problem.
And it bids fair to bring in street word-of-mouth that money simply can't buy. Who needs fake Twitter, if you have real Facebook?
Comcast will attempt to implement such a policy, claiming that their terms of service allow them to cut people off for three accusations of impropriety.
The first lawsuits based on "internet as a common necessity in modern life" will be filed immediately, claiming that the so-called contractual agreement does not trump legal due process for a basic need.
It will be fun to watch the fireworks -- and now's the time for a legal startup specializing in suing the RIAA for legal costs, as a business model.
Publishing is in total confusion as to the best way to survive the upcoming changeover; that is, from shipping objects, to distributing data streams. The publishing industry is not as greedy and evil as the music industry, but they're just as confused.
Lots of VP's will have to retire or be fired or go down with sinking companies before their replacements take over and craft a reasonable approach. Meanwhile, it's anybody's guess what the right price should be for an e-book -- the Publishers Don't Know, and argue among themselves. I'm not making this up.
Anyone who is interested in what's actually going on should subscribe to two free daily newsletters: the one put out by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, and Michael Cader's PUBLISHERS LUNCH.
And... follow Teleread.org for a daily insight from the trenches.
There are many more sources, but these three will cover the story pretty completely.
bowerbird! hey, where you been, buddy? Great to see you're still raising a ruckus.
OK, back to work: Are there specific examples of Kessinger, for example, causing a book to be removed from Full View because of a claimed copyright, or is it just folklore? So far we're long on fears and short on examples.
I love what Google is doing in making rare volumes available for easy download, but am continually dismayed by the erratic way in which they do it: missing or distorted pages, broken sets, and volumes which are clearly in the PD in all countries but not available in Full View.
It's that last consideration we're talking about here.
Kessinger's been doing PD reprints for years. In the early days they photocopied the pages and provided hard copy reprints of books that were difficult to find.
With Google and others providing usable electronic texts, it's gotten easier for Kessinger to find source material. In a lot of cases, I suspect, the physical books don't even exist until someone buys a copy -- and at that point the copy is printed off and sent to the buyers.
The two key issues are:
(1) Is Kessinger claiming a bogus copyright? -- and if so, what are the penalties?
(2) Is Google actually keeping a PD book out of Full View because someone like Kessinger claims a copyright, or is it just poor management at the Google project?
Regarding (2), Google has a history of screwing up the titles and descriptions (aka metadata) so that it can be impossible to find, e.g. all the volumes in a series. Some volumes may have variant titles; some may be in Full View while others are just not available, though already scanned; and some may simply be missing.
The Goog needs to hire a few hundred librarians just to figure out what they already do have.
On their behalf I will now add that trying to figure out which books can be read in Full View, in which countries, has to be a nightmare of awesome proportions.
Robida illustrated, and Octave Uzanne wrote, a piece in 1895 predicting that printed books would soon be replaced ... by audio streams and recordings....
Here's one version:
http://www.hidden-knowledge.com/titles/contesbib/
PM is one of the few magazines that has put all their old covers up on their website for us to see. And by all I mean ALL -- going back a hundred years. It's a great way to track tech and science development ... as well as a lot of tech fantasy.
Are you saying that if I own a copy of a book I can't scan it into my computer so I can create my own personal index of it? Isn't that the epitome of fair use?
Oh, wait, then if Google owns a copy of a book they can scan it into their computer so they can index it? Well, that sure sounds reasonable to me.
So, then, if a library owns a copy of a book they can scan it in to index it, too. OK, maybe they hire Google to run the scanners, eh. Hm.
Gosh! What a wonderfully slippery slope of common sense we have here. I think it's time someone stopped complaining about scanning, as I don't think they have a leg to stand on.
Or, put another way, Google simply buys a copy of every book they want to scan and makes their private index -- which they don't have to show to anyone; all they have to do is tell people the information can be found on page nn of Book Aaaa Bbbbb.
Libraries have been doing this since 1999, when the LIBRARY JOURNAL featured some libraries who were already lending out Rocket eBook readers with books on them. These days, many libraries lend e-books via download, using Overdrive's technology, thus getting around the hardware cost issue.
It's only Kindle's atavistic focus on a specific piece of hardware that makes this a news story; if Amazon e-books could be read on any other platform, then the books could be lent via download.
Hey, I can hear the EFF's knees knocking all the way down here in San Jose.
So here's my idea: Nathan Myhrvold should fund the EFF a couple million dollars or so to go after the silly-season patents they've identified. God knows there's no shortage of real ideas that might be patented, and this makes him look better, and also keeps the really stupid patents from making people think ALL patents are a bad idea. I suppose he could make the deal contingent on the EFF using some other person's money to sue Intellectual Ventures (his own company), or maybe he should just sign up to have them sue him as well as anyone else they think is abusing the process.
So here's my second idea: Nathan Myrhvold (or Jeff Bezos or Paul Allen or whomever) funds the EFF with tens of millions of dollars so that they can sit in on his patentability discussions BEFORE they get to the lawyering stage. If the EFF person says, "No way, Nathan, that's a dumb one and we'd sue if they ever issued it," then he's just saved himself a pot of money on filing and defense costs, and again makes himself look even better.
Using a tiny percentage of his actual patenting costs, NM publishes a "Non-Patenting Journal" describing all the ideas his company decided not to try to patent (this is an old tradition in high tech, but seems to have fallen out of favor), thus establishing prior art such that no other person can ever try to patent the silliness under discussion.
If Nathan et al decide this is a good idea, they can reward me with a nice dinner at a laundry restaurant I know.
McColo is registered in Delaware, and the official location for the corporation there is actually SIMILEX, a company that provides incorporation-of-convenience services. You could look it up.
I suspect the registrants of record will just be dummy names, and the actual ownership is in Russia. Oddly enough, no one has seemed to want to look into this. Similex has their phone number on their website.
The elephant that's hiding in the room, rather large and hard to ignore, is that a large number of people in our government had a hand in breaking the law. Not just the Administration, though it's the primary offender. A lot of people in Congress and the bureaucracy winked and nodded at this. Plenty of culpability to pass around!
It's time the perps got frog-marched off to prison. How it will warm my heart to see some justice meted out!
OFAC
In all seriousness (if that's possible in this comments section), isn't there a Due Process issue involved in the scooping up of arbitrary amounts of random people's money, with no procedural way of getting back if the scooping operation is found to have been in error?
TISA
Beg pardon? Open source offers the source code. No one need go to huge efforts to get it, as it's freely available. The text of the agreement seems to me to block the "requiring" of access to the source code, which is pretty irrelevant when the code is already available.
DOJ exceptions
A statement that a document may not be used in court does not exempt it from being used in court. What utter nonsense. Do they pay the DOJ lawyers in actual money? If so, we should demand a refund of our tax dollars.
lodsys
OK, so why aren't those 54 companies suing Lodsys for fraud? Presumably the contract they signed for patent rights (or to keep from being sued) includes a proviso that they give up their right to sue later on. But a clear case of fraud obviates the terms of the contract, if they can prove that Lodsys fraudulently obtained their signatures by their fraudulent patent claims. While they're at it, they should see if they can sue for punitive damages.
robocalls
Is there some reason why we can't just follow the money and put the robocallers out of business? If the government can't do it, there's always direct action. Somewhere along the line, someone has to meet you face to face. That's when you and your friends hold them upside down and shake until the keys fall out of their pockets. Further details left as an exercise for the reader.
Hard Rock
Gee, $25,000 is mouse nuts to an advertising budget like they run. So is $100,000, which is same order as a color ad page in the San Jose Mercury-News.
Furthermore, if you aren't extracting revenue from the contract, you don't have to spend much on accounting, program management, or insurance. It's all the Band's problem.
And it bids fair to bring in street word-of-mouth that money simply can't buy. Who needs fake Twitter, if you have real Facebook?
TPP
My fiercely amazed brain is struggling to Follow the Money in this.
Assuming that a sovereign nation such as, e.g., the U.S. -can- give up sovereignty (by becoming a voluntary colony?), why would it want to?
ISP's v. 3-strike
Comcast will attempt to implement such a policy, claiming that their terms of service allow them to cut people off for three accusations of impropriety.
The first lawsuits based on "internet as a common necessity in modern life" will be filed immediately, claiming that the so-called contractual agreement does not trump legal due process for a basic need.
It will be fun to watch the fireworks -- and now's the time for a legal startup specializing in suing the RIAA for legal costs, as a business model.
Why...?
Publishing is in total confusion as to the best way to survive the upcoming changeover; that is, from shipping objects, to distributing data streams. The publishing industry is not as greedy and evil as the music industry, but they're just as confused.
Lots of VP's will have to retire or be fired or go down with sinking companies before their replacements take over and craft a reasonable approach. Meanwhile, it's anybody's guess what the right price should be for an e-book -- the Publishers Don't Know, and argue among themselves. I'm not making this up.
Anyone who is interested in what's actually going on should subscribe to two free daily newsletters: the one put out by PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, and Michael Cader's PUBLISHERS LUNCH.
And... follow Teleread.org for a daily insight from the trenches.
There are many more sources, but these three will cover the story pretty completely.
Re: bowerbird's comment
bowerbird! hey, where you been, buddy? Great to see you're still raising a ruckus.
OK, back to work: Are there specific examples of Kessinger, for example, causing a book to be removed from Full View because of a claimed copyright, or is it just folklore? So far we're long on fears and short on examples.
I love what Google is doing in making rare volumes available for easy download, but am continually dismayed by the erratic way in which they do it: missing or distorted pages, broken sets, and volumes which are clearly in the PD in all countries but not available in Full View.
It's that last consideration we're talking about here.
Kessinger / Google / Full View
Kessinger's been doing PD reprints for years. In the early days they photocopied the pages and provided hard copy reprints of books that were difficult to find.
With Google and others providing usable electronic texts, it's gotten easier for Kessinger to find source material. In a lot of cases, I suspect, the physical books don't even exist until someone buys a copy -- and at that point the copy is printed off and sent to the buyers.
The two key issues are:
(1) Is Kessinger claiming a bogus copyright? -- and if so, what are the penalties?
(2) Is Google actually keeping a PD book out of Full View because someone like Kessinger claims a copyright, or is it just poor management at the Google project?
Regarding (2), Google has a history of screwing up the titles and descriptions (aka metadata) so that it can be impossible to find, e.g. all the volumes in a series. Some volumes may have variant titles; some may be in Full View while others are just not available, though already scanned; and some may simply be missing.
The Goog needs to hire a few hundred librarians just to figure out what they already do have.
On their behalf I will now add that trying to figure out which books can be read in Full View, in which countries, has to be a nightmare of awesome proportions.
Blodget Again
Why is anyone paying attention to Blodget? We already know why anything he says is questionable.
More of Robida on the Future of Publishing
Robida illustrated, and Octave Uzanne wrote, a piece in 1895 predicting that printed books would soon be replaced ... by audio streams and recordings....
Here's one version:
http://www.hidden-knowledge.com/titles/contesbib/
The illos are hilarious!
e-book prices
There are plenty of other publishers who will provide books to the customers when the Big Six go out of business. That's the way our market works.
POPULAR MECHANICS cover art
PM is one of the few magazines that has put all their old covers up on their website for us to see. And by all I mean ALL -- going back a hundred years. It's a great way to track tech and science development ... as well as a lot of tech fantasy.
scanning
Are you saying that if I own a copy of a book I can't scan it into my computer so I can create my own personal index of it? Isn't that the epitome of fair use?
Oh, wait, then if Google owns a copy of a book they can scan it into their computer so they can index it? Well, that sure sounds reasonable to me.
So, then, if a library owns a copy of a book they can scan it in to index it, too. OK, maybe they hire Google to run the scanners, eh. Hm.
Gosh! What a wonderfully slippery slope of common sense we have here. I think it's time someone stopped complaining about scanning, as I don't think they have a leg to stand on.
Or, put another way, Google simply buys a copy of every book they want to scan and makes their private index -- which they don't have to show to anyone; all they have to do is tell people the information can be found on page nn of Book Aaaa Bbbbb.
Oh, wait, information isn't copyrightable....
Libraries with e-Book Readers
Libraries have been doing this since 1999, when the LIBRARY JOURNAL featured some libraries who were already lending out Rocket eBook readers with books on them. These days, many libraries lend e-books via download, using Overdrive's technology, thus getting around the hardware cost issue.
It's only Kindle's atavistic focus on a specific piece of hardware that makes this a news story; if Amazon e-books could be read on any other platform, then the books could be lent via download.
EFF
Hey, I can hear the EFF's knees knocking all the way down here in San Jose.
So here's my idea: Nathan Myhrvold should fund the EFF a couple million dollars or so to go after the silly-season patents they've identified. God knows there's no shortage of real ideas that might be patented, and this makes him look better, and also keeps the really stupid patents from making people think ALL patents are a bad idea. I suppose he could make the deal contingent on the EFF using some other person's money to sue Intellectual Ventures (his own company), or maybe he should just sign up to have them sue him as well as anyone else they think is abusing the process.
So here's my second idea: Nathan Myrhvold (or Jeff Bezos or Paul Allen or whomever) funds the EFF with tens of millions of dollars so that they can sit in on his patentability discussions BEFORE they get to the lawyering stage. If the EFF person says, "No way, Nathan, that's a dumb one and we'd sue if they ever issued it," then he's just saved himself a pot of money on filing and defense costs, and again makes himself look even better.
Using a tiny percentage of his actual patenting costs, NM publishes a "Non-Patenting Journal" describing all the ideas his company decided not to try to patent (this is an old tradition in high tech, but seems to have fallen out of favor), thus establishing prior art such that no other person can ever try to patent the silliness under discussion.
If Nathan et al decide this is a good idea, they can reward me with a nice dinner at a laundry restaurant I know.
Mike (a different Mike)
McColo, Ownership, Silence From
McColo is registered in Delaware, and the official location for the corporation there is actually SIMILEX, a company that provides incorporation-of-convenience services. You could look it up.
I suspect the registrants of record will just be dummy names, and the actual ownership is in Russia. Oddly enough, no one has seemed to want to look into this. Similex has their phone number on their website.
Hidden Elephant
The elephant that's hiding in the room, rather large and hard to ignore, is that a large number of people in our government had a hand in breaking the law. Not just the Administration, though it's the primary offender. A lot of people in Congress and the bureaucracy winked and nodded at this. Plenty of culpability to pass around!
It's time the perps got frog-marched off to prison. How it will warm my heart to see some justice meted out!