Darknet

Annotating rich media

A videoblogger named Robert says, "Imagine how cool it would be to have everyone's annotation of video and audio media in a searchable database."

It should begin happenning by next year.

Exhibit A: The BBC Annotatable Audio project.

The project we undertook was focused on Annotatable Audio (specifically, but not exclusively, of BBC radio programming) - and we decided to look in an unorthodox direction - towards the possibilities of user-created annotation and metadata. We decided that we wanted to develop an interface that might allow the collective articulation of what a programme or speech or piece of music was about and how it could be divided up and described. Our first ideas looked for approaches similar to del.icio.us, Flickr or our own Phonetags - which create collective value by accreting the numerous annotations that individuals make for their own purposes. But after a fascinating discussion with Jimmy Wales, we decided to think about this in a different way - in which (just like Wikipedia) individuals would overtly cooperate to create something greater and more authoritative.

Exhibit B: At the Open Media Developers Summit on Oct. 20, some of the members of NYU's ITP program described their work with "video comments," a system that allows users to add comments to a specific point in a video. They moved from videoblogs, I believe, over to live chats, where a Java applet embedded within a QuickTime player let them attached comments to live chats via a time code.

I think that a non-chat environment will make better use of this technology, however.

Exhibit C: Ourmedia has on its roadmap what we're calling a rich media clipping service (regular people don't use the word "annotation"). It would allow bloggers (or anyone) to link to segments -- clips -- within an audio file or video. We've been in discussions with tech journalist Jon Udell (who has described the idea in his writings) and Doug Kaye about it, and hope to get some momentum going on the project in the coming weeks. (If you're a coder who'd like to help out on this open-source project, contact me.)

It's going to happen.

Later: Related to all this somehow: Interclipper, a real-time video organizer for the PC. Doesn't look like a social media tool, however.

Welcome to Remix Culture

Redhat.com looks at Remix Culture, specifically the public domain films available through the Internet Archive and Prelinger Archives. The citizens media site Wearethemedia.com has declared November "remix month," so I'll be following its reports with interest.

Ourmedia.org plans to do far more than make content available for remixing. So stay tuned for word about our plans for a Remix Central in the coming months.

The new, legal iMesh

Dawn C. Chmielewski in today's San Jose Mercury News takes a look at the new incarnation of the iMesh p2p file-sharing network.

One of the former bete noires of Internet file-swapping, iMesh, has re-launched as a strictly legit online file-swapping service.

This new, music industry-approved version of iMesh manages to capture the guilty pleasure that is file-swapping. You can find virtually any song or video clip you can name and hoard it, like trick-or-treaters scouring the neighborhood for every last chocolate bar.

And for a limited trial period -- it's absolutely free. ...

iMesh provides access to about 2 million songs by the biggest mainstream and independent music acts. This is considered premium content that's identified with five gold stars.

But iMesh also remains connected to the venerable Gnutella file-swapping network, so you'll also find anywhere from 15 to 20 million songs that are free for the taking. The music spans the gamut, from live recordings of Phish or the Grateful Dead concerts, which permit fans to freely exchange their songs online; as well as so-called ``gray'' content, for which neither the artist nor the label has demanded payment. ...

If you're a longtime iMesh user, you'll be able to keep your existing music collection. But the software will now prevent you from redistributing that Bruce Springsteen anthology to millions of strangers for free.

You can only share ``Devils & Dust'' with other paying iMesh subscribers, and only in a form that wraps each track in software that restricts how many times it can be copied.

The iMesh software will similarly prevent you from downloading songs by artists like the Beatles, who don't want their music distributed online.

You also won't be able to download entire movies on iMesh. Its deal with the Motion Picture Association requires it to block all video that's longer than 15 minutes long. It also blocks child pornography.

I'll have to go back and give iMesh another look. A few months ago, almost all my queries there came up largely empty.

Universities should support public's access to knowlege

Mary Sue Coleman. president of the University of Michigan -- a partner in the Google Library project -- offers this defense of the initiative in the Allentown Morning Call:

Students coming to my campus today belong to the Net Generation. By the time they were in middle school, the Internet was a part of their daily lives. As we watch the way our students search for and use information, this much is clear: If information is not digitized, it will not be found.

Libraries and educational institutions are the only entities whose mission is to preserve knowledge through the centuries. It is a crucial role, one outside the interest of corporate entities and separate from the whims of the market. If libraries do not archive and curate, there is substantial risk that entire bodies of work will be lost.

Universities and the knowledge they offer should be accessible by all. ...

Joshua Schachter on tagging

Joshua Schachter spends Tuesday Lunch at Harvard's Berkman Center, talking about Del.icio.us and tagging. Listen to the mp3.

The Darknet as the great equalizer

The San Francisco Chronicle today has a story about Darknet titled, Underworld's 'Darknet' foments copyright revolution against Hollywood. (Chronicle photo by Deanne Fitzmaurice)

Just to be clear, Darknet advocates a personal media revolution and reform of the U.S. laws governing copyright. Excerpt from the piece:

Saying the 20th century's passive media consumer has been replaced by today's active media user, Lasica argues that the Darknet is a creative, democratic realm that will only grow in popularity to the extent that Hollywood doesn't get it.

"In a few years, technology will allow us to carry hundreds of movies or TV shows on a single keychain," he writes. "But will the media companies and their tech allies really get us there? I'm not sure." ...

"The excesses of copyright have gotten to the point where some of our traditional rights have gotten stripped away," he said. "As we're turning into more of a visual culture and we evolve from a print and text culture to a multimedia culture, are we going to have the same rights to quote from and borrow from and cite visual works as we had in the past?" ...

Why Google Print is good for publishers

Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal explains why Google Print Library is good for the world -- and good for authors and book publishers -- in this video interview. Warning: Some CNBC bimbette analyst named Becky keeps shouting out, "This is stealing!"

Lessig on 'Darknet' and the commons

I'm glad I stuck around last night for the TechSummit 2005 dinner organized by the Computer & Communications Industry Association at its annual gathering in Dana Point, Calif.

Lawrence Lessig was the evening's keynote speaker, and he gave another one of his memorable PowerPoint presentations, highlighting the challenges we face in a permission culture with imbalanced copyright laws.

I've seen Larry do his thing two or three times before -- he changes his presentation every few months -- so I was surprised when "Darknet" popped up on screen two or three times. ("This is a little bit embarrassing. I didn't know JD would be in the audience," he said. Someone leaned over to me and said, "Do you feel like a star now?")

He gave four reasons why asking the entertainment companies for permission to use snippets of their works for personal, noncommercial use doesn't work. Mine came in at No. 3: when I asked Warner Bros. for permission to use two 10-second snippets from the 1988 movie "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters" in a home movie project I was making with my 5-year-old son and was told no, and when I asked Universal Studios permission to use 39 seconds from the cartoon feature "Ice Age" and was told "you would be obligated to pay the appropriated license fees which would be $900 for each 15 seconds."

Among other points Lessig raised:

- "If Google Print is infringing, why is Google legal?" Google is based on the same premise of copying and caching hundreds of millions of Web pages without asking for the copyright owners' permission.

- On the imposition of heavyhanded U.S. IP laws on developing nations: "We are destroying wealth in these nations as a form of economic blackmail for access to our marketplace."

He laid out three strategies for combating the closing in of the public commons:

1. We make clear we are against piracy.

2. We press for legislative reform -- not to repeal copyright but to return its length and scope to a reasonable length. Specifically, he endorsed the idea, proposed by some scholars, of taking the copy out of copyright. Instead, we ought to regulate distribution or commercial reproduction.

3. Congress should regulate derivative works to allow for creative expression by amateurs, as in the mash-ups that he and I showed off during the day.

But he acknowledged, "These are reforms that are impossible during the current political climate. We suffer from a sort of IP McCarthyism." Thus, the need for private reform that demonstrates how copyright ought to work.

Creative Commons is at the forefront of those private efforts, of course. And at one point I stood up and asked the reps from the tech companies in the room to support the nonprofit organization, now that it is transitioning from foundation support to being supported by the private sector.

Hollywood won't support Creative Commons. The tech industry must -- on the public's behalf.

At TechSummit 2005

I just gave the keynote address during lunch at TechSummit 2005 in Dana Point, Calif., the annual convention of the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Open Source & Industry Alliance.

Lawrence Lessig is speaking tonight about the Grokster decision's impact on technology innovation. Here's the conference agenda (PDF). My talk centered on fair use in the digital age, including mash-ups and freedom of creative expression.

Most of the folks here are executives at tech companies, and I entreated them to become informed about these issues (see this blog, for instance) and to serve as a proxy for the public interest on Capitol Hill.

Wednesday evening I'll be appearing on stage with Doc Searls at UC Santa Barbara to talk about citizens media.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

Embracing our digital destiny

The AlwaysOn Network just published the final excerpt from "Darknet" the book that I'll be posting online: Embracing our digital destiny. Here's a 10-point blueprint for transitioning from the analog to digital worlds, which I expand on in the piece and in the book:

1. We are users, producers and creators as well as consumers.

2. Artists must be compensated for their works.

3. The public’s digital rights should be affirmed.

4. The DMCA requires a dramatic overhaul.

5. Celebrate participatory culture. Don’t outlaw it.

6. The Darknet is the public’s great equalizing force.

7. The Internet is not an entertainment medium.

8. To make file sharing and the Darknet irrelevant, innovate.

9. Trust the marketplace.

10. Efforts to enrich the public domain should be encouraged.

Kos love

Darknet gets some Daily Kos love. Glad you're blown away, Markos, thanks for spreading the word about the assault on our digital rights.

DVD Jon lands dream job Stateside

Annalee Newitz in Wired News: Michael Robertson, the bold but oft-sued genius behind MP3.com and Linspire, brings the iconic and frequently prosecuted Norwegian media hacker to California for his latest venture. This should be interesting.

Public Knowledge criticizes publishers’ suit against Google

Wednesday, the Association of American Publishers sued Google, saying that the Google Print project to digitize books would violate copyright. Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn responded:

"The publishers’ suit against Google is truly unfortunate and short-sighted. Those who produce books should be heartened to see a project that has as its goal the legal distribution of knowledge and insight. The publishers also stand to gain increased exposure for their books. Instead, they are taking to court a program that would only fully digitize public-domain work and would give readers only a glimpse of copyrighted material. That Google project falls squarely within the boundaries of fair use, and the publishers should recognize that.”

Dead on.

Lawrence Lessig on interoperability

Over at Creative Commons, Lawrence Lessig has a few words to say about interoperability.

Protecting the right to be anonymous online

Good editorial in today's San Jose Mercury News: Protecting the right to be anonymous online.

Much of the anonymous babble that fills Internet chat rooms, discussion groups, bulletin boards and blogs is not terribly interesting. Some of it is outright distasteful.

Yet most of it must be protected to preserve free speech. Indeed, a robust, unfettered conversation in which a diversity of views is freely expressed is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy and is guaranteed by the First Amendment.

That principle was reaffirmed last week by the Delaware Supreme Court, which drew a clear shield around anonymous political speech on the Internet. It's the first state supreme court to do so, and it should hearten Internet users and free-speech advocates everywhere.

Efforts to pass a law offering similar protections in California stalled last year and ought to be revived by the Legislature. ...

Broadcast flag: It's baaaaack!!

Our friends at the Recording Industry Association of America are circulating the following language for the Senate Commerce Committee to insert as it prepares to mark up a digital television bill beginning today. The language would cover satellite radio as well.

Proposed Legislative Provision Granting FCC Authority Regarding Terrestrial and Satellite Digital Audio Broadcasting

The Federal Communications Commission –

(a) has authority, for the purpose of implementing usage rules pursuant to paragraph (c), to require (i) that the in-band, on-channel technical standard for digital audio broadcast transmissions currently under consideration in MM Docket No. 99-235 include that transmissions be made through encryption or a similar technology, and (ii) that licensees operating Satellite Digital Audio Radio Services (“SDARS”) pursuant to Part 25 of the Commission rules, or any successor regulations, encrypt transmissions made as part of the SDARS service. In order to promote the availability of new, innovative and competitive devices, the Commission shall require as part of its regulations for IBOC radio systems that any and all technical specifications necessary to make devices capable of decrypting such signal, and any usage or rules that apply to the use of such signals, are fully disclosed sufficient to enable the manufacture of compliant devices and that all technologies necessary to make such compliant devices are licensed on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms. The adoption of any digital audio regulations pursuant to this section shall not delay the adoption of final operational rules for digital audio broadcasting.

(b) may reconsider, amend, repeal, supplement, and otherwise modify, in whole or in part, any regulations adopted pursuant to paragraph (a) of this section in order to further the purposes of
this section, provided, however, that any change in such regulations shall incorporate encryption at the source or a similar technology as the means to achieve those purposes, and

(c) any usage rules adopted pursuant to paragraph (a) of this section (i) shall permit recording of specific programs, channels or time periods as selected by the user in increments of no less than
thirty minutes duration; (ii) shall not permit recording based on information concerning specific sound recordings, artists, genres or other user preferences, (iii) shall not permit the automated
disaggregation of the copyrighted material contained in any recording of a transmission program, and (iv) shall not permit the exporting or redistribution of recorded material from the device by
digital outputs or removable media.

Thanks to Public Knowledge for sharing this would-be assault on the public's digital rights.

Secret code in color printers that lets the government track you

If I hadn't heard this on NPR tonight, I might have missed it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a new finding about a secret code in color printers that lets the government track you.

Google opens 8 book-search sites in Europe

New York Times:

Google said Monday that it had begun operating local-language sites in eight European countries for its Google Print program, its closely watched effort to make all of the world's books searchable online, expanding into territories where it has drawn fierce criticism.

The Google Print sites - for France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain - enable users to search books provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights.

Hollywood's plans to control your TV

I just read the September issue of Scientific American, where Wendy Grossman has this article (subscription required to read full text): Flagging Copy Rights. Piracy protection may redefine home recording.

The right to protect against unauthorized copying of digital television and film seemed to take a step back for the entertainment industry and content provider--and a step forward for the consumer and video pirate--when a federal court struck down the planned July 1 introduction of the "broadcast flag." The flag is a set of bits in a digital transmission that can prevent recording. But advocates of free recording are not celebrating the defeat of the flag--transmissions standards currently being devised could trump the ruling.

The consortium creating the standards is the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) Project, a group that includes broadcasters, mobile phone companies, set-top box manufacturers and movie studios. Most of its work defines ways to transmit, encode and format data. But the next version of the DVB standards will include a scheme called Copy Protection/Copy Management (CPCM), which, if implemented, may give copyright holders even more control than the broadcast flag would have.

As drafted, CPCM will allow them to specify, for example, whether protected content can be copied -- and, if so, onto how many devices. They could dictate how many times a program can be viewed, where it can be viewed and how long a copy may be kept. While attending a public DVB Forum meeting held in Dublin this past March, Jim Williams, vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in private that preventing someone from accessing a single HBO subscription from two different locations is "social justice." ...

Sharing is good

I forgot to link to this the other day. Mary Hodder snapped this shot of the back of my T-shirt after I spoke at the Archival TV conference. She uploaded it to Flickr.

Digital TV deadline: 2009

Associated Press: Congress is zeroing in on early 2009 as the time for the country to make the switch to digital television broadcasts, a move that will give viewers sharper pictures and better sound.

Oh, and almost certainly less control over their broadcast viewing, a point the AP story neglected to mention.

OnHollywood to explore tech-entertainment clash

At Web 2.0 last week, I cornered the high-energy, super-sharp Valerie Cunningham about AlwaysOn's just-announced OnHollywood summit -- a gathering of the best and brightest in the movie and tech industries, coming to Hollywood on April 25-27, 2006.

Here's Valerie's 2 1/2-minute description of the conference (in MPEG-4). (Ourmedia page | watch video)

From the AlwaysOn announcement:

ONHOLLYWOOD is where cutting edge technology from the backstreets of Silicon Valley meets Hollywood's digital media revolution. This two and a half day industry insider event borrows on the "film market" tradition by providing an open environment where 80 top digital entertainment and media entrepreneurs meet the big time studio, telco and consumer electronics executives. …

Among those invited are the top dogs from Yahoo, Disney, Sprint and other bigger players to mix it up with the entrepreneurs, VCs and talent agents that will be wandering the halls of the Roosevelt and hanging out at the pool party on opening night.

I'll be there.

Cross-posted to New Media Musings.

Technorati tags: Hollywood, OnHollywood, HonorTagJournalism

Pirates set sail to Darknet island

NY Times: Darknets: Virtual Parties With a Select Group of Invitees. I'm briefly quoted in the piece, as are Lawrence Lessig and Ian Clarke. Excerpt:

"Our intent is not to circumvent the copyright world," said Josh Felser, a co-founder of Grouper. "This is about personally generated content."

Mr. Felser and other advocates of commercial darknets think they are fulfilling consumer demand for what might best be called personal distribution, a medium whose potential content expands with every video-equipped cellphone and pocket-size digital camera bought.

"The big play for us is personal video," Mr. Felser said last month, as he toyed with a moviemaking digital camera in his office in Mill Valley, Calif. "Personal video is everywhere, and people are wanting to share video that they create." ...

The Register UK had this riposte today: Pirates set sail to Darknet island.

In the current era, one of the great expressions of friendship is sharing experiences, through snippets of video, personally recorded music and pictures. The record labels should be trying to harness this, not put an end to it.

Personally-created materials take time to be seen or listened to and this eats into the available time that the young today have to listen to copyrighted works. This is a far greater threat to content owners and a world where the power of P2P networks is used to create, index and share non-copyrighted works of high quality is only just around the corner.

One missing piece in both articles is the use of darknets as collaboration tools -- for artists, musicians and other creative individuals to share half-finished works and to trade them across the network as if they were collaborating in real time and real space.

Darknets are becoming a way of trading our media, not their media.

South Park likenesses

For a while, you could get a South Park cartoon doppelganger of yourself made at Vexatori.de, but it looks like they took down the page sometime this month.

But not before Brian Russell (whom I met at the Duke University symposium on podcasting last month) got his made (that's him, above).

For the life of me, I can't see why copyright owners would get upset about this kind of free viral publicity and goodwill.

CC: 50 million backlinks and counting

Lawrence Lessig at Creative Commons on How it All Began. The first in a series.

Mash-up culture

The Urban Testing Ground blog points to a two-part video series on the mash-up movement (called bootleg culture in the UK) -- using the recombinant DNA of two separate song tracks to create a startling new sound. As one of the speakers says, "It's the first cultural movement of the Internet age."

It's also illegal under copyright law.

Here's part one, a 4-minute QuickTime video.

Defending Google's licence to print

BBC News: Defending Google's licence to print. Google's plan to create an index of millions of books has got them into legal trouble, but technology analyst Bill Thompson thinks they should press on despite the lawsuits.

Lawrence Lessig on supporting the Commons

Lawrence Lessig writes:

Creative Commons launches its first fund raising campaign. Until now, we've lived on very generous grants from some very wise foundations. But the IRS doesn't allow nonprofits to live such favored lives for long. To maintain our nonprofit status, the IRS says we must meet a "public support test" -- which means we must demonstrate that our support comes from more than a few foundations. And thus, this campaign. ...

Please consider contributing to this most worthy cause.

Piracy's global scope

LA Times: Piracy Spins a Global Web. The bootlegging of 'Spider-Man 2' began with a 'cammer' in a New York theater. Within hours, DVDs were on sale in Asia.

Might is right in IT world

ComputerWorld New Zealand: Dan Gillmor takes a look at vendor lock-in.

When I consider the big issues in the world of IT and policy, I invariably return to a single word: control.

Australian court: Gamers can mod their Playstations

Down Under news ... Consumer Reporter: Australia's High Court chips away at Sony's stranglehold. Computer games enthusiasts are free to modify their Playstations to run cheap games bought overseas or online.

Thanks to Ken Doran for the pointer.

The teenage filmmakers

Here's what's new on the AlwaysOn Network, including the fourth serialized installment of my book, "Darknet." This one's on the teenage filmmakers.

Mix and mash-up

The San Jose Merc takes a look at the Bay Area's red-hot mash-up music scene. The article also offers this list:

Mash-up websites

Getyourbootlegon.com The mother of all mash-ups Web sites where the international mash-up community distributes, chats and meets

Culturedeluxe: For bootleg charts based on Web site visitor votes

Mashupradio: For mash-up podcasts and popular downloads

Gohomeproductions: Based in the United Kingdom, motherland of the mash-up, these DJs created the now famous "Ray of Gob'' Sex Pistols vs. Madonna mash-up.

As for video mash-ups, take a look at the lead video on Ourmedia right now.

The Mercury News also published this list of Bay Area mash-up DJs:

DJ John Liechty of Campbell. Spins at Bootie SF mash-up parties. Signature style: complex party mixes blending multiple parts. www.djjohn.net.

DJs Adrian and the Mysterious D (a.k.a. Adrian and Deirdre Roberts, at www.rebeldjs.com). Founders of San Francisco's Bootie monthly mash-up dance club parties: www.bootiesf.com. Adrian's live mash-ups band performs at Bootie and around the Bay Area: www.smashupderby.com.

DJ Party Ben (a.k.a. Ben Gill) of Live 105's (KITS-FM 105.3) Sixx Mixx, 6-6:30 p.m. Fridays. http://partyben.com.

DJ Yuma Tripp of Santa Cruz. Resident DJ of monthly mash-up parties at Blue Lagoon. www.bass211.com.

DJ Matt Hite of San Francisco. Writes a comprehensive insider blog on mash-up DJ news, production and culture. www.beatmixed.com.

DJ Earworm of San Francisco. Recently deejayed parties at the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami. His tracks appear on popular bootleg compilation ``The Best Mash-ups in the World ever are from San Francisco.'' www.djearworm.com.

DJ Mei Lwun of San Francisco. Spins at Frisson, 244 Jackson St., San Francisco, (415) 956-3004; and Club Glo, 396 S. First St., San Jose, (408) 995-6414. www.mei-lwun.com.

Digital music sales are singing

Associated Press: Digital music sales are singing. The digital music market has more than tripled in a year, and that has helped offset a continuing decline in sales of CDs and other physical formats.

Podcasting video is now live

The video of the Law & Public Policy panel at Duke University's Symposium on Podcasting is now online here.

Streams of all the other sessions are up here.

Yahoo, Archive to scan books

Meantime, Katie Hafner in Monday's NY Times reports that a group of edu, org, com and gov organizations are announcing an Open Content system in the tradition of Open Source software.

An unusual alliance of corporations, nonprofit groups and universities plans to announce today an ambitious plan to digitize hundreds of thousands of books over the next several years and put them on the Internet, with the full text accessible to anyone.

The effort is being led by Yahoo, which appears to be taking direct aim at a similar project announced by its archrival, Google, whose own program to create searchable digital copies of entire collections at leading research libraries has run into a series of challenges since it was announced nine months ago.

The new project, called the Open Content Alliance, has the wide-ranging goal of digitizing historical works of fiction along with specialized technical papers. In addition to Yahoo, its members include the Internet Archive, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, as well as the National Archive in England and others.

The digitization of print materials has been a continual effort on the part of various research libraries for the last several years. But the potential power of the new collaboration lies in the collective ability of many institutions to compare and cross-reference materials, said Daniel Greenstein, librarian for the California Digital Library at the University of California.

"This is the kind of platform we've been looking for for a long time," said Dr. Greenstein. "Libraries digitize their stuff and put it up, but none of the libraries have comprehensive collections of everything. Now we can say: 'We have this particular edition of Mark Twain, but it's not as good as that one over there,' and we add it to the collection."

The Library of Congress, for instance, has one of the largest library collections in the world, but even that collection is incomplete. "It's all about gap-filling and collection development," said Dr. Greenstein. ...

In a departure from Google's approach, the Open Content Alliance will also make the books accessible to any search engine, including Google's. (Under Google's program, a digitized book would show up only through a Google search.) And by focusing at first on works that are in the public domain - such as thousands of volumes of early American fiction - the group is sidestepping the tricky question of copyright violation. ...

When it comes to copyrighted materials, the newly formed group appears to be taking a more cautious approach by seeking permission from copyright holders and by making works available though a Creative Commons license, whereby the copyright holder stipulates how a work can be used.

"Other projects talk about snippets," said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco that is building a vast digital library. "We don't talk about snippets. We talk about books." ...

The new group is calling for others to join. And Mr. Kahle of the Internet Archive said he hoped to recruit Google.

"The thing I want to have happen out of all this is have Google join in," he said. "I know we're dealing with archcompetitors, but if there's room for these guys to bend, by the time my kid goes to college, we could have a library system that is just astonishing."

Congrats, Brewster and colleagues. An important step forward.

Digitizing books: Authors Guild has it backward

Everyone's got an opinion about Google's plan to scan books.

The typically down-the-middle Mike Langberg in today's San Jose Mercury News: Google's libraries project facing writers' block.

Vin Scelsa, host of the show "Idiot's Delight" on Sirius Satellite Radio, in a letter to the NY Times: Keep books alive.

The Authors Guild's objections to Google's plan to offer a searchable database of the collections of five libraries is analogous to the Recording Industry Association of America's imposition of limitations on digital radio (including "terrestrial" stations with Internet simulcasts) through its lobbying of Congress during creation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. ...

If authors want their work to survive, it had better be in digital libraries. If record companies want to establish new artists, they should support outlets that offer exposure. Why tie the very hands that are trying help these artists achieve their goals?

Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild, in a letter to the Times: Google and the Authors.

And the op-ed piece by Tim O'Reilly that started the letter exchange above: Search and Rescue. Excerpt:

AUTHORS struggle, mostly in vain, against their fated obscurity. According to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks sales from major booksellers, only 2 percent of the 1.2 million unique titles sold in 2004 had sales of more than 5,000 copies. Against this backdrop, the recent Authors Guild suit against the Google Library Project is poignantly wrongheaded.

The Authors Guild claims that Google's plan to make the collections of five major libraries searchable online violates copyright law and thus harms authors' interests. As both an author and publisher, I find the Guild's position to be exactly backward. Google Library promises to be a boon to authors, publishers and readers if Google sticks to its stated goal of creating a tool that helps people discover (and potentially pay for) copyrighted works. ...

I'm with Google on this one. It would certainly be considered fair use, if, for example, I circulated a catalog of my favorite books, including a handful of quotations from each book that helps people to decide whether to buy a copy. In my mind, providing such snippets algorithmically on demand, as Google does, doesn't change that dynamic. Google allows click-through to the entire book only if the book is in the public domain or if publishers have opted in to the program. If it's unclear who owns the rights to a book, only the snippets are displayed.

A search engine for books will be revolutionary in its benefits. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy. While publishers invest in each of their books, they depend on bestsellers to keep afloat. They typically throw their products into the market to see what sticks and cease supporting what doesn't, so an author has had just one chance to reach readers. Until now.

Google promises an alternative to the obscurity imposed on most books. It makes that great corpus of less-than-bestsellers accessible to all. By pointing to a huge body of print works online, Google will offer a way to promote books that publishers have thrown away, creating an opportunity for readers to track them down and buy them. Even online sellers like Amazon offer only a small fraction of the university libraries' titles. While there are many unanswered questions about how businesses will help consumers buy the books they've found through a search engine for printed materials that is as powerful as Google's current Web search, there's great likelihood that Google Print's Library Project will create new markets for forgotten content. In one bold stroke, Google will give new value to millions of orphaned works.

I'm sorry to see authors buy into the old-school protectionism of the Authors Guild, not realizing they're acting against their own self-interest. Their resistance can come only from a failure to understand the nature of the program. Google Library is intended to help readers discover copyrighted works, not to give copies away. It's a tremendous service to authors that will help them beat the dismal odds of publishing as usual.

I'm with Google and O'Reilly, and hope to see him when his Web 2.0 conference begins Wednesday.

Wait! Don't open that cardboard box!

NY Times:

Pay attention next time you rip open a cardboard box - you may be entering into a contract without realizing it.

A recent decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinforced the right of companies, in this case Lexmark International, the printer maker, to legally limit what customers can do with a patented product, given that the company spells out conditions and restrictions on a package label known as a box-top license.