A new radio spot paid for by the Koch brothers extols the spirit of cooperation that led unionized workers at Harley-Davidson to take a pay cut for the good of the company. What it doesn't mention is the $6.5 million paycheck the company's CEO handed himself that year.
--Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
Showing posts with label Boing Boing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boing Boing. Show all posts
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Copyright Law - A Quagmire
The Internet has created a real firestorm over copyright law. Bloggers, such as myself, often copy clips from other publications and use them to initiate a story, or to confirm facts or opinions being offered. It's not likely, without the fair use provision of copyright law, that blogs like mine would exist. I don't have enough original thoughts - nor do I do enough original research - to warrant publishing a blog on a regular basis without the use of material I find elsewhere.
Occasionally copyright claims are filed against blogs that clip information. Google got sued by book publishers when they tried to provide a database of hundreds of thousands of books by scanning them into their servers. Even though only small clips would be provided by a Google search for text in the books, the publishing companies still felt that having all of the books scanned into one database threatened their ability to make a living by selling the books.
Now a new copyright battle is brewing - this time over Amazon's production of the second-generation Kindle which will use text-to-voice software to read electronic books aloud. This is sort of funny - but also a bit threatening. If the publishers win, in the future you can't be sure that when you buy a book you really own it.
From Boing Boing (click to read the whole article - it's interesting).
Occasionally copyright claims are filed against blogs that clip information. Google got sued by book publishers when they tried to provide a database of hundreds of thousands of books by scanning them into their servers. Even though only small clips would be provided by a Google search for text in the books, the publishing companies still felt that having all of the books scanned into one database threatened their ability to make a living by selling the books.
Now a new copyright battle is brewing - this time over Amazon's production of the second-generation Kindle which will use text-to-voice software to read electronic books aloud. This is sort of funny - but also a bit threatening. If the publishers win, in the future you can't be sure that when you buy a book you really own it.
From Boing Boing (click to read the whole article - it's interesting).
Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob has the news that the always-retrograde Authors' Guild believes that Amazon is violating copyright law by shipping a device that can read text-files aloud using text-to-speech, because "that's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."
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Forget for a moment that text-to-speech doesn't copy an existing work. And forget the odd notion that the artificial enunciation of plain text is equivalent to a person's nuanced and emotive reading. The Guild's claim is that even to read out loud is a production akin to an illegal copy, or a public performance.If a machine reading a book creates a derivative work, why not a person reading a book?
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