Book: The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

James Boyle -- who is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and Chairman of the Board of Creative Commons -- has written a book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. The book is available for free on the book's web site and available for purchase as places like Amazon.com. (He does explain on the web site why giving it away for free and selling it simultaneously makes sense.) He is using a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

What is this book about? Quoting Boyle (page xiii):

This book is an attempt to tell the story of the battles over intellectual property, the range wars of the information age. I want to convince you that intellectual property is important, that it is something that any informed citizen needs to know a little about, in the same way that any informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment, or civil rights, or the way the economy works. I will try my best to be fair, to explain the issues and give both sides of the argument. Still, you should know that this is more than mere description. In the pages that follow, I try to show that current intellectual property policy is overwhelmingly and tragically bad in ways that everyone, and not just lawyers or economists, should care about. We are making bad decisions that will have a negative effect on our culture, our kids’ schools, and our communications networks; on free speech, medicine, and scientific research. We are wasting some of the promise of the Internet, running the risk of ruining an amazing system of scientific innovation, carving out an intellectual property exemption to the First Amendment. I do not write this as an enemy of intellectual property, a dot-communist ready to end all property rights; in fact, I am a fan. It is precisely because I am a fan that I am so alarmed about the direction we are taking.

Yet, he says that the message is not all doom-and-gloom. In fact, he believes that there is reason for hope.

This book is 333 pages, with notes and indexes. I've downloaded a copy and have been skimming it (I'll read in-depth later). Boyle does a good job "drawing in" the reader and making his point. And it is message that I hope we all can support.

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Technorati tag: Copyright

Article: The Current State-of-art in Newspaper Digitization: A Market Perspective

Yes, this is an old article (Jan. 2008), but not out of date. It is worth perusing, especially if you're into newspaper digitization. The article is the result of research and surveys conducted with newspaper digitizaton program and vendors. It discusses (in somewhat of a bird's eye view):

• Market parties
• Digital imaging
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
• Zoning and segmentation
• Metadata
• Searchability
• Presentation

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Newspaper

Web 2.0 version of "A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections"

Thanks to Digitizationblog for pointing this out. The Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections has been made editable by anyone with an account on the site. As the site says:

Engage with your colleagues and help to build a stronger Framework by providing your comments on this website. Community participation in the framework includes providing feedback, annotations, resources, and discussion.

This move allows librarians, archivists, curators, and other information professionals to contribute to this valuable document. For more information contributing, go to How to Contribute on the web site.

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Standards

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

Google announced this archive in its blog last month and the Spellbound blog has done a nice review of it. Work on this 70+ year archive containing 10 million images was done by the Crowley Company. In talking about the project, the Crowley press release said:

When asked about the challenges of such a large project, [Crowley project manager DeAnne] Larsen says, “At this point, it’s down to a science, although the early months offered a lot of learning opportunities. Every time we’d open a negative drawer, there was a ‘size surprise’ and we became quickly adept at having stations for every type of image – 35mm, 120 mm, 4x5’s, 8x10’s, prints, you name it.” She continues, “It’s impossible not to be awed by this collection. In the beginning there were a lot of ‘Hey, check this out’s.’ We quickly realized that almost every photo in the collection had a wow factor.”

The press release noted that each photo was given a digimark for copyright protection. This photo taken in 1863 is of a former slave, who became a Union soldier during the Civil War. The photo shows the scars on his back from the beatings he suffered while a slave. There is a copyright on the photo page, but -- really -- this photo is still protected by copyright law? Really? According to my math, the answer is "no", but perhaps Life did something to extend the copyright?

I would like to see more text on the Google Life photo archive page that explains their expectations for this collection and their copyright claims. How do they expect people to use this collection? Do they have different expectations of students? What is copyrighted? Prints are for sale, but what if I wanted a digital image to use? What do they consider Fair Use?

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Google

Rights holders have a limited time to opt out of the Google settlement

My fascination with the Google and its book search efforts is really showing, as I pounce on every new blog post in my RSS reader about it (and the impending settlement). Peter Murray in a recent blog post commented on Judge Sprizzo’s order granting preliminary settlement approval. Those -- rights holders -- who do not want to be included in the settlement must opt out soon. However, many may not realize that they need to do this. Murray wrote:

The number of people in the settlement class is huge — all of the authors who have self-published and/or retained copyright to their works and all of the publishers over the last eight decades, not to mention their heirs (since the current incarnation of copyright law extends the rights 70 years past the death of the author). It would seem that in the span of four months (January 5th to May 5th), all of these people need to see the notice and make a decision on whether they want to op-out of the settlement. Tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people need to decide whether they agree with a sweeping new Books Rights Registry and what will probably become a template of an agreement covering retrospective, had-not-been-conceived digital rights.

While Google must publish notifications, I would think that it is in our best interest to also spread the word to people that are -- or may be -- right holders. If you want to opt out of this settlement and not be covered by it, you need to say so before May 5, 2009.

Related posts:

• Article: The End of Snippet View: Google Settles Lawsuit with Book Publishers
• More on the Google settlement: Is it all good?
• More on what the Google Book Search settlement means (and my vision of Google's future)
• Article: Is Google Deal a Setback for Rival Digitization Efforts?

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Technorati tags: Digitization, Google