Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/court-rules-book-scanning-is-fair-use-suggesting-google-books-victory/

by abraham • 14 years ago

167 27 14 years ago

bookworm_3• 14 years ago

"text mining"

Hmmm. It's not so easy to do this with ebooks viewed in a graphical ebook reader. Note he didn't say "text search". He said mining.

Does this suggest noncommercial library books will offer research capabilities that commercial ebooks will not?

I want my ebooks in ASCII format. And that certainly goes for textbooks.

less(1) is my "ebook reader".

pyre3• 14 years ago

Are you suggesting that ebooks should be formatted in groff and devoid of page-breaks?

bookworm_3• 14 years ago

Should be a format that can be grep'd, made into PostScript, DejaVu, etc. Versatile. ASCII works well for that. Open, non-proprietary format.

Not only that, working with raw text is so much faster than anything else. less(1) is the most responsive "ebook reader" I've ever used. It never chokes on huge files. less -n

Ever try reading 100 or more PDF's in one sitting?

But with 100 ASCII docs, it's possible to skim them fast using less, or mine some text with some UNIX utility.

I like what this judge said. Digitizing books not just about putting the book on a "paper-like" screen with beautiful fonts, it's about enabling new utility. Working with the text.

lucian19003• 14 years ago

Yes, I don't want page-breaks in my ebooks. My reader is unlikely to be precisely the size the publisher put breaks on.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

What [major] eBook format keep their content in something other than ASCII (or Unicode or text of some kind)?

magicalist• 14 years ago

> Does this suggest noncommercial library books will offer research capabilities that commercial ebooks will not?

If they are scanned noncommercial library books, I guess.

I'm not sure how this is really relevant though. Scanning for this use may be fair use (hooray! some sanity), but the publishers aren't providing an ASCII file to the libraries either, the libraries are making a copy...hence the need for a fair use decision.

kalleboo• 14 years ago

Textbooks in pure ASCII sounds like a pain. No hyperlinks? No index?

TheGateKeeper• 14 years ago

As plane-Jane as can be sounds absolutely great for text piping etc.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

Would copying a VHS tape to a digital format similarly be fair use? Why or why not?

danshapiro• 14 years ago

Based on reading the article (and no legal knowledge whatsoever), it would appear to depend entirely on who was doing it and why. If libraries were doing it so they could automatically subtitle the work and make it available to deaf viewers, then probably so. If you are doing it so you can hawk DVD versions on street corners for a buck apiece, likely not.

bruceboughton• 14 years ago

I think what waterlesscloud is getting at is: What about if you want to watch it yourself on your iPad/computer/TV without VCR?

njharman• 14 years ago

I thought that (media shifting) along with time shifting was already decided to be fair use.

mtgx• 14 years ago

I thought Google and the authors settled? What is this ruling for? Is this in another trial?

rada• 14 years ago

Different lawsuit against the libraries that gave those books to Google to scan.

Avenger42• 14 years ago

Google settled with the publishers [1]. There's still a case between Google and the Authors Guild.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/google-se...

fluxon• 14 years ago

Dear Google,

Please resume scanning books, old magazines and newspapers, which you "paused" some time back. It was sensible to take a wait-and-see approach until this decision was reached.

Thank you.

Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory

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