The Settlement is really mostly about out-of-print works whose publishers are no longer in business to negotiate with Google. And works owned by entities too small for Google to consider worth the trouble of direct negotiation and who Google figures can’t afford to sue: Authors whose rights have reverted to them, small publishers, and micropresses. They figure they might as well sweep up a few million works for free while they are at it.

Fran

Common land (a common) is land owned collectively or by one person, but over which other people have certain traditional rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect firewood, or to cut turf for fuel. By extension, the term “commons” has come to be applied to other resources which a community has rights or access to. The older texts use the word “common” to denote any such right, but more modern usage is to refer to particular rights of common, and to reserve the name “common” for the land over which the rights are exercised.

The act of transferring resources from the commons to purely private ownership is known as enclosure, or (especially in formal use, and in place names) Inclosure. The Inclosure Acts were a series of private Acts of Parliament, mainly from about 1750 to 1850, which enclosed large areas of common, especially the arable and haymeadow land and the better pasture land.

It is often thought that a common is somehow owned by everyone, or at least by the community in some sense. While that may have been true more than a thousand years ago, when waste would be used for grazing by the local community and over which there would not be, nor would there need to be, any particular limit or control of usage; since at least late Anglo-Saxon times, the right to exercise a right of common has been restricted to a commoner.

Professor Niall Ferguson recently wrote a piece on his blog about this

14/06/2009 Corrupt, Amoral Politicians. An Economy Sinking in Terrifying Debt. And a People Enraged. Britain Has Been Here Before.

… almost a month after its strongly-worded statement, Google hasn’t followed through on its plan and continues censoring its search results in China. – Computerworld

Eugène Delacroix

if you cant draw a man in the time it takes him to fall from the third floor of a building: you cant do the big machines

a public utility.

Normally descibes things that are Natural monopolies : the road , not to trucks that use the road to move things from one place to another.

However the more useless and unimportant something is, the greater potential it has to become a object of prestige.

At any rate, the point that I was trying to make is that US Federal Judges are not particularly well paid for their work, and that most of them could earn far more in the private sector. Generally speaking, Federal judges are intelligent, well qualified people who are committed to public service.

Like many others, I feel that they deserve to paid more. It seems ridiculous that Americans have no problem with athletes earning millions, while we scrimp on the salaries of our judges, who are doing work that is far more important to society.

What is X? It is a policy wherein your profile photo, friends list and most importantly fan page subscriptions are irrevocably public and a variety of other types of user data are now by default public. He doesn’t say “the era of privacy is over” directly, he says “our new privacy policies reflect the way the world is today” - but the phrase “our new privacy policy” equals no more privacy about some things and public by default on others.

Make sense?

It is true that Google books does not supply books to readers on a commercial basis. It is true that Google books supplies audiences to advertisers on a commercial basis. For Google Books, the principle tool used to draw an audience is ;books. For Google Books, books are a tool of trade , they are used to create a product ; ‘audiences’ that is suppled to advertisers on a commercial basis.

Google’s use of these books as a tool to create an commercial product : ‘the supply of an audience’, is a commercial use by Google of these books .

A worker on a building site asked the foreman, if he could have a wheelbarrow of sand to take home as he was building a sandpit for his kids, the foreman said ‘fair enough’. The worker continued to take a wheelbarrow of sand home every Friday evening for the next few months, before someone noticed that he wasn’t bringing the wheelbarrows back. Everyone is focussing on the sand, and not on the missing tools of trade. The worker was taking some sand on a’ fair enough’ basis, and he was also at the very same time stealing a tool that could be used for a commercial purpose.

The Author’s Guild sued Google because Google scanned copyrighted works, which Google initially said was for the purpose of displaying “snippets” in their search engine. The Author’s Guild could have lost that suit, and they could have won it. If they had run out of money to pay their lawyers (which apparently they did not) they could have merely withdrawn it.

What the Author’s Guild did instead, is to negotiate a much, much larger publishing contract; which if approved by the courts, would enable Google to publish entire books as e-books, as print-on-demand books, and as parts of bulk package deals to libraries. This contract extends for the entire remaining copyright term of millions of works. The Author’s Guild is trying to rope in millions of copyright holders by demanding an “opt out or you’re automatically in” arrangement.

I do not call this giving authors “control” over their works—and Google is still scanning them. No one has determined what Google will do with all the works they have scanned that were published after the Settlement cut-off publication date of January 5, 2009, or the works of copyright holders who individually opted out of the Settlement, or the works of copyright holders who are citizens of foreign countries that were opted out of the Settlement. Or even the illustrations in most of the books opted in, where the illustrations have a different copyright holder than the text. The Author’s Guild did not, for example, get a clause inserted in the Settlement saying that neither Google nor the fully participating libraries (who received free scans of the books in other participating libraries), will use the works of copyright holders who opted out.

If the Settlement were approved, this would set a precedent for every other entity who wanted to scan and sell copyrighted books, to first do so, and then try to get copyright holders automatically signed up with a similar class action suit and opt-out requirement.

Meanwhile, since the “snippets” issue was dropped, the Author’s Guild has set no legal precedent regarding “snippets.” Any and every other search engine company can still scan copyrighted works, display “snippets,” and wait for a class action suit.

I would hardly call the Author’s Guild’s actions either protecting copyright, or preventing infringement from “moving elsewhere.”

Fran