And 50 km to the north of you, it's 4 degrees. Almost freeze you Ottawa bastards!

Oh, and go Google Library! I'm not sure what author's rights you're talking about. Can they opt out of card catalogues too?

You know what rights. You place the full text in a new medium without consent and/or payment there is absolutely no doubt it is a copyright breach. You been drinking the boingy water? It is instructive to keep the discussion within reality to be reminded of how the BBC has approached this...if I could find a link to it. Basically they hired a team of lawyers to go through and clear copyright by paying the interest holders what is due.

I sure have, most of the way. Most of these rights are fairly recent inventions, and have been contiually modified to roll with the punches, technologically speaking. This push and pull has always tried to balance authors rights with physical property rights with the benefits to society. Copying a book that you own doesn't sound like a copyright violation to me, as long they don't make readable copies available to humans (including internal employees) in a practical manner. I do see the conflict of rights here and I think that the right to do this should be explicitly recognized in law, because:

- there is no economic loss to authors (no one is getting their book for free) and in fact the potential for economic gain is quite tangible
- there is a significant net benefit to society (a superior indexing system)

The teflon factor is hard to understand. Surely, at some point it must wear out and voters will decide to "throw the bums" out no matter what they think of the opposition. That would be a good Ph.D. study for someone: the Teflon factor of the federal liberal party in Canadian politics: How long can it last, what will finally make it wear out and how good to the alternatives have to be for the Teflon to wear off?

If I can replicate the bread I bought once, I won't buy the bread again. The idea that there is no economic loss is stunning in its persistence among intellegent people. Exclusivity is the key factor in valuation of a commodity.

Well, I'm not sure where the bread argument fits in, so I'll leave that alone for now.

Where is the economic loss? Are you following the argument in the globe and mail on Wednesday: "if they can copy the books for indexing, then they can copy the books for giving away"?

Bread is like software is like books. If you learn to copy my widget and make it available for free, I can no longer sell it for the price I have fixed. That is my loss and it is a process of involuntary decommodification of my work product not through creating a better widget but taking my widget. That is exactly what copyright is for despite Cory Doctorow and others humbuggery on copyright. These <i>Wired</i> columnists turned amateur IP lawyers see no big picture with their avarice to get their hands on the content of others. They couch it in "new e-conomy" and "Web 2.0" claptrap but it is irrelevent. Every new medium in the past has been incorporated into copyright to protect the author's interest - to the point you can go to the Canadian copyright agency and see the fee to play music at a rollerskating arena or on a telephone system while on hold. Somehow internet based digital technology is being counselled as having the opposite effect, that it is a free for all. The gurus are hungry. That is all.<p>Look at it this way. If I re-label your digital products and call them my own and distribute them, I have breached your right and likely have perpetrated a theft of property. Placing the text of books on the internet even though they are under copyright as Google is proposing (and Yahoo and the BBC are each separately expressly rejecting) is no different. Google is wrong in doing this without consent and payment. Yahoo is right not to digitize works under copyright and the BBC is right to pay out the interest holders in its archive. Worst of all, Google has the capacity to pay out these interests in a model it already uses. It merely chooses not to. I would not be surprised to see Google one day to place these servers in a rogue state to effect its plan of content control. <p>Nothing boingy changes the above.

I design and write thread pools for a living. Dunno about Rove though.

"Placing the text of books on the internet even though they are under copyright as Google is proposing...". No they are not proposing do this, no more than they are proposing to round up all the authors of the books afterwards and put them in concentration camps (so Google will own all the world's content). No one (well, me) is disagreeing that either act (putting the books on the Internet; gassing the authors) is illegal and immoral.

Google is copying the books internally to index them; this can be done in a manner which will not divulge the full contents to the public. There is nothing wrong or immoral with copying stuff -- I'm doing it right now with the CDs _I purchased_ to the iPod _I own_.

Law is created, and new circumstances create new law. It's fine to sneer at "amature lawyers", but they're entitled to as much as say in the process of creating these laws as the professional set, even if the pros think differently.

Well, that is a change. I understood that there was keyword indexing and whole page displaying after complete text scanning. <p>Your last paragraph makes little sense by the way. Sneering amateurs saying lawyers <i>don't get it</i> as they mischaracterize what is being done is the problem with the discourse.

Nope, only the immediate line that the keyword is on (as I understand it). This is different than the Amazon approach, obviously.

I won't speak for Cory Doctorow, except to note that the problem of how to do IP properly given a changing technological world is more wide open than many experts in the field would have you believe.

I think Google Print is kind of squicky too, but - damn it's cool.

Alan: Some time ago you were wondering where the Erie Canal was in Syracuse. If you use Google Print, you can look at some great photos of haunts you may recognize from your travels here. (Search on "Syracuse" in this book.)

Hey! The 1955 Bulgarian Folk Choir CDs came in the mail today! I can't be grumpy about futurist consultants any more. I have to whirl around the living room to disharmonic madly paced songs about the goat herd. Excellent.

...and NYCO hit the nail on the head - squicky. Right some jeesely squicky at that. <p>That book was my Christmas book to me last year, too. That is a great series - does it only cover CNY. Great concept, having just a gallery of historical photos on a theme.

David - just have a look at this search. If I put "canal" in the Google Print the entire book's content comes up. I would never need to have bought this book. The publisher loses the sale and Google gets my attention to access the material through its web site in full page after full page of reproduction. True, Google does not allow you do save the image as a .jpg but by doing a "print screen" drop into MS Paint I can do this:<p><center><img src="images/2005f/google.JPG" vspace="5"></center><p>I can do that for every image in this book of images so the medium has facilitated my circumvention of the owner's control of access to the content of it work. Not exactly "just indexing."

When I was growing up in Brockport, NY, I went to the Erie, now known as the Barge Canal, every day to go fishing and ride bikes with friends up and down the towpaths. We found a large floating raft one summer day and sailed a few miles east to Spencerport, a la Huck Finn. Got in trouble for that. New York state works hard to preserve some nice parks, lakes, rivers etc, including that canal, which remains a working waterway, albeit mostly for pleasure craft.

Al ... I apologize. If that's copyrighted materials, that's outrageous.

You got it Gary. I will do one of those Erie barge holidays one day. You can go all the way to Ithaca and berth by the Farmers' Market.

Never an apology. We are working this out communally. The most outrageous thing is that Google has stamped it "Copyrighted Material" but does not identify whether this particular publisher has consented...which may be the case. That being said, the medium allows for gross violation of copyright.

Alan--how 'bout a little trip down the Niagara River?

I like the Bulgarian goat music too. Did you order it through Amazon?

Indeed. I had the lp of the 1970s version but got that and the 1955 recording on CD through Amazon.