On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 12:33 PM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
What's the context here for Wikipedia?
IMHO, the google books settlement, and all its twists and turns, has big implications for us, particularly in increasing the quality of our referencing.
Yeah, but if someone could spell it out in detail, that would be good.
Carcharoth
The Chinese thing is bad for us because copyright is becoming a one-way street. What good is the GFDL/CC if we cannot enforce it but proprietary-licensing-but-copyright-infringing parties can enforce theirs? Heads we win, tails you lose...
As for Google Books's settlements: I don't know. I don't think I've seen anyone cover the consequences for Wikipedia.
Obviously we benefit in the short-term from having in-copyright books (as well as all the public domain books which we could've expected to appear online sooner or later), since most Wikipedians will only use what's in Google.
But what're the long-term costs? As I understand it, if the settlement is allowed to go through, it means anyone wanting to similarly use orphan works or in-copyright works in general will have to undergo a similar notification process and set up similar payment structures, a barrier which will keep out competitors. And many of the digitized works will be part of a wave of new public domain works is coming up in the next 2 or 3 decades, and since we can expect Google to be around then, we might also expect to see Google lined up with Disney et al in lobbying for a new Mickey Mouse Protection Act. Google's lobbying prowess is not trivial.
But besides that, I can't really think of any downsides. The community isn't planning on going into digitizing & distributing non-Free copyrighted books, so it doesn't really matter to us. Project Gutenberg likewise, and the Internet Archive is either covered by its special legal loopholes or likely isn't too bothered by having to keep private its archived books. (It already keeps private countless webpages; on a personal note, it's very frustrating to know the IA has backups of a webpage you want, but that years later someone bought the domain and put up a narrow robots.txt so you can't get at it.)