Re: Authors Guild's Paul Aiken Opposes 'Turning Copyright Law Upside Down' -- Except When the Guild Is Helping Publishers Impose a 'License By Default'

On 9/28/05, Karen Coyle <kcoyle[_at_]kcoyle.net> wrote:

>

Let's face the assumption that creating digital page images is an act of infringement. I don't think that it is an act of infringement for the following reasons.

Libraries, unlike lay people, enjoy a special favor that allow them to do things that would be otherwise infringing if the lay people were to do the same. Libraries carry a very great responsibility in preserving the materials that they are entrusted to keep. Natural disasters and theft are constant threat to the libraries. There were few occurrences that when I went to shelves in some libraries only to find that the books were not there, probably because they were stolen or lost. Every several years, we read news how flood inflicts damage on a library. Allowing the libraries to have digital page images that Google give them will permit the libraries to give greater protection to the materials that they are entrusted to keep by moving them to more secure places. When anyone wants to borrow a book but it is locked up in a secure place, library can provide the borrower a digital copy of the digital page images. Naturally, libraries must monitor the digital copies that are lent to the borrowers.

Second reason is that libraries are able to send copy of digital page images to other libraries to fulfill the inter-library loan service without the need to mail the actual book itself. This will reduce the expense that the libraries will have to pay to cover the shipping and lighten the burden that the libraries have to carry to ensure that the books that they mail will not be lost somewhere during the delivery.

Third reason is that having digital page images ready will enable the libraries to fulfill the responsibility to preserve materials as allowed by Section 108.

> I thought that copyright had to do with copying, not with letting people
> see those copies.

Yes but authors and artists do not have absolute monopoly on copying.

> I would love to see a determination that the creation of indexes by
> machine is no more a copyright violation than some sitting down with
> lots of pieces of paper and making a list of the page numbers where each
> word appears, even though the former creates a transitory "copy" of the
> entire work.

Is there really any difference between index done by a machine and index done by a human being? I think that this is going to be a core issue. I think that transitory copy is permissible as long as the outcome is index. We are living in 21st century where digital media is part of our everyday life. We should not allow the authors to monopolize their works precisely because their works are not digital.

We will see how the court in New York City (or White Plains) decide, if the lawsuit continues to the completion.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<josephpietrojeungriolo[_at_]gmail.com>
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com>

Number of days left until 1-1-2019 when all knowledge of 1923 in the land of the U.S.A. will be freed from their copyright owners' prisons: 4,838

Public domain notice: I put all of my expressions in this post in the public domain. Received on Mon Oct 03 2005 - 22:50:45 GMT