Terminology issues II

G'day everyone

2. In the old days, before large-scale use of computers by the public, terminology was extracted "by hand". The terminologist would sit down with the book, and underline possible terms, and then write them or type them into a terminology database. With computer we are, however, now capable of doing faster and better term extraction based on statistical and hybrid linguistic computation.

Now we can import an entire book (in electronic format) and extract possible terms from it (even if the terms total a fraction of the total words of the work) within a matter of minutes. Then the terminologist checks the words to remove false postives, and he reads the terms in context using a concordance method to write their definitions or their translations. To do this, the book must be in electronic format... and that is something which may be an issue.

Here is an example of a copyright notice which appears in many books: "No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retreival system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise...".

As far as I know, making a photocopy of a book of which you own a legal copy, and using that photocopy for personal use and not for the purpose of making two copies of the work available simultaneously, is not considered infringement of the above notice. Am I right? What about making an electronic copy of the book?

What about making a temporary copy for the purposes of information processing? A hardcopy example may be that you buy a book, make a complete photocopy of it, store the original book in a place where no-one else has access to it, then use the photocopy edition for studying (making notes on it in pen or with a highlighting pen, etc), so that when you're done "processing" the information, you can throw away (destroy) the photocopy and still have the original unharmed.

An electronic copy example might be to scan in a book so that you can more easily do Find-searches on the text, or make annotations to it in Notepad, but in the end, the electronic version of the book is destroyed and only the hardcopy remains.

I guess what I'm getting at is whether it would be okay for me to make a copy of something which is simply an inbetween step in a process of which the end-result is not infringement of copyright.

Samuel Received on Wed Jun 21 2006 - 06:05:45 GMT