
Is this idea prone to lawsuits? - amichail

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amichail
I have been thinking some more about an idea to help people better understand
their books. However, there's a chance that the information submitted by users
would allow people to infer the contents of some books sufficiently such that
they would not need to buy them. Would this be viewed as a copyright
violation? Of course, it may turn out the other way around with the service
resulting in more people buying books.

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jwecker
If the author voluntarily submits the text, it wouldn't be a problem imo. You
could then/also require that any quote over 1 sentence (which could be safely
covered by fair use) or maybe even any quote at all is simply a reference to
the book itself- maybe even formalize the referencing system. If they are not
copying the text, there is no copyright problem. Copyrights do not act like
trade secrets or patents.

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danielha
This would not violate our copyright laws.

Refer to Amazon.com's product reviews as an example. There is plenty of
information available on a book or movie, submitted by users -- spoilers too.
As long as there isn't verbatim material provided in whole contexts, I see no
problem. People review books all the time; they even summarize its entire
content.

If I misunderstood your idea's intent, let me know.

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amichail
People will probably copy some material verbatim even if the terms of usage
policy says otherwise. And if sufficiently many people are contributing to
information associated with a book, after a while those copied parts can add
up to a significant portion of the book.

But even if material isn't copied verbatim, what happens if significant
portions of the book are revealed anyway? This may not even be a summary. The
contributed content may end up being larger than the book itself.

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phil
if you can get enough bits of books posted to your site that publishers start
to notice and want to sue you, then you would be wildly succeeding. even so,
this all sounds like fair use to me.

