

Court rules book scanning is fair use, suggesting Google Books victory - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/court-rules-book-scanning-is-fair-use-suggesting-google-books-victory/

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bookworm_
"text mining"

Hmmm. It's not so easy to do this with ebooks viewed in a graphical ebook
reader. Note he didn't say "text search". He said mining.

Does this suggest noncommercial library books will offer research capabilities
that commercial ebooks will not?

I want my ebooks in ASCII format. And that certainly goes for textbooks.

less(1) is my "ebook reader".

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magicalist
> Does this suggest noncommercial library books will offer research
> capabilities that commercial ebooks will not?

If they are _scanned_ noncommercial library books, I guess.

I'm not sure how this is really relevant though. Scanning for this use may be
fair use (hooray! some sanity), but the publishers aren't providing an ASCII
file to the libraries either, the libraries are making a copy...hence the need
for a fair use decision.

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waterlesscloud
Would copying a VHS tape to a digital format similarly be fair use? Why or why
not?

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danshapiro
Based on reading the article (and no legal knowledge whatsoever), it would
appear to depend entirely on who was doing it and why. If libraries were doing
it so they could automatically subtitle the work and make it available to deaf
viewers, then probably so. If you are doing it so you can hawk DVD versions on
street corners for a buck apiece, likely not.

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bruceboughton
I think what waterlesscloud is getting at is: What about if you want to watch
it yourself on your iPad/computer/TV without VCR?

~~~
waterlesscloud
Well, that certainly. But also more. If it's legal to do this on an industrial
scale with books, why not with movies or music?

I think there's some complicated reasoning in the decision, and I'm curious
what it will mean in the bigger picture.

Why can't I (or a company) take any analog media and transform them to
digital. I'm adding transformative functionality, after all. Digital search
capabilities, for example.

Not for resale of the work, of course, but for my own vast database that I
sell research access to.

And even if the work has already been translated to a digital format (DVD or
CD for example), the decision seems to say there's still nothing wrong with me
transferring from analog to digital. If there was, point 4 would be circular
as the decision says.

So it seems like this says Google could go digitize a bunch of LPs, VHS tapes,
and even celluloid film for similar projects. Google Film. Google Albums. Etc.

I don't really think this holds up, but I can't pin down why it wouldn't.

Bonus thought- what if I took software and made it run on a new platform. Is
that also fair use under this decision? Wouldn't that also be transformative
use?

Hmmm.

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fluxon
Dear Google,

Please resume scanning books, old magazines and newspapers, which you "paused"
some time back. It was sensible to take a wait-and-see approach until this
decision was reached.

Thank you.

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mtgx
I thought Google and the authors settled? What is this ruling for? Is this in
another trial?

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Avenger42
Google settled with the publishers [1]. There's still a case between Google
and the Authors Guild.

[1]: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/google-
se...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/google-settles-with-
publishers/2012/10/04/3a3ea034-0e2f-11e2-bb5e-492c0d30bff6_blog.html)

