COPYCENSE

“This summer, Hugh McGuire was searching for free audio books online from his home in Montreal. He didn’t find very much.

“So McGuire launched LibriVox by recruiting amateur readers to create audio files of works of literature. The project now includes almost two dozen complete works, including Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and other classic novels and poems.”

Cyrus Farivar. The Web Will Read You A Story. Wired News. Dec. 16, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Google was set to launch on Thursday a new service intended to give searchers fast links to song lyrics, musical artists and CD titles on the main search results page.

“Google Music will allow a user to type in the name of a band, artist, album or song in the main Google search bar special, and results will appear at the top, accompanied by icons of music notes.”

Elinor Mills. Google Whistles a New Tune. News.com. Dec. 14, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

Commentary by K. Matthew Dames, executive editor.

This is from the “you know you’re unpopular when your hometown paper is crushing you” department:

Scarcely a week passes without the entertainment industry warning us that its business model is about to be exterminated by some new technology.

The Internet, satellite radio and TiVo are among the mortal threats that have sent media executives scurrying to Washington with proposals to rein them in, tax them, even ban them. The music labels, TV networks and movie studios never propose to alter their own models to accommodate new technologies — they merely insist that everybody else change to accommodate them. When they don’t get their own way with lawmakers, they take it out on consumers.

Plainly, the media companies are engaged in an all-out attack on the principle of “fair use.”

Whenever a community is home to a particularly successful industry, it is common for that community’s newspaper to think twice about criticizing that industry or the domestic large companies that are in that industry. When I was just beginning to get started in journalism in the late nineties, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a scathing series about Chiquita Brands International, Inc., the banana company, accusing it of various and sundry unethical business practices, including improper (and perhaps illegal) uses of pesticides and environmental toxins. At the time, Chiquita was based in Cincinnati, and its owner, Carl Lindner, was one of Cincinnati’s most powerful business figures.

Many of the critical stories were published prominently in a special section in the Enquirer, and included several Page One stories.

Chiquita, sensitive to damage to its corporate reputation, fought back, claiming that one of package’s lead reporters, Mike Gallagher, had improperly obtained voice mail to support his stories. The Enquirer retracted the entire package, apologized to Chiquita on its front page, and fired Gallagher. The newspaper, part of the Gannett newspaper empire, also paid a financial settlement to Chiquita believed to be worth as much as $50 million. (See Columbia Journalism Review coverage.)

To my knowledge, none of the information in the Chiquita package has been discounted as untrue. In fact, research for the core claims in the package — including money laundering, violations of child labor laws, and sweatshop work conditions — did not depend on any voice mail material, as Salon later reported.

I recount this story because since that time, media outlets have been loathe to do investigative reporting. They also have, to a great extent, abdicated their role as a governor on corporate and government abuses. Put in this context, it is rather unusual for the Los Angeles Times to criticize Big Content so directly. There once was a time, however, where this sort of critical reporting and editorializing was routine.

Michael Hiltzik. An Industry Unwilling to Play by Rules of ‘Fair Use’. LATimes.com. Dec. 12, 2005.

See also:

Nicholas Stein. Banana Peel. Columbia Journalism Review. September/October 1998.

Bruce Shapiro. Rotten Banana. Salon.com. July 8, 1998.

John Nolan. Chiquita Accepts Apology, $10M from Enquirer. Cincinnati.com. June 29, 1998.

The Cincinnati Enquirer. An Apology to Chiquita. Cincinnati.com. June 28, 1998.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“In the latest salvo in the fight over the future of books on the Internet, one of the country’s biggest publishers said it intends to produce digital copies of its books and then make them available to search services offered by such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com., while maintaining physical possession of the digital files.

“News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. hopes to head off the prospect of these big Internet companies taking charge of books that it has purchased, edited and published.”

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Kevin J. Delaney. HarperCollins Plans to Control Its Digital Books. The Wall Street Journal. Dec. 12, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“Several developers of Mac software that search the Web for song lyrics have been issued with cease and desist orders by one of the big four record companies.

“Walter Ritter, author of the pearLyrics application and widget that automatically searches the Web for song lyrics and adds them to the lyrics field in iTunes, said that he had been contacted by Warner/Chappell Music and asked to remove the software or face legal action.”

Simon Aughton. Music Giants Bear Down on Lyric Search Apps. PC Pro. Dec. 7, 2005.

See also:

PearWorks. PearLyrics: Too Easy to Be Legal? No date.

Update:

Simon Aughton. Music Publishers Seek Stringent Punishment for Websites Disclosing Lyrics. PC Pro. Dec. 9, 2005.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

“The Grateful Dead–the business–is testing the loyalty of longtime fans of the Grateful Dead–the band–by cracking down on an independently run Web site that made thousands of recordings of its live concerts available for free downloading.

“The band recently asked the operators of the popular Live Music Archive to make the concert recordings, a staple of Grateful Dead fandom, available only for listening online, the band’s spokesman, Dennis McNally, said Tuesday.

“In the meantime, the files that previously had been freely downloaded were taken down from the site last week.”

Jeff Leeds. Deadheads Rebel Against Web Crackdown. News.com. Nov. 30, 2005.

See also:

BoingBoing. Barlow on Death of Grateful Dead Music Sharing, Fans Protest. Nov. 29, 2005.

Internet Archive. Grateful Dead Concert Recordings on the Internet Archive. Nov. 22, 2005.

Updates:

Associated Press. Everyone Is Grateful Again. Wired News. Dec. 1, 2005. (“What a short, strange trip it was. After the Grateful Dead angered some of its biggest fans by asking a nonprofit website to halt the free downloading of its concert recordings, the psychedelic jam band changed its mind Wednesday.”)

Susan B. Shor. Dead Keeps Concert Sharing Alive. TechNewsWorld. Dec. 1, 2005.

Internet Archive. Good News and an Apology: GD on the Internet Archive. Dec. 1, 2005.

Richard B. Simon. Grateful Dead Downloads Likely To Be Restored at Archive.org. Relix News. Nov. 30, 2005.

Attribution: OpenWyre.com first discovered news of this policy change through a posting in Library Stuff, edited by Steven M. Cohen.

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.

My esteemed colleague, digitization expert Jill Hurst-Wahl, has done a preliminary analysis of Google Book Search, including the quality of the images the service provides. Unfortunately, Jill’s early report is not encouraging. “If you search through the materials, you’ll find items where the images are very crisp and clear, and others that are blurry and (perhaps) sloppily done,” Jill says, suggesting that the image quality is inconsistent. Now, if the page image is the source material — Google is not providing lots of text from the material for fear of fanning the flame of copyright concern more than it has — what good is it if it is blurry?

Jill’s preliminary analysis points to something we have discussed often throughout 2005: it is difficult to provide consistently high quality work in a digitization project. Most people equate digitization with scanning. Digitization is not scanning; scanning is scanning. Digitization, on the other hand, is a planned, comprehensive, systematic approach whereby a piece of information that exists in analog or paper form is transformed into a digital form and made accessible in the new, digital form. (I’m sure Jill will correct this definition where it is lacking.) There can be several dozen factors that one must consider within a digitization project or program, including the quality of the source material, pixel count, image format, storage size of captured image, network loads of aggregated captured images, findability, and metadata.

To this end, Jill and I are teaming throughout 2006 to provide training sessions on digitization project management. The schedule below is what we have confirmed as of this writing; I will update this listing as we receive more confirmed dates. If you or your organization are investigating whether to launch a digitization initiative, are in the midst of a digitization initiative, or need digitization training or case studies, please contact me at mail@sesodigital.com or Jill Hurst-Wahl at hurst@hurstassociates.com.

Digitization 101. How is Google’s Digitization Quality? Nov. 30, 2005.

Digitization Project Management Essentials

Computers in Libraries conference, Washington, DC

Saturday, March 25, 2006 1:30 PM to 4:30 PM

Digitization is much more than converting a physical or analog object into its digital equivalent: It is about efficiently repurposing crucial information resources to improve an organization’s retention and use of information. Yet most digitization projects are doomed from the start because the focus is on the conversion process instead of other, critical pre-scanning issues such

as selection criteria, preservation of original documents, metadata creation, software and hardware concerns; integration into existing systems; and legal issues.

This workshop introduces the critical issues every organization must consider when approaching a digitization project, including the copyright issues inherent in any digitization project, and how copyright can govern whether or not a digitization project is even viable. It provides an update on the status of the world’s most famous digitization project: Google’s proposed

digitization of the holdings of five of the world’s leading research libraries. Participants will leave with a conceptual understanding of the life cycle of a digitization project, allowing them both to investigate their own projects more critically, and move from working on a single project to creating an ongoing digitization program.

Register for Digitization Project Management Essentials (Code W16)

Digitization Project Management in a Nutshell

SLA Virtual Learning Series

Wednesday, April 12, 2006 (time forthcoming)

This session introduces participants to the core project management tools involved in creating, managing, and preserving digital assets, including:

• When should you digitize, and why;
• Overall project management considerations;
• How to decide what materials to select for a digitization project;
• Storing and accessing digital materials; and
• Best practices

Registration information forthcoming for Digitization Project Management in a Nutshell

Managing Intellectual Property Issues Within the Digitization Project

SLA Virtual Learning Series

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 (time forthcoming)

This second session builds on the basics learned in the first session and analyzes how different areas of intellectual property will affect different phases of the project plan, including:

• What “intellectual property” really means (including an introduction to the IP landscape);
• Identifying the copyright issues inherent in digitization projects (including the public domain, the library and archival limitations, and fair use);
• Why licensing agreements and subscriptions may curb your digitization project;
• Why confidential and proprietary information must be handled differently; and
• An update on the IP issues in Google Print’s Library Project.

Registration information forthcoming for Managing Intellectual Property Issues Within the Digitization Project

Digitization Essentials Workshop

SLA Annual Conference, Baltimore, MD

Saturday and Sunday, June 10-11, 2006

Participants in this pre-conference workshop will be introduced to some of the critical issues every organization must consider when they approach a digitization project, and will be engaged with on exercises and simulations that discuss and analyze real-world situations. In particular, these two, half-day morning sessions will provide participants with a firm conceptual understanding of the life cycle of a digitization project, which will allow them both to investigate their own projects more critically, and move from working on a single project to creating an ongoing digitization program. The lecturers also will provide an update on the status of the world’s most famous digitization project: Google Book Search.

Register for Digitization Essentials Workshop (effective Jan. 6, 2006)

CopyCense™: K. Matthew Dames on the intersection of business, law and technology. A business venture of Seso Digital LLC.