we live in public
Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.
vine found
Copyright, Fair Use, and the Perils of Legislation
Bruce Sanford and Bruce Brown commented in the WSJ on “Google and the Copyright Wars” (11/12). Many are focused on the status of orphan works in the Google Books project, but Sanford and Brown argue that the idea of fair use and its application by search engines is the controversy’s center, not orphan works. Sanford and Brown would say that a search engine’s use of the web’s content is definite and definitely unfair.
Fair use of a book’s content, a website, or even the news underpins a search engine’s ability to find and deliver websites to users of the internet. Sanford and Brown stake out a position for search engines that is similar to a public library. Just as a library can employ the contents of its archive to establish an index for its patrons, the search engine uses the contents of the internet to establish an index for anyone at all. Sanford and Brown, however, contend that search engines are not libraries, so fair use does not apply.
Sanford and Brown argue that two distinctions separate search engines from the library model. Search engines not only copy text, they reproduce it in their results as snippets. Rights of reproduction are protected for copyright holders. Second, search engines sell advertising, and the sale of advertising is contingent on their ability to copy, store and reproduce copyrighted material. These distinctions, argue Sanford and Brown, disqualify search engines from the safe harbor of any exemption made for libraries. Their remedy: legislation.
The problem is, search engines don’t find safe harbor in the library model, and legislation is not the answer. Yes, a library applies fair use in its practices, and search engines have been compared to them in the past, but not all applications of fair use are found in the confines a library. This may be why they are so quick to demand legislation to expand copyright, even though expanding copyright may drive more business to the lawyers who protect it than the websites involved.
The Ninth Circuit court framed a four factor test for fair use in the case of Perfect 10 v. Google, et al in May 2007. The test would distinguish between copyright infringement and fair use in the case of Google’s use of Perfect 10 material in its search results. The four factors comprise: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the work, ie fact-based or creative; the amount of the work used; and the effect on the market for the work. None of them invoke the metaphor of the library used by Sanford and Brown.
When Google displayed the Perfect 10 images, the Circuit determined that all four factors weigh in its favor. The images may have been highly original, but the results incorporate “an original work into a new work, namely an electronic reference tool,” and this is highly transformative: “a search engine may be more transformative than a parody because a search engine provides an entirely new use for the original work, while a parody typically has the same entertainment purpose as the original work.” Though Google would use a degraded thumbnail version of the image, its “use of the entire photographic image [is] reasonable in light of the purpose of a search engine.” The Ninth Circuit, therefore, reasoned that Google’s use of Perfect 10 thumbnails would be considered fair use. Though it didn’t provide a decision, it did suffice to vacate Perfect 10’s preliminary injunction against Google.
Sanford and Brown mistake the metaphor of a library as the only example of fair use when alternatives, such as the Ninth Circuit’s opinion, are perfectly acceptable. Perhaps this is why, having fleshed out their metaphor, they seize on legislation as a solution. Indeed, they would have Congress assert, “once the cache is monetized for the benefit of a search engine, the line of copyright infringement is crossed.” Isn’t this a sort of Hail Mary pass to rights-holders?
Legislation could make it illegal to monetize a cache without permission, but it’s not the panacea that Sanford and Brown are driving at. If the legislation mandated payments for rights-holders, it would, but this is probably not a suggestion that would be found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. More likely, it would not, and it would leave websites in the position of the prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone cooperates and insists on payment, it will be to their mutual advantage, but the search engines direct so much traffic that each website has an incentive to break ranks; hence, everyone reluctantly opts in for fear that they’ll be the lone hold-out. In effect, it’s as though the legislation never happened, with one important distinction: there’s a new law on the books that requires a few good lawyers to understand. Perhaps that’s what’s really driving Sanford and Brown’s comment.
There is an exception, however. Not all players are equal in this game. Some may wager that holding-out is viable regardless of legislation or whether others do. That’s exactly what News Corp has done. They have begun negotiating a possible payment from Microsoft for the exclusive right to index their content. Though derided by many on the internet, should they find an agreement, their example will prove an important experiment in the question of paying for content.
We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.
—Marcus Brauchli on the Washington Post
He has to convey the fact that his strategy is not an open-ended one for an indefinite war. In different ways he’s going to have a hard sell with both Republicans and Democrats, simply because the country is in a kind of state of unease.
—Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter
there’s a real chance that, soon enough, Chinese economic weakness will be a bigger problem than was Chinese economic strength.
—Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, via Economic View: NYT
is he right…
We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security.
—David Brooks on healthcare reform
We have seen broad improvement in home prices for most of the past six months. However, the gains in the most recent month are more modest than during the seasonally strong summer months. Fewer cities saw month to month improvements in September than in August in both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted figures. Nationally, the U.S. National Composite rose by 3.1% in both the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2009. Both the 10-City and 20-City Composites posted their fifth consecutive monthly increase with September’s report. Earlier some analysts voiced concern that the end of the first-time home buyer program would result in a drop in activity. While housing starts did slip in October, the federal government recently extended and expanded the first-time homebuyer tax credit.
—David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s
This may be a bit of a transition period…You can look down the street and have 10 houses to choose from.
—Maureen Maitland, vice president for index services at Standard & Poor’s
Though we have seen some signs that the worst may be over, the housing industry is not out of the woods yet. Nor is the broader economy.
—Federal Reserve President Sandra Pianalto on 17 November
This is the big growth strategy for I.B.M., the company’s next big play for this decade. SAS comes from the legacy world of statisticians and programmers. The real opportunity is in deploying this technology broadly in corporations.
—Ambuj Goyal, a computer scientist who is general manager of I.B.M’s business analytics software unit
We must reform the international monetary system. A good monetary system should make us confident. But we don’t have confidence in the US dollar now.
—Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank adviser, on 17 Nov
Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.
Double your rate of failure
Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You are thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all. You can be discouraged by failure or you can learn from it, so go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because remember that’s where you will find success.
–Thomas J. Watson, (1874-1956), former President of IBM, one of the richest men of his time and called the world’s greatest salesman when he died in 1956
“ the paranoid mind is far more coherent than the real world
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964)
“the Igon Value Problem”
when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
—Steven Pinker on Malcolm Gladwell
China
We are in a fairly advanced stage of economic mutual interdependence. I think the Chinese can pull the rug out from under our economy only if they want to pull the rug out from under themselves…I think it is neither of our interests to see that unravel. If we can find ways to manage our differences and cooperate where we can, we both win. If not, we both lose.
—Kenneth Lieberthal, a China specialist with the Brookings Institution
We are really put in a corner. China will not take any irrational action. We don’t want to hurt you — because if we hurt you, we hurt ourselves first. It’s a kind of synergy.
—Yu Yongding, an economist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
They’re in the dollar trap. There’s no easy way out of it.
China is a big customer for U.S. debt, but it is not America’s banker. Nor is the United States dependent on China to finance its budget deficits.
—Steven Dunaway, CFR
Look for the stories about Lou Dobbs’s departure from CNN to say that he was controversial figure. No doubt he is. But that’s not really the main point about Mr. Dobbs. The main point is that he has a long history of not telling the truth.
