Web Version of Books

Here's an email I just sent Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Book of Quotations:

I don't see a web version on the website. There should be one. Your publisher may be worried about losing book sales. What you can do is this:

1. Put a serial number in each book.
2. The buyer sends in his serial number an email address.
3. He then gets a password.
4. A new password is emailed to that serial number every year (or month, or whatever), replacing the old one.

That would be good enough security to avoid most cannibalization, I think, and would greatly increase the value of the book.

Publishers *should* know about simple things like this, but I bet they don't, and think security requires something more burdensome for all concerned.

Cambridge v. Patten

Justia has the complete collection of documents for Cambridge v. Patten, the case where Cambridge and Oxford's presses are suing Georgia State for copyright infringement. I've read the complaint. Georgia State lets professors post readings for their students, and gives them very liberal Fair Use guidelines. The presses are objecting even to single chapters being posted that way. Some interesting bits:

1. The presses are suing university administrators personally, as well as the organization.

2. The presses are not asking for any damages, just costs. The main thing they want is declaratory relief and an injunction.

I think the presses should win by law, though the law is very bad.

Oregon Threatening People Who Post State Laws

David Post at VC writes:

The State of Oregon, bless its heart, has begun sending out cease-and-desist letters to websites like Justia and Public.Resource.Org, demanding that the sites take down copies of the Oregon Revised Statutes posted there on the grounds that the posting infringes the State's copyright in the statutes.

Hard to believe, but apparently true. [See Cory Doctorow's posting on Boing Boing, and the story from TechDirt, along with accompanying documents.

The copyright claim is (like a lot of copyright claims these days) probably about 98% horse manure. They're not asserting copyright in the text of the laws themselves, but in the "arrangement and subject matter compilation," the numbering of statutory sections, and the various "tables, indices, and annotations" contained in the documents. Lots of that stuff is simply not copyrightable -- and even as to the stuff in which there might be copyright protection, what makes the State of Oregon so sure that it, and not the various individuals who authored particular sections, owns the copyright to those contributions?