OT: Apple's new announcement (iBooks Author), Personal Books & SOPA

Interesting to see the big Apple entering the Personal Books market. Wonder what Logos thinks of this?

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/19/2718433/apple-education-event-january-2012

Wonder whether it will have cross-book searching like Logos does, and linking/integration with your entire library. I'm guessing not, though I confess I have not read all the materials or watched the video of the announcement.

Still, it is interesting to see that Logos was reading the wind and anticipating the future before other companies were. Or maybe they were even helping create the future.

As Clay Shirky explained in his excellent TED Talk on Why SOPA is a bad idea, we love to be not just consumers of content, but creators and sharers of content. SOPA would probably interfere with Logos being able to offer a Personal Book marketplace, because it could theoretically be used to violate copyrights, so Logos would have to be in the business of policing the content people share or else they would be at risk of having their website shut down, rather than it being the responsibility of content owners to go after copyright violators as has always been the case in the past. It basically makes the cost of compliance for differentiating between legal sharing and illegal sharing too high, so companies that make products that allow content creation and sharing stop providing those services, so it penalizes all of us, whether we're guilty of theft or not.

And if that's not enough to scare you away from making PB's, this might rock your boat a little:

Public Domain Works Can Be Copyrighted Anew, Supreme Court Rules - yikes!

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toughski

Public Domain Works Can Be Copyrighted Anew, Supreme Court Rules - yikes!

the article title is misleading. According to the new ruling, now the law gives the same protection to foreign works as to American works. So foreign public domain works (FPD) are NOT copyrighted anew (as in I got another 4 year term as president), but their copyright "extended" to match that of US works and only in the US. In Somalia copyright protection may be different.

Lynden O. Williams

[:@] [:'(] Groooaaannnnn.This copyright thing needs to be sorted out.

Nord Zootman

Thanks for sharing Rosie. I had certainly heard of SOPA but had really not paid any attention. It obviously has far reaching ramifications.

Mike Childs

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/327603#Comment_327603

Groooaaannnnn.This copyright thing needs to be sorted out.

Indeed, it does. Copyright is a good thing in so far as it protects the rights of the author or creator of a work. It is a bad thing when it goes beyond that. There is a reasonable balance.

Also, times and technology change, and the laws must change as well. Otherwise the laws become irrelevant, and that is bad. For example, there is a law in Boston that forbids taking a bath unless prescribed by a doctor. Personally, I think that law stinks, but you get my point. The law, if not reasonable, becomes irrelevant.

When it first became popular to make personal .mp3 files from one's own cd collection, the music industry was outraged. They fought and came up with better copyright DRM protection. However, the public refused to buy cd's with such DRM protection, and time showed that the making of .mp3s actually increased music industry sales. Soon the law was changed.

Eventually, common sense will prevail. The fact is that current copyright laws were developed long before current technology. Today anybody can copy anything easily. So the enforcement of copyright law largely becomes a matter of personal ethics.

Finally, as was pointed out by others, the current decision only places foreign works on an equal copyright basis with American works. There is some logic in that, but I think SOPA would be a terrible mistake. It would be somewhat like the bathing laws in Boston.

fgh

Why SOPA is a bad idea

Anyone with a bit of Swedish can answer that one: 'sopa' means 'piece of garbage'. [:P] And to make it even better 'pippa' is a childish word for what adults do in bed.[:D] (Which made one sentence towards the end of that video sound really funny to Swedish ears.) What do you think my risk of losing is if I bet no one in the relevant congressional offices knows Swedish? [:P]

this might rock your boat a little

Why? Seems to me they're just upholding a law that's been on the books since 1994, and a law based on an international convention at that. As a non-American I'm quite happy that the SC puts at least some limit to how much Americans can steal from non-Americans. There are quite a few Swedish inventors who've had their lifetime achievements stolen by some American company, too big for an individual foreigner to fight. We'd do better to worry about the fact that companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google all have the resources to build a 'Logos 7' in far fewer years than Logos can, the influence to quickly contract pretty much all relevant publishers, and the money to hold the prices down until Logos goes broke.

SOPA is another matter. It does indeed seem to be a piece of garbage.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/328111#Comment_328111

SOPA is another matter. It does indeed seem to be a piece of garbage.

And it is effectively dead.

fgh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/328153#Comment_328153

SOPA is another matter. It does indeed seem to be a piece of garbage.

And it is effectively dead.

I know. With a name like that, it was destined to end up in the trash.