Google Accused of Violating Copyright In China 247
angry tapir writes "The Chinese Authors Society has demanded that Google present a resolution plan by the end of the year and quickly handle compensation for Chinese authors whose books the US company has scanned without permission as part of its Book Search program. A local copyright protection group, co-founded by the authors group, has said it found at least 17,000 Chinese works included in Google's scanning plan."
In other news (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news, Baidu implement a website to download MP3s
http://mp3.baidu.com/ [baidu.com]
Same treatment (Score:1, Interesting)
I think google should address this with as much tenacity as the chinese government has in enforcing copyright of non-chinese works/programs/music.
One also has to wonder what China is trying to prove. First microsoft and now google
Is this really about copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)
Copywrong. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a privateer. I decided to become one recently. What sparked this decision is the fact that content industries are stealing from me. When copyright was first introduced it was for a period of fourteen years which allowed the creator time to make a profit off of their work even with primitive dissemination systems of the time. After that period it expired and entered the public domain where it would join other works in a rich mosaic for future works to draw from. This is dead. Over the years copyright terms have been extended to the point where there effectively is no public domain anymore. The content industry plays lip-service to the issue, they insist that there is a public domain but when every work is at least life of author plus seventy-five years or so there is in reality no public domain from my life's point of view. I will never see Alien (1979) enter the public domain. I will never see a new original movie based off that setting and characters. I will never see the iron grip of control loosened and in fact I'm sure content is planning more extensions to the terms. Government is complicit in this, politicians have accepted bribes, er.. campaign donations, in exchange for listening to these idiotic and greedy lobbies and passing the appropriate legislation right on cue like their training taught them. Even if magically there are no more extensions to copyright by the time current terms expire the works in question will be irrelevant. No one will be interested in them any more as their times have passed. This gutting of the copyright agreement between publishers and citizens has resulted in copyright not being copyright anymore: it is now a form of property and you will pay for every single last use. In response to this wholesale theft from me I have decided to liberate what I see fit. Go to hell content. I will take whatever I like as you are raping and pillaging through my cultural tapestry. The day I stop will be the day there is an actual agreement restored. I would be willing to settle for twenty years for a copyright term which is even more generous than the original fourteen. With a twenty year period I would also like to see as a punishment for twisting our heritage that only copyrights younger than ten years would be protected from the start. In another ten you'd be up to your twenty. Bite me content you're a parasite and you are stealing from me directly. Anything 1989 and older is a moral right to me and until you stop reneging on the social contract everything newer is as well.
Haha (Score:5, Interesting)
/trollish mode on
Slashdot americanism knee-jerk on anything about China is just amazing.
/trollish mode off
This is not news. It was on local TV news several days ago. Basically, the Author's Society (a "guild"-like organization) said to Google something like this: "We know the benefits of scanned-and-indexed books and we want digital libraries, but why you're not paying for the copyrighted content?" So far the parties are negotiating a plan that is supposed to achieve mutual benefit.
BTW, I think Google was doing a right thing simply putting those books on-line and negotiate later. In the words of Admiral Grace Hopper, "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission." The books acquired without negotiating copyright serves as a good corpus of OCR calibration or "training" material. While the legal dept are doing the talking, the techies can take the time sharpen the tech.
The Only Answer! (Score:2, Interesting)
Since we in the US seem to now be also controlled by every governments' copyright laws the only answer is to insure that all of us at every single moment are under perpetual surveillance to be absolutely certain that we comply with the laws of every brutal, jerk water, banana republic on the face of the Earth. After all copyright is just sooooooo important!
Re:under the acta google will be down in less then (Score:1, Interesting)
How about we just cut off Chinese IP space, that will mean all the MMORPG's will suddenly be free of spam and bots, win-win.
Re:Copywrong. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Copywrong. How convenient! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Is this really about copyright? (Score:3, Interesting)
Really? Please provide proof of this. I seriously doubt you can. For starters, much of American laws were based on original UK law and Copyright and Patent had originated with UK. In fact, President Washington, who pushed for LIMITED TIME IP rights, has patent #1. Also, I believe that we provided protection to anyone that put an IP in our country regardless of citizenship. Of course, we did not use other nations IP system. Of course, NO NATION did, even after signing the berne treaty, none had really done a thing about it until the 80's (UK in 1988, and USA in 1989).
Perhaps more importantly, I notice that it was EU countries ripping off each other to ship goods to the colonies and their territories that caught my eye. [wikipedia.org]
So, really, what proof do you have of this, because, IIRC, you have posted this multiple time.
Re:In other news (Score:3, Interesting)
in other news, so does google:
http://google.cn/mp3 [google.cn]
only accessible from certain countries' IPs
Re:under the acta google will be down in less then (Score:3, Interesting)
If you owe the bank $100,000 they own you, but if you owe the bank $1,000,000,000,000 you own them.
In Walt Disney's biography there's a story about him giving a head of state of state of some country a tour of the brand new Disneyland when it first opened in the fifties. The man looked at the giant, clean, futuristic theme park and said "you must be a very rich man."
Disney replied "Yes, I must be, I'm in debt for millions of dollars!"