The new guidelines are as follows – I highlighted the changes:

The main change is the first guideline – it used to say that only non-commercial use is allows. Now it has been replaced by two new guidelines: no hosting, and no reprints including helping people reprint.

An interesting wrinkle about the new hosting restriction is that the Internet Archive is currently hosting about 537,000 PDFs of public domain books from Google Book Search. Under the old rules, non-commercial hosting was ok. What is the story under the new guidelines?

The new no reprint guideline seems to be directed towards services like my own PublicDomainReprints.org with the second part “help other people buy and sell them” perhaps directed towards POD providers like Lightning Source and BookSurge, and e-commerce sites like Lulu and Amazon that assist in the process. It remains to be seen what the story is under the new rules and I am evaluating options as far as my service is concerned.

One thing to consider – are these retroactive? Can a company put out public domain material with a notice in the material itself, and then go ahead and change the terms?

Of course, the elephant in the room is that these books are in public domain and thus have no copyrights. Without significant creative change it would not be possible to re-assert copyrights over the public domain scans (sweat of the brow has been struct down back in 1992). Whatever terms apply are being pushed via contracts and not the tradition route of copyright licensing. This may or may not similar to what the OCLC has been recently doing by trying to enforce contract rules on stuff that cannot be copyrighted. Can a contract override federal copyright law, placing a public domain book under someone else’s legal power?

It appears that at least some public domain content within Google is already hidden behind protection. The recent addition of magazine to Google Book Search brought along some magazines which have been published before 1923, placing those issues into public domain. If you run a search for magazines published before 1923, quite a few come up. But none of them have PDF downloads and all of them say they are being displayed with permission of some magazine publisher. It seems that the publisher provided them under contract with restrictions, thus forcing Google to carry over the restrictions. But what if the same magazine is scanned at a library? Will Google allow the second version to appear with full PDF download?

One other side effect of this is that if the content in question is not copyrighted, than in theory the DMCA restriction on reversing DRM should not apply since it only applies to copyrighted material. It would still be illegal since hacking into someone else’s website is forbidden and no one should try it. But in theory, does reversing DRM as codified in DMCA apply for public domain content?

Another interesting point is that these seem to be voluntary guidelines. The legal terms of Google’s site and any of the Book search site never state these terms, and both inside the book and in the FAQ they are cauched in a language that ” we do ask that you follow some basic guidelines regarding their use”. Is “we do ask” a legal request? IANAL, but perhaps not – may be they are simply there to scare people off?

Lots of questions, and a few answers.

P.S. And there is the small matter of the Google / AuthorGuild settlement which is going to have hearings in front of a judge. A settlement that someone can object to.

function stripVowels(rawString)
{
	var newString = '';
	for(j=0; j<rawString.length; j++) {
		if(rawString.charCodeAt(j)<1425
			 || rawString.charCodeAt(j)>1479)
		{ newString = newString + rawString.charAt(j); }
	}
	return(newString);
}

You can test it below:

Test

The federal government plans to begin collecting the full names and birth dates of air travelers this summer in its latest effort to screen passengers for possible links to terrorism. In a few weeks, the Transportation Security Administration will notify airlines, travel agents and online reservation systems that they will be required to ask travelers for their legal names and birth dates when booking domestic flights. Travelers will be encouraged — but not required — to give the personal information. Under the current system, only a last name and first initial are needed to reserve a flight. Passengers who don’t comply with the request will dramatically increase their chances of being stopped at airports for questioning or pat-downs, TSA Assistant Administrator Justin Oberman said. That’s because their partial names are more likely to register a “hit” on terrorist watch lists.

Now I have a stupid question – given that the information is being provided by passengers voluntary and no one verifies it, what stops a terrorist from lying? Is any terrorist actually stupid enough to travel under their real name?

I send in a card with three four telephone numbers (home, cell and fax), my full name and two addresses (school and home). There was also a $5 fee. I got back four reports: one Telephone Product Search, one Identity Product Search and two Property Product Searches.

Starting with the the Telephone product search, for my school address and name the resulting phone number was someone else’s. For my home address and name the resulting phone number was in fact correct. For reverse phone number searches for all three numbers no results were found while my own searches online were able to yield at least one number.

For the Idenfity search the reported data was four years old without my driver license, incorrect month of birth and no gender. The property searches got nothing.

While on one hand I am appalled by the low quality of information present on the other hand I am kind of happy that most of my information has been kept out of their hands. But then again, with information like this how do you expect to fight terrorism?

A judge has ruled that Maryland’s anti-spam law — the first state law to penalize senders of junk e-mail — is unconstitutional because it seeks to regulate commerce outside the state’s borders. Last week’s ruling, which threw out a lawsuit against a New York e-mail marketer, effectively overturns Maryland’s 2002 Commercial Electronic Mail Act.
…
The Maryland law applies to e-mail sent to or from Maryland residents, but it leaves vague the actual location of the resident — potentially affecting companies who send e-mail to people who live in Maryland, but who might receive the transmission elsewhere via laptop.
…
The judge concluded that the law unconstitutionally attempts to regulate commerce that may never enter Maryland.

UPDATE: The Russian press is reporting that the entry has been removed from Interpol’s website at the request of the United States. Supposedly, the US invoked a section in Interpol’s constitution that forbids any member country from using political motives for listing fugitives.

Unlike the former vice president, who lost a recount fight and the 2000 election, Kerry will be quick to declare victory on election night and begin defending it. He also will be prepared to name a national security team before knowing whether he’s secured the presidency.
…
While the lawyers litigate, political operatives will try to shape public perception. Their goal would be to persuade voters that Kerry has the best claim to the presidency and that Republicans are trying to steal it. Democrats are already laying the public relations groundwork by pointing to every possible voting irregularity before the Nov. 2 election and accusing Republicans of wrongdoing.

Whatever happened to good old honorable defeat?

1. Creators of ideas and inventions have the right to be compensated for their work, but not to limit political expression, veto technological innovation, or restrict education and scientific research.

2. Intellectual property laws should be judged by their potential to foster new creativity, as required by the U.S. Constitution.

3. Intellectual property laws should be clear and explicit, so anybody can create without fear of lawsuits.

Rumour has it that the decision to keep the license, against all opposition internal and external, came from the highest possible authority: Microsoft’s Chief Architect himself. And House Rule #2 says we can’t nominate Microsoft’s Chief Architect as an official Harbinger of Evil. Because that would be far too easy. It’s sort of the Godwin’s of the field. So, no evil here, albeit only on a technicality. Gads, but those Microsoft lawyers are good. Next!

As for John Kerry (also refered to as “They That Shall Not Be Named Except In The Context of This Article, Where Naming Them Is Rather The Point”), it seems that one of his main advisors maybe Bruce Lehman who just happens to be the godfather of the DMCA and software patents. And for the funny quote:

Suffice to say that his re-appearance in the Whitehouse would not be accompanied by angelic choirs of open source programmers singing Hosannahs.

Now, as it turns out, opinions differs as to whether Mr Lehman really has appeared on the shoulder of Mr Kerry. He himself says he has only a “minor role”, while sources close to Kerry deny his very existence. So rather than stick the hatchet to Mr Kerry, and have exactly 49.999% of Americans likely to vote furious with us, we’ll shift our target slightly to the right, and award this month’s Black Heart to Bruce himself.

Bruce Lehman, Mr Software Patents to you, is this month’s Evil Without Portfolio.

Also, on an interesting sidenote, it seems that the Internet Archive does not delete content when a robots.txt file is posted but rather hides it. A quick check reveals lots of FBI.GOV content going back several years.

New research by Burke’s Peerage reveals that Mr. Kerry is the only presidential candidate in U.S. history who has genealogical descent from Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Among the most interesting parts is that John Kerry is a direct descendant from the prophet Muhammad. Of course we already know that his grandfather was a Jew. And of course being a Catholic senator from Boston, the Christian aspect is not disputable.

Of course the underlying message of these “facts” is that “no matter what religion you are, you are free to vote for John Kerry since he is one of you”. Sounds kind of desperate if you ask me.

This is exactly why I hate politics – just another dirty trick for the sake of power (not that the Republicans are any better).The moral of the story: if you forge something, at least do a good job

“Of course, there are some elections that money can’t buy. For everything else, there is Diebold.”

After doing some more calculations, I am coming up with an interesting result. There is a total of 50,000,000 minutes alloted for these phone cards at the retail value of $0.10/minute. This comes out to a total of $5 million dollars. The minimum value of each card is $5 which comes out to about 1 million potential people that will receive them. HOWEVER, if we take into account the wholesale value of phone cards which can be as low as $0.01 or $0.02, then the value of the settlement drops to somewhere between $500,000 to $1 million. Take into account that they also expire in 180 days and it looks like a very good deal for the defendands. At the same time, the lawyers are seeking $1.25 million in cash which can possible dwarf the settlement itself.

What would have made a bit more sense is alloting straight $5 million in cash among the possible 1 million people. But then again, this is our legal system.

UPDATE: I decided to submit an objection to the court. A copy in PDF format can be found here.

A lof the jobs moving overseas are programming jobs. If a company uses open-source products, and most of the IT effort involved is not programming but rather integration or service, than it would follow that those jobs should stay in the US while the actual programming is done by the open source community (it is hard to imagine a company that does service and support on your operating system to have technicians fly in from India). Could switching to open source save the high-tech IT industry in the US?