Comments on: Episode 68 – OMG No GBS

By: Ian Thomas

Ian Thomas — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:13:02 +0000

I could be wrong on this, but could there be some FERPA risk in using students non-.edu email address? Though unlikely, it wouldn’t be difficult to make a new email address impersonating a student in an attempt to gain private information from a professor.

That’s the main reason I won’t discuss academic information with students over any email address not administered by the university.

By: Erik

Erik — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:54:58 +0000

Great discussion as usual. I don’t mean to get all William F. Buckley on you, but I believe OMG and LOL are not acronyms, but abbreviations or initialisms. My understanding of acronyms is that they are pronounceable (e.g. “NATO,” “scuba,” but not “e.g.”).

By: Peter Hirtle

Peter Hirtle — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:10:32 +0000

I was surprised that a group of academics that actually use older material weren’t more critical of the GBS ruling. Chin’s decision means that there will be no full-text access to orphan works until Congress acts. And given that rights holders won’t even allow books to be indexed without their permission, it is unlikely they would ever support Congressional efforts to limit their rights to control the use of the full text of their content. And if Google’s indexing is not a fair use, then it will have to destroy the copies at Google and in the HathiTrust. Goodbye research corpus.

Google had pledged in the settlement to work for new orphan works legislation. The best solution for academia would have been to see GBS be approved as a short-term solution, and then work on a more equitable solution in Congress. And remember: GBS also had a solution to the other great problematic issue, namely who exactly owns the digital rights in these books. No one has talked about a Congressional solution to that mess. This is why only one individual among major academic librarians spoke out against the settlement – it was a positive step for scholarship.

One last thing: While the negotiations are secret, there have been reports that it was Michael Boni of the Authors Guild, and not Google, that suggested that the win-win solution was for Google to get into the bookselling business.

By: John Muccigrosso

John Muccigrosso — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 01:06:40 +0000

Dan,

CORpora, not corPORa.

Yours in Latinity.

Who believed Google on the “indexing” beard?