Earth: Mostly Harmless

Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales

The latest chapter in Google’s continuing world-domination book-scanning operations, this is a defence of the programme - a rare publisher’s voice speaking out in favour of it, at a time when the nebulous and highly-successful company is being sued by authors’ associations for copyright infringement over the service. And as for the scheme’s greatest benefit for less well known books - further confirmation of the Long Tail thesis?

I, for one, welcome our digitising, organising, aggregating, comparison shopping, advertising, Mountain View overlords.

Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales:

eldavojohn writes “A few book publishers are actually thanking Google for an apparent rise in sales due to Google’s scan plan. Google is busy defending itself against authors and publishers that have brought lawsuits for ignoring copyrights. The director of the Oxford University Press said, ‘Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers.’ It seems to work in favor of the smaller publishers: ‘Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the ‘buy this book’ Google link.’ Do you think that Google’s ’sneak peak’ search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?”

(Via Slashdot).

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case

A remarkable turn of events in a case I sadly wasn’t aware of before this article was published. It involves Larry Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons project, who is currently pursuing a negligence action on behalf of a former pupil of the American Boychoir School, where Lessig himself was evidently abused as a boy. The article linked to below also includes a profile of the reluctant public figure that is Harvard Law’s star professor. At times it is biting in criticism of Lessig’s intellectual record but is nonetheless generally affectionate towards him. Worth a read.

Lawrence Lessig’s other court case:

A dramatic update on Professor Lawrence Lessig’s other court case written by his friend John Heilemann appears in New York Metro magazine this week. And this is a battle that critics as well as supporters are praying will end in victory for the lawyer and scholar this time.

Lessig is representing John Hardwicke, who like himself is a former pupil of the American Boychoir School (now the Columbus Boychoir School) in Princeton, New Jersey. Hardwicke claims he was abused by multiple staff including the music director. The school argued it should be immune from such negligence lawsuits, and a trial court had agreed. Incredibly, the school even claimed the sex between now fugitive choir director and Hardwicke was consensual. The case was heard by the state’s supreme court, and in what reads like a movie script, the evidence turned on Lessig himself.

In the court room, Lessig tore up the rule book and confronted years of private torment by revealing that he had been abused himself at the school.

“It was the perversion of this music director . . . to believe that sexual abuse was part of producing a wonderful boychoir,” he disclosed to the court. Lessig said he knew that this was what the director believed, because the director himself had disclosed this to Lessig at the school.

(Via The Register.)