Peter Batke, A selection of tweets on the ruling by Judge D. Chin formerly U.S District Court (now U.S. Court of Appeals) on the Google-Authors-Publishers settlement we would like to see

rev. March 25, 1011 by pb

A selection of tweets on the ruling by Judge D. Chin formerly U.S District Court (now U.S. Court of Appeals) on the Google-Authors-Publishers settlement we would like to see.

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

The changes in fashion in the course of a lifetime of 60+ years are truly remarkable. I am not speaking about purple hair or skinny ties but about writing style. Once, elegant, extended and thorough treatments of a subject were required for top marks in writing. Today, all that is required is a one sentence tweet. More than one sentence is regarded as too dense. In order not to strain the attention span of twitterers even further beyond their limits than I have already done - my apologies for having exceeded the limit by 500 percentage points with my first six sentences - let me make a proposal for some rhetorical tweets: "It's about the Chin ruling in the Google settlement with the publishers and authors. It's all about the orphans."

SEE A NOTE ON THE USE OF THE TERM "ORPHAN" AT THE END!!

Enter twitter mode!

Divided opinions make a reasoned analysis appear as only spin.

The monadic units of tweets are our only defense against insidious and disingenuously tedious rhetoric buttressed by logic.

Orphaned texts are called orphans because their authors are: 1. deceased without heirs, 2. disinterested, 3. disappeared, 4. vanished, are no more, joined the choir invisibile.

Orphans are sad and lonely texts on library shelves that want to be part of the great electronic kindergarten in Mountain View.

Unfeeling and uncharitable corporations and professional nay-sayers want to keep the orphaned texts stuck on pages, between cardboard, held together with glue (attrib. SV) and covered with dust.

Every author knows or thinks he or she knows how much the next royalty check will be.

Vacations are planned around the arrival of royalty checks.

Every publisher knows whether a specific title will get a second, third ... edition or not.

Publishers do not give a rats behind for out-of-print books.

Most orphans are sitting on library shelves and have been checked out only once since the Carter administration.

Orphaned texts can be bought at used book stores for a dollar or less.

Judge Chin has closed the shades of the prison house upon the poor unread texts, at least temporarily - weep.

Millions of people around the world would give the glued up page-bound texts a happy electronic home on their laptops.

It is not about scanning stupid, it is about being in the index stupid.

Only a comprehensive index of everything can organize the knowledge of the world - is that a difficult concept to grasp?

Scanning projects, (by consortium of foundations - Robert Darnton, by concerned government - Siva Vaidhyanathan) are pretty useless, unless they are in an index so they can be found.

The scans of the BNF - without OCR - are as useless as the paper the originals were printed on.

Multiple indexes are not to the point, but probably inevitable.

Censorship of results from index queries by the party of a socialist paradise should not be condoned as multi-culturally anti-corporationally appropriate.

Electronic texts without OCR and without a comprehensive index of the lexical items of the text serve only the class of mandarins or high priests of any or variable gender who are in charge of fanning the cultural embers.

The high priests play favorites and ignore the vast majority of the orphans.

Jealous relatives are trying to make sure that no unclaimed texts get to the great electronic adoption agency in Mountain View.

Lawyers, (people of limited horizon through their association with the law) who have become used to being called "Your Honor" have forgotten that not all fields of text creation have well established electronic repositories for their opinions, such as they are.

The principle of competition and the vigilance against monopolies as yet beyond the horizon have adversely affected the logic of legal opinions, such as they are.

Judicial activism and judicial restraint are weapons flailed about with quite arbitrarily.

Judicial restraint means killing a proposal by pitching it to our elected representatives who are too busy searching for clues to do anything sensible.

The competition of Westlaw and Lexis is a bit of a sham considering the secret licensing agreements of technology in the past.

Competition in the creation of comprehensive indexes is a fairly absurd concept.

An index of only French search terms is vraiment bete - as are the silly accents.

Imagine a competitor to Medline.

Spending scarce foundation resources to redo the scanning work of Google is a colossal waste of money - is Robert Darnton on this tweet?

Lets get some experience how the electronic delivery of library books would work.

Spending public funds to do something that has already been done is a grotesque waste of money - is there a Siva V on this tweet?

The publishers want it, the authors want it, librarians want it (exception noted), I want it, Google is spending millions to build it, Google is spending millions to box it through the courts - "not fair" - "not reasonable" - "not adequate" - from the bench.

Saying that Google is only interested in making money for its shareholders is like saying Harvard is only interested in providing a comfortable living for its professors - wait - Harvard IS only interested in providing a comfortable (all the way up the scale to lavish) living for its professors - forget that thought then.

If someone has written a book since 1923 - or if someone's great-great-grandfather has written a book since 1923 - it would not be too much to ask to go to a web site and make that fact known.

If someone or someone's ancestor has written a book since 1923 and does not bother to register or is living under a rock somewhere and does not care enough to register, then let that orphaned text be free.

If some want to opt out of the comprehensive index - let them and their ideas fade from the collective memory - an undisturbed place on a library shelf will be an adequate, fair and reasonable place to mark time till the sun goes red giant.

There is no reason to coddle neglectful autors.

The proud authors who have stood by their creations although the little freeloaders have not pulled their weight for decades should get some minor compensation, sixty bucks per.

The fact is; most texts that have stayed too long in their limited temporal horizon don't really deserve a place in the great electronic kindergarten in Mountain View - but let us be generous.

Orphaned text are orphans because their authors have given up on them, their publishers have given up on them, librarians have become the refuge of last resort.

Adopt an octogenarian!

An author born in 1950, who writes a book in 1980 and who dies in 2030 at the age of 80, can pass on royalties on the 1980 book until the year 3000 - electronic indexes be darned till then.

It is important for contemporary texts to be part of the comprehensive electronic index.

Registered copyright holders get fair compensation, authors of orphans who are found get fair compensation, nobody who has a reasonable expectation of compensation is excluded.

The lathered up anti-voices want to make a punitive raid into the great electronic kindergarten in Mountain View and remove any files who may or may not have autors who are alive or had heirs.

Think of the book that just wants to be read - weep.

All the glued up page bound books covered with dust who have been cleaned up and made productive again by Google and restored to their authors can now romp in electronic space and try to seduce the current contemporaries with their pathetically limited temporal horizons.

Thoughts die on the shelves of libraries.

Thought can be reborn in the comprehensive index.

Even thoughts with a limited temporal horizon are witness to the limited temporal horizon of their time and thus contribute marginally.

That though is too weird for twitter!?>><<(<

Exit twitter mode!

Twitterers will know immediately that I am not one of them because I don't have command of the argot. Alas, it may be too late for me. However, I challenge any responders to keep responses to one sentence. No tricky logic, no disingenuous rhetoric, just a one sentence reply. Less is more. The less "merda taurorum" the better.

Of course, this is just an extended joke which I hope will amuse and stimulate some thought. I am working on a reasoned piece on the Chin decision, but such reasoned arguments, protracted spin, disingenuous rhetoric and subliminal agendas take some time to craft.

I invite one and all to my web page anon to see the anti anti-perspective.

http://www.humancomp.org/batke/

cheers, Peter Batke

Comments to batke_p@hotmail.com

NOTE: The term "orphans" in this context refers to a class of out-of-print books that are still under copyright. The class of out-of-print orphans comprises titles that have no author registered in the databases that keep track of the whereabouts of authors and their bank routing numbers. Remember Elvis: "She wrote upon it: Return to sender, address unknown. No such number, no such zone." To be a true orphan, bibliophilically speaking, the book must have an author of indeterminate whereabouts who had not died before 1941, should it be possible to determine that fact without 40 hours of research (2011-70 years of copyright protection=1941). Conversely, the books of an author who has died in 1941 will have come out of copyright this year (2011), regardeless when they were published, and do not have the status of orphan, they are in the public domain. Books with registered copyright holders can generate royalties. In the past that was out of the question for the out-of-print, the not-reprinted, the not-reissued, the zombies in libraries and internet internet booksellers; with digitization, some fresh wind has come into the market for the left for dead with renewed revenue flows to authors and publishers, however modest, in the offing. It is a murky area with some conflicts of perceived rights and interests that can generally be resolved in broad outline by looking at the back of the title page. Should there not be a date on the title page, or no name of a publisher still in business, the book may not be worth fighting for. The term "orphans," in this context, is a technical term. The term is used metaphorically and not intended to hurt feelings. I have been sensitized to potential insensitivity on my part in earlier versions. My apologies and the obligatory rewriting are offered as prohylaxis and a gesture of good will in case my attempt to have some fun with the Google ruling may have touched a sensitive social problem and personal trauma, but I hope apologies will not have been necessary. My apologies also to the twitterers... - oh, they are already gone. Never mind.