Taking their sponsors page at face value and doing the math, they're bringing in close to $100k/month with corporate sponsorships alone... how much money could maintaining a framework possibly cost?
No, none have reached out yet. I've had some brief, high-level discussion along those lines with some people in the library industry, and the conclusion I drew is that public libraries in the US are highly fragmented in terms of technological capability. Instead of partnering with individual local library systems, it would make the most sense to - as you mentioned - partner with Overdrive. But there's been no movement in that direction. If anyone from Overdrive is reading, get in touch :)
I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.
As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930).
We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published.
(My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!)
1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!
First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started.
The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain, including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license. (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files, except for Standard Blackletter[1] when necessary, which is a font we developed especially for our use based on public domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license.
I prepared three of the works listed here for Standard Ebooks, and I’m not in the US so I’m definitely not covered by US copyright law on my own machine.
“Copying” here refers to distribution and derivation, at least in the US. It is entirely legal to create copies of media for personal usage for instance (so long as you aren’t circumventing DRM, thanks DMCA).
Standard Ebooks is organized as a “low-profit L.L.C.,” or “L3C,” a kind of legal entity that blends the charitable focus of a traditional not-for-profit with the ease of organization and maintenance of a regular L.L.C.
corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
> corporations cannot make "personal copies" of copyrighted works, otherwise they'd buy just one copy of microsoft office
That would surely be a license violation, not a copyright violation?
They absolutely can (and do) make copies of the Microsoft office binary and shuttle it around their network/backups/etc, activating licenses only when they need to assign a copy to a particular user
This isn't correct. It is infringement, for example, to write Harry Potter fan fiction in private on a typewriter, even if another soul never sees it. Copyright includes creation, not just distribution
What you describe would almost certainly be considered fair use until point of distribution - it’s non commercial, transformative and has no meaningful impact on the market value of Harry Potter.
Copies for private use are going to be similar, and while I’m not a lawyer it feels like it’d be a hard case to make that work being conducted in private is going to have a meaningful impact on the market for Nancy Drew novels in the next 30 days.
Market harm is not required for something to count as infringement, but it matters for certain defenses and damages.
Simply writing new adventures for existing copyrighted characters is usually treated as creating an unauthorized derivative work. Writing Harry Potter from the perspective of the Weasley twins, for example, is not fair use.
Distribution is one part of fair use but it isn't the focus of it - fair use is a defense against infringement, but it's still infringement.
You're really missing the crux of fair use:
"Noncommercial, educational, critical, or transformative uses (like commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research)"
How closely does writing Harry Potter fanfiction align with commentary, criticism, news reporting, parody, or research?
Fair use is more about: writing a critique about Harry Potter. Or a Weird Al style song about it. Or presenting parts of it in a paper you're writing for class.
This is all easily searchable stuff. Copyright is extremely draconian when you really look into it.
Seems to say that market harm is the single most important factor in fair use, and it's basically impossible to show that a person writing their own fan fiction without any distribution would prevent an author from exploiting their own work.
If you think about it, writing “Harry Potter” on the internet could be infringement because those words might be in the book, and most worrisomely you are inducing people to make “copies” of the books in their minds. There’s no way to calculate what you owe Rowling from this post, it could be infinite.
(Thankfully I’ve never read those books so I can say the name without infringing)
Because people insist on discussing copyright as if there is any part of it that makes sense, and as if it operates how they think it should.
They derive a history of it from all of these principles that they made up, then propose a future which is always a moderate compromise between the guiding principles that they made up and the history that they made up from the guiding principles that they made up.
Things are as they are because powerful people made them that way, and built on that. The length of copyright is justified by the fact that it got past Congress and judges. What you're allowed to do is vague know it when I see it stuff, and has always been a patch on top of what you're not allowed to do which is always very clear: anything you don't have a written grant of permission to do.
People talk about "fair use" like it is a real abstract principle, rather than being some weird legal wording by a judge from a few court cases where something felt just too minor and silly to be a violation but was obviously, by the letter of the law, a violation.
I'm fairly sure that under the letter of the law you're allowed to read a book you own or listen to a record you own more than once, but I wouldn't bet on it. For all I know it could be an exception called "private repeat performance of licensed material" which is not a law but actually guidance written by the counsel for the Librarian of Congress based on two court cases from the 1930s.
edit: when I was a kid, you wouldn't put the song "Happy Birthday To You" in a movie, and you would edit it out of a documentary. This was never determined not to be a violation, it just got so embarrassing that it was somehow determined that the copyright had lapsed. Archive.org was in a years-long kerfuffle about 78s. It's not about sense, it's about power.
Fair use and the 4 criteria for determining if it applies to usage is literally written into the letter of the law, passed by congress in 1976: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
Its squishy and specific application relies on interpretation guided by precedent, but that's true of just about everything in legal systems guided by common law.
> Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this dispositif [...]
This part near the end caught my attention:
> One could effectively claim that Smith [...] stands in for the figure of the psychoanalyst within the universe of the film. Here Hinton gets it wrong: our (humans’) only chance is to grasp that our imperfection is grounded in the imperfection of the AI machinery itself, which still needs us in order to continue running.
In the Hyperion sci-fi novels, (spoilers ahead) the godlike AIs are ultimately characterized as parasites of humans. Their existence was stored in some high-dimensional quantum medium, but the hardware they ran on was the old fashioned human brain. Then I read that in the initial draft of The Matrix, that's why the machines needed to farm humans; but test audiences were confused by it and so they changed to story to "body heat is energy."
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