Future of blogging: big and dumb. Based on the selling eyeballs model, it becomes kinda like TV in the vast wasteland days.

Now that Google has reached an agreement in which rightsholders will be paid for use of their work on Google’s bookscanning project, Harvard has decided it will not make copyright works in its library available for copying. Just doesn’t wanna run the risk of having to pay for other people’s work. Fortunately Google will have other sources of books to scan.

[Thanks to the Canadian Magazines blog for the link.]

Publishers Weekly reports Google has settled with a coalition of authors and publishers in the United States and will begin paying to licence access to the copyrighted works it includes in its “Index to Everything” essentially, a project to scan the text of every book in the world and make it searchable.

Authors and publishers received a lot of abuse as luddites and enemies of progress from IP scholars and freecopiers on this issue. But this is the solution that was always available. These rights were always available for licensing once Google was amenable to recognizing the value in the rights they wanted access to. It was never a problem about access, just a problem of unwillingness to pay. And since Google’s capital reserves are immense and the earnings potential of its indexing project equally large, that was not really a problem either.

Some background to the story is available here , if you read far enough.

Andrew Keen doesn’t think so. I’m not convinced.

John Degen, executive director of PWAC, CCC stalwart, and creator copyright activist par excellence had been named as the new literature officer at the Ontario Arts Council. He’ll do terrific work there, but he’ll be missed in the advocacy role he’s filled so well in recent years.

John Degen, here, looks into dodgy campaign pledge demands that have been orchestrated by law professor Michael Geist. The comments are a must-see too.

… new copyright legislation passes the US Senate underscoring “the importance lawmakers place on protecting intellectual property.”

Next time they tell you copyright was invented for publishers by the Statute of Anne in 1702, link ‘em here. It’s a copyright case from c560 AD, resolved on the basis, “To every cow belongs its calf, to every book belongs its copy.” Copyright’s as old as creativity, and as natural.

Bookninja has a provocative post about a creator’s certain weariness in defending publishers’ copyrights. Noteworthy comments too.

Ideas on CBC Radio the other night ran a program by one of its staff producers on “Who Owns Ideas?” — available here

Haven’t had a chance to listen yet. But from the lineup, the conclusion looks predictable.

I have a personal connection here. I used to freelance documentaries for Ideas; great program, wonderful people to work with, many good programs created together. I had started to drift away from radio (I have a great voice for print, frankly), but about that time they introduced a new contract (much to the regret of Ideas staff as well as us freelancers) that required freelancers to surrender copyright to CBC, so the Corp could have unlimited re-use rights without compensation. It’s not precisely because of that that I’ve never done another one, but…. Anyway, when the CBC asks “Who Owns Ideas?” I know the answer already!