The crucial connection between the budget and freedom

Adding: Here's another video for when you've got more time.



Noting: Now with video!

Behold the Coconut!

So I've been researching Web resources for my Comp II students, Web sites offering free, full-text books and periodical articles (I'm interested in finding such sources for all kinds of subjects, but especially literature, literary biographies, and literary analyses). I've been investigating Google Books and Google Scholar, for instance.

Then, I came across this today in the Times. It's about Google's recent settlement with authors and publishers wherein Google will "pay $125 million to create a system under which customers will be charged for reading a copyrighted book, with the copyright holder and Google both taking percentages":

So while there is a large direct-mail effort, a dedicated Web site about the settlement in 36 languages...and an online strategy of the kind you would expect from Google, the bulk of the legal notice spending — about $7 million of a total of $8 million — is going to newspapers, magazines, even poetry journals, with at least one ad in each country. These efforts make this among the largest print legal-notice campaigns in history.

That Google is in the position of paying for so many print ads “is hilarious — it is the ultimate irony,” said Robert Klonoff, dean of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., and the author of a recent law review article titled “Making Class Actions Work: The Untapped Potential of the Internet.”

So far, more than 200 advertisements have run in more than 70 languages: in highbrow periodicals like The New York Review of Books and The Poetry Review in Britain; in general-interest publications like Parade and USA Today; in obscure foreign trade journals like China Copyright and Svensk Bokhandel; and in newspapers in places like Fiji, Greenland, the Falkland Islands, and the Micronesian island of Niue (the name is roughly translated as Behold the Coconut!), which has one newspaper.

The almost comically sweeping attempt to reach the world’s entire literate population is a reflection of the ambitions of the Google Book Search project, in which the company hopes to digitize every book — famous or not, in any language, published anywhere on earth — found in the world’s libraries.

Under the proposed settlement, reached on Oct. 28 and still subject to court approval, there must be an effort the court finds “reasonable and practicable” to find authors and publishers — especially copyright holders of so-called orphan books, which are still in copyright but long out of print. So the task means placing at least one advertisement in every country in the world.

Send me any links you think I might find useful.

Have fun with that!

"Will you rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine?" asked Wallace.

"I'm going to leave that issue to Julius Genachowski, our new head of the FCC, to, and the president, to discuss," Axelrod said. "So I don't have an answer for you now."

In June, press secretary Michael Ortiz told Broadcasting & Cable that "Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters."

That's clear enough. But since becoming president, it's been difficult to get such a definitive statement. | politico |

I love it. Believe me when I say that nobody on our side cares about messing around with regulating radio to try and dilute the relative supremacy of crazy wingnuts in that medium. It may have seemed like a good idea to some liberals during the Clinton years (although I never heard anyone talking about it), but these days there is absolutely no appetite for it.

First of all, trying to regulate free speech is distasteful even when it is Constitutional (and here I don't think it should be ruled as such). But really, there's just no point. Everybody knows that the future is the internet, and right now our side is winning over here.

But by all means, right wingers... please continue to obsess about something that's never going to happen! We'll just be over here fixing the country.

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Palin really, really wanted to ban those books

The McCain campaign now concedes to the Associated Press that Sarah Palin, as mayor, asked her town librarian about book-banning three times. That's quite a strong interest in a hypothetical action she had no intention of taking.

What she tells you three times is... something she really means, I guess.

The innocence of youth

Here's a fun game: what did you write in junior high that would be most likely to get a student arrested nowadays?

For my part I'm pretty sure that it's the short story I wrote about the guy who had such bad luck that every time he stepped on a plane somebody hijacked it. The story that actually got my pops called in for a parent teacher conference, though, was a comic piece called A Day in the Life of a Mass Murderer. I'm not really sure why I thought serial killers were funny, but it might have had something to do with this.