Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

But if somebody who sells a Strunk & White Revelations T-Shirt
can’t get the apostrophe right, then…

Websnark.com: Philosophical Snarks Archives

Hurricane Rita has, as of this writing, just been upgraded to Category 5. It’s barometric pressure is worse than Katrina’s was at Katrina’s height.

I do echo his wish that everybody in the path of the storm will be safe.

Roger L. Simon: You never write, you never call, you never email!

Google’s not asking permission, because what Google is doing is fair use, if it’s even reproduction or distribution at all. Google and its lawyers say (and I happen to agree) that they are under no legal obligation to seek permission from an author, although as a courtesy they’ll exclude an author’s works from the program if requested to do so. They aren’t making the works available online, they’re just making them searchable. In your view, would somebody need explicit permission from the author if a friend who knew you had a copy of the book called up and asked you to look up whether a particular line occurred in the book, or to consult the index and tell him whether there was an entry for a particular topic? If not, then why would automating the process be different? It seems to me the only tricky bit is making sure that they don’t display so much of the context as to violate fair use, or allow people to access the whole thing by searching for successive chunks in context.

Terrence Ross is either being misquoted or tricky with words, because under copyright law you do *not* need permission to “use” a copyrighted work; you only need permission to reproduce or distribute it, and even then there are the “fair use” exceptions. I’m sure the Authors Guild and various publishers have lawyers who are prepared to argue that it’s the scanning into the database that’s an unlicensed reproduction, even if there is no way to access that copy except under conditions that would not conflict with copyright or constitute fair use. That might even prevail, but it’s hardly settled law. Google could argue that regardless of the copyright in the original work, the number of times the words “Moses Wine” occurs in the work is a fact, and not subject to copyright and that moreover they have a right (recognized in Feist v. Rural) to use the copyrighted work to compile their own work.