Throw the Book at Google

Jim Minatel, an acquisitions editor at Wiley for one of my books, believes that Google's plan to turn web-crawling googlebots loose on print libraries is a clear violation of copyright.

I'm not so sure.

If I had a copy of the world's most useful computer book (let's call it Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition), and I made a practice of sending one page of the book to people who asked a question answered by that page, would I be violating Wiley's copyright?

Selective quotation of a book is fair use. Is repeated selective quotation of a book still fair?

There are full-text books on the web under copyright, such as Live Simple by John December. Google did to this book what it wants to do to library books in the real world -- it grabbed copies of all the pages and will search the text in response to a query, presenting the relevant excerpts.

As an armchair copyright lawyer, I can't figure out how it matters that Google grabbed one book with a bot and grabbed the other with a scanner. Google grabs the full text of copyrighted works all the time -- 56,000 on this server alone. If Google Print is illegal, wouldn't Google be illegal as well?

Thank God we have wealthy corporations with high-powered intellectual property lawyers who can answer this question for us.

Publishing · Politics · Movable Type · Google · 2005/10/01 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

The Joy of MySQL

While deleting some comment spam in the Drudge Retort database, I just had to use the following MySQL query:

  delete from feedback where author like '%sperm%';

Mysql · Webpublishing · Sex · 2005/09/30 · Comment · Link

Grover Cleveland Will Have His Revenge

Blogs for Bush contributor Mark Noonan:

I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge -- you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received.

DailyKos diarist Hunter:

This is the world you forged and, unfortunately for you, I'm beginning to take a fancy for it. Welcome to the politics of your own party, finally sprouting from the ground on which you planted the seeds and ---- upon them.

When two political blowhards engage each other in back-and-forth argument on the Internet, it always reads like foreplay to me. I would not be surprised to learn that James Carville deflowered Mary Matalin on the set of Hardball after a particular divisive joint appearance. Or that Chris Matthews stuck around to take pictures.

We're mass producing stupid in American politics these days, but the absolute nadir has to be the following argument, whether offered by a Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, Kossack, or Little Green Football:

Things didn't get ugly until your side began the politics of personal destruction. We were perfectly happy to fight by Marquess of Queensberry rules, but after what you just did, you will have no one but yourself to blame when I vigorously knee you in the nuts.

Gutter politics is as American as insider trading and jazz music.

If you must cling to the belief that the other guy started it, show some historical perspective and reach back further than Robert Bork, Vince Foster, or Richard Nixon to rationalize your behavior.

Any underhanded actions I undertake in support of the Democratic Party will be motivated by the ill treatment Grover "Ma, Ma, Where's My Pa?" Cleveland received from Republicans in 1884.

Just because a man sleeps out of wedlock with a troubled woman who had multiple sex partners, accepts paternal responsibility even though the child might not be his, sends the toddler to an orphanage instead of taking him in, then persuades her to give the boy up for adoption, that's no excuse to make the subject a character issue during a presidential campaign.

Politics · 2005/09/30 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Bill Bennett Races to Judgment

The crime rate would go down in the U.S. if blacks were aborted, former Secretary of Education Bill Bennett said during his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday:

... it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could -- if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

The belief that a particular race is more prone to criminality is often based on rates of incarceration, such as a Bureau of Justice Statistics report that blacks have an 18.6 percent lifetime chance of being incarcerated, compared to 10 percent for Hispanics and 3.4 percent for whites.

Judging this solely on the basis of current incarceration is both extremely ugly and misleading. Other contributory factors are ignored, such as a 2004 poverty rate for blacks that's 24.7 percent, three times as high as that for whites, and the fact that minorities are significantly more likely to be arrested and convicted than whites who commit the same offenses.

There's also the tragic generational consequences of a parent's incarceration, which increase the chance a child will end up in prison later in life.

Bennett could have made the same point using gender instead of race -- males are 10 times as likely to be incarcerated as women, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

By choosing to make this about race and single out blacks, Bennett engaged in one of the uglier examples of race baiting I've heard from a national radio host, even though he tried to qualify his thoughts by admitting they were "morally reprehensible." I hope he has the decency to offer a full apology.

Update: Matthew Yglesias, perhaps fishing for another Yglesias Award, defends Bennett on TPM Cafe, while Rep. John Conyers calls for his suspension.

Radio · Politics · 2005/09/29 · 54 COMMENTS · Link

Your Deadline Or Your Life

Computer book author Dave Prochnow rode out Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and risked his family's life so he could FedEx a manuscript:

Getting to the highway involved doing things that you would never ever do with kids in a car -- driving off the road, driving through people's yards, and driving over power lines. Yes, we had to drive over power lines. Luckily at least one of them was dead -- that was the one that just touched our roof antenna. Gulp.

Generalizing wildly from his personal experience, Prochnow scolds the media for exaggerating the damage of the storm, telling people to "believe your own eyes, not the one-eyed, myopic media."

He's lucky to have survived two mistakes that often proven fatal: Riding out a strong hurricane and driving over power lines.

Rafe Colburn relates another story of people driving around in the eye of Hurricane Rita. Downed power lines are incredibly dangerous, carrying up to 26,000 volts of electricity.

One thing I tell people about computer book authors, after working in the profession for eight years, is that we're not always the most lucid people in the world. When you work alone on technical documentation in your home for years, getting a majority of your information and social companionship from talk radio and the Internet, you can easily reach a point where Travis Bickle starts to make a lot of sense.

Choosing to drive over power lines with your kids in the car, just so you make dead on PSP Hacks, Mods, and Expansions, may be the most insane decision to come from one of us since Ed Yourdon predicted the Y2K bug would cause the collapse of civilization.

Hurricane Katrina · Publishing · 2005/09/26 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Tim Russert Presses Aaron Broussard

Tim Russert used Meet the Press this weekend to teach Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard a lesson -- the next time New Orleans is destroyed by flood, he should be more factual during his emotional breakdowns.

Russert played back Broussard's last interview on the show, in which he related a gut-wrenching story about the death of a colleague's mother in a nursing home after the storm.

True to form, Russert didn't have the spine to accuse Broussard directly of being wrong. He quoted bloggers:

... it's important I think ... that our viewers see that again because MSNBC and other blog organizations have looked into the facts behind your comments and these are the conclusions, and I'll read it for you and our viewers. It says: "An emotional moment and a misunderstanding. Since the broadcast of the interview, which elevated Broussard to national prominence, a number of bloggers have questioned the validity of Broussard's story. ...

Subsequent reporting identified the man whom Broussard was referring to in the Meet the Press interview as Thomas Rodrigue, the Jefferson Parish emergency services director. Contacted on Friday by MSNBC.com, Rodrigue acknowledged that his 92-year-old mother and more than 30 other people died in the St. Rita nursing home. They had not been evacuated and the flood waters overtook the residence.

The chronology of the phone calls described by Broussard came under particular scrutiny by bloggers.

It's possible that Broussard was intentionally lying, as all-knowing conservative bloggers have been claiming for days, but I believe it's far more likely he was simply exhausted, traumatized, and didn't have the full story at his disposal.

Rather than being chastened by Russert, Broussard had a message for the Internet's fact-checking asses:

Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man's tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man's mother's death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn't a box of Cheerios they buried last week.

Hurricane Katrina · Journalism · Politics · 2005/09/26 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Breaking News Coverage on Wikipedia Takes Flight

As I write this, a JetBlue Airways plane carrying 140 passengers is preparing for an emergency landing in Los Angeles.

The incident has been in the JetBlue entry of Wikipedia for more than an hour:

On 21 September 2005 at 7:55 PM Eastern Standard Time, the New York Times reported that JetBlue Airways Flight 292 was in the process of dumping fuel in preparation for an emergency landing at Los Angeles International Airport following a failure of the front landing gear during retraction.

When I majored in journalism, I don't recall any of my professors preparing me to compete with encyclopedias on breaking news.

Journalism · Wikipedia · 2005/09/21 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

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