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Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

Harvard University has been advising its professors to publish their work to open access journals since many large journal publishers are charging higher fees.

For those who have ever wondered how many different books are out there in the world.

Great minds think alike -- I posted the same thing. :) The estimate keeps going up, probably because more books keep being published!

This is just a Wikipedia article about the history of music publishing but I shared it because I remember my music prof. at Mason talking about Stephan Foster being the first songwriter who got copyright over his material and he is mentioned in this post. Its interesting to see how far back the laws go in different countries.

The New York Times website is down today (by some reports it's because Syrian hackers have attacked it), but here's a (probably illegal) copy of a helpful column on "Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User" by the New York Times's technology reviewer, David Pogue. This documents also contains all the comments. All 1149 of them. :) Many of those comments have helpful tips as well. Even though this was published in 2008, it's still helpful.

If you want to know more about the International Standard Book Number, go visit this web page. It especially tells you what elements the ISBN is made up of besides its history and facts.

Listserve is a website that writes about lists of things strange and yet fascinating at the same time. This list definetly falls under this idea, and despite the fact that this article was originally published in 2011, most of the articles in this list are still up and running on wikipedia.

Here's a recent article published in April about where people get their news.

That's useful, Milan, thanks. Note, though that it's not super-clear what "get" means in this context -- I'm sure a lot of people, like me, get their news from several of these sources. I get news from radio, the Web (including newspaper websites and Google News), and social media, and I'm not sure which of those sources is primary.

You can use Google to search for magazines and magazine articles that date all the way back to the 1960's.

Hey, that's super-useful, Talia, thanks! When Google scanned things from research libraries, that included a lot of magazines. Or maybe Google made deals with the publishers directly for these. There are some weird titles in there, though -- no Time, no Newsweek, but you can search through _Torque_, "Singapore's best homegrown car magazine" :)

This articles talks about the journal boycott of the U.K. scientists to protest the high cost of paywalls and shows the arguments on both sides- scholars and publishers.

The idea of open access to scholarly journals seems to be a big debate and this article talks about how publishers make millions of dollars off of research and peer reviews that are done for free. It also talks about Aaron Swartz who led the movement for allowing access to journals by basically "stealing" them and sharing them.

AP Late this month, Google went "dark" in terms of providing publishers with free information on which words led people searching in Google to click on their sites. The move came as Google seeks to reassure users following the NSA/PRISM domestic surveillance scandal.

Wow, I hadn't even heard about that, Emily. Terrific story. That's a bummer, though -- I use Google Analytics on some of my sites, though I probably should make more use of it, and it was always interesting to see what keywords people were using to get to my site. Sometimes the keywords were weird.

This is a somewhat old article (published in 2005) but still has some relevancy in how musicians are looking at the positives and negatives of creative commons licenses and copyrights.