Democracy activists' books unavailable in Hong Kong libraries after new law; Reuters, July 5, 2020

Reuters; Democracy activists' books unavailable in Hong Kong libraries after new law

"Books by prominent Hong Kong pro-democracy figures have become unavailable in the Chinese-ruled city’s public libraries as they are being reviewed to see whether they violate a new national security law, a government department said on Sunday. 

The sweeping legislation, which came into force on Tuesday night at the same time its contents were published, punishes crimes related to secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces, with punishments of up to life in prison.

Hong Kong public libraries “will review whether certain books violate the stipulations of the National Security Law,” the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which runs the libraries, said in a statement.

“While legal advice will be sought in the process of the review, the books will not be available for borrowing and reference in libraries.""

USPTO Designates Durango, Colorado Public Library a Patent and Trademark Resource Center; Press Release, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), May 15, 2018

Press Release, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO); USPTO Designates Durango, Colorado Public Library a Patent and Trademark Resource Center

"The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced the grand opening of the newest Patent and Trademark Resource Center (PTRC) at the Durango Public Library in Durango, Colorado on Tuesday May 22, 2018. A free public program

(link is external), “Researching Patent and Trademark Information: Essential Information You Need to Protect Your Intellectual Property” will be presented.

The Durango Public Library will be the second PTRC in the State of Colorado. It will serve residents in southwestern Colorado and northern New Mexico. The Durango Public Library is in the Four Corners region of Colorado, which includes the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Nations. The library will support entrepreneurs throughout the region seeking patent and trademark protection for their intellectual property. USPTO-trained librarians will assist patrons using the agency’s patent and trademark databases.

PTRCs are a nationwide network of public, state, and academic libraries that provide free services, including assistance in accessing patent and trademark documents, help in using USPTO databases, and aid in identifying resources on the USPTO website. They support inventors, intellectual property attorneys and agents, business people, researchers, entrepreneurs, students, historians, and members of the public unable to visit USPTO campuses. PTRCs also host public seminars on IP topics for novice and experienced innovators.

The PTRC Program began in 1871 when federal law first provided for the distribution of printed patents to public libraries. The addition of the Durango Public Library to the PTRC network makes a total of 86 resource centers located in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.

A list of current PTRC libraries can be found on the USPTO's Web site at www.uspto.gov/ptrc."

Who's afraid of digital book piracy?; (London) Guardian, 2/18/10

Alastair Harper, (London) Guardian; Who's afraid of digital book piracy?:

With the iPad and e-readers on the rise, will pirated books become as common as illegal music and films?:

"For years, we have been able to combine our taste for music and film with our desire to stick it to the man, and all from the safety of our PCs. Our literary habits, however, have perforce remained largely legal. The closest we could come to the same thrill is by wearing a deep-pocketed coat to WH Smiths – which is such an analogue approach to theft. Soon, however, even the bookish will be able to frustrate Lord Mandelson because, at long last, thanks to the iPad, digital book piracy is almost upon us.

The surest sign of this is that industry figures have started producing dubious statistics to show how endemic it is. In the US, it's just been announced that 10% of books read are now pirate texts. The same report claims that piracy has cost US publishers $3bn. But the source of the statistics was a company named Attributor, who provide online piracy protection for the publishing industry. Like a plumber tutting over the state of your pipes, they have a vested interest in finding problems.

A glance at the top seeded ebooks on Pirate Bay shows that Christopher Ricks isn't about to lose much sleep over the downloaders. Filling the top slots are Windows 7 Secrets, Adobe CS4 for Photographers and, shamelessly playing up to the stereotype of all geeks being lonely boys, the Jan/Feb edition of Playboy magazine. According to Freakbits, the only non-technical or sexual downloaded book in 2009 was the Twilight series – a choice that only goes to show how masturbation and Photoshopping mess with the mind.

More mainstream books are found on Scribd, a site you might well use – it's great for finding free books, citations and excerpts. It's also home to an awful lot of copyright infringements. You can find everything: Tintin in America, Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years, Richard Brautigan. Heck, there's even a bunch of Guardian book bloggers, bundled together in a self-published book of literary quotations.

The interesting thing is just how openly available these books are from the site's servers. In fact, Scribd has a very old-school approach to piracy. It pitches itself as a document-sharing service, just as Napster pitched itself as a way of sharing sound files – a euphemism as transparent as a newspaper ad offering "escorts".

Publishers' lawyers will most likely eventually compel Scribd to close, or to turn it into a legal online shop (authors such as Stephen King already sell their digital copies through the site). Certain juicy targets for piracy, such as Stephanie Meyer or JK Rowling, have already had their legal battalions ensure no illicit Potters or vegetarian vampires appear online. That the rest of the industry hasn't yet bothered shows how small the impact of piracy has been on publishers thus far. Faber clearly don't see the need to police the Alan Bennett plays available on Scribd, since most of their audience still prefer physical copies.

The blog The Millions recently hosted an amazing interview with an American book pirate who provides e-copies of books because of his open-source, anti-copyright beliefs. Dutifully, he scans and proofs every book he uploads. The thought of all that repetitive effort, a kind of digital ironing, is quaintly charming – like a farmer tending to his patch with a sickle, his back squarely turned to the rolling Google combine harvester. It's such a lot of work and, outside textbooks, it makes so little impact that publishers haven't needed to pay the lawyers' fees to stop it.

But this is about to change. As e-readers become ubiquitous, publishers know they need to go digital. And being digital, no matter how much drm you shove in, means content will be pirated. Anyone will be able to get any new book you want if you know how to look for it.

But, despite the statistics, I don't believe book piracy will ever be as endemic as it has become with music and film. We've moved on from the pre-iTunes days when the only way of getting an MP3 of a song was to find it on Napster. Publishers were keen to get on board with the iPad straight from launch because they knew it was the safest way to protect and to disseminate their product. One editor at a big publisher told me just how desperate his company have been to woo Apple over the last 18 months.

More importantly, though, publishers have a headstart on the music and film industries and already have some experience of what happens when controlled content is made widely available for free. Victorian publishers were convinced public libraries would ruin them: they didn't. Lending libraries brought books off the estates and into the tenements, and publishers were suddenly selling a lot more books to a lot more people. This happened as the result of a system that, like Spotify, allowed readers to legally obtain books for free while the authors still received some money. If the publishing industry can remember its own history, digitisation should be a doddle."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/feb/18/digital-book-piracy-copyright

OpEd: Proposed Google book settlement leaves libraries' rights in question; San Jose Mercury News, 10/22/09

OpEd: Melinda Cervantes and Jane Light, San Jose Mercury News; Proposed Google book settlement leaves libraries' rights in question:

"The problem with the initial proposed settlement is a lack of specificity about how public libraries throughout the United States would be able to provide access to Google Book Search for millions of citizens. Would each library, regardless of its size and number of users, only be allowed to have one computer that could be used to access the Google Book Search?

What about access for the many library cardholders who use their home or work computers to "visit" the library's online resources? Would they be shut out?

Would the public be required to give up anonymity and privacy in order to explore Google's digitized library? Who would hold this information, and what assurance would library users have that the data would not be used for commercial purposes?

What would be the cost to libraries to access Google's Book Search — and should they have to pay anything at all, considering that much of Google's collection is material already in the public domain, and many of the books they are scanning come from publicly funded libraries?

These are troubling questions, and not just for librarians. They get to the heart and soul of what libraries are all about: equal access to information for everyone and a guarantee of privacy.

More people than ever are coming to their local libraries for resources. Some are budding inventors and entrepreneurs who are seeking inspiration for the next great innovation. Some are self-motivated independent learners who want to read, research and learn just for the fun of it. And, of course, many are students who rely as much on the public library as their school library for access to the world of information. The needs of the public are equally important as the intellectual property rights of authors.

So far, the Google settlement is being treated as if it were just another private litigation. It's not. Google's digitized library represents a huge worldwide public policy issue with complex, significant impacts that need further exploration."

http://www.mercurynews.com/opinion/ci_13619997#

'U' teams with Amazon to make 400,000 rare books available; Michigan Daily, 7/21/09

AP via Michigan Daily; 'U' teams with Amazon to make 400,000 rare books available:

"The University of Michigan said Tuesday it is teaming up with Amazon.com Inc. to offer reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books from its library. Seattle-based Amazon's BookSurge unit will print the books on demand in soft cover editions at prices from $10 to $45...

The books in the Michigan-Amazon deal do not have copyright protection and are in the public domain, so no royalty payments go to the author or original publisher...

"Public and university libraries are seeing the benefits of print-on-demand as an economic and environmentally conscious way to support their missions of preserving and making rare or out-of-copyright material broadly available to the public," [BookSurge spokeswoman Amanda] Wilson said.

University of Michigan libraries Dean Paul Courant said the arrangement means "books unavailable for a century or more will be able to go back into print, one copy at a time.""

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/2009-07-20/u-teams-amazon-make-400000-rare-books-available

Some Fear Google’s Power in Digital Books, The New York Times, 2/1/09

Via The New York Times: Some Fear Google’s Power in Digital Books:

"To Thomas Augst, an English professor at New York University who has studied the history of libraries, including those in the past that were run as businesses, what is significant is that the digitization of books is ending the distinction between circulating libraries, meant for public readers, and research libraries, meant for scholars. It’s not as if anyone from the public can walk into the Harvard library.

“A positive way to look at what Google is doing,” he said, “is that it is advancing the circulating of books and leveling these distinctions.”

In a final twist, however, the digital-rights class-action agreement has the potential to make physical libraries newly relevant. Each public library will have one computer with complete access to Google Book Search, a service that normally would come as part of a paid subscription.

One of Mr. Darnton’s concerns is that a single computer may not be enough to meet public demand. But Mr. Augst already can see a great benefit.

Google is “creating a new reason to go to public libraries, which I think is fantastic,” he said."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/02/technology/internet/02link.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=google%20book%20search&st=cse