When I raised copyright/ethics concerns to LM-Net, I also sent an E-mail
to Randy Cohen, who writes a column on ethics in the New York Times
Magazine.
He raised questions of his own and they follow my original query. Your
comments are welcomed.
My original query to Randy:
"Amazon.com is now offering full-text searching of over 33,000 books
(actually 120,000+ books/33 million pages). The service is only days
old, but it has already raised an ethical/copyright question in my mind
as a librarian.
Let's say I am searching for "meiosis". I find it in a book on
Amazon.com. Amazon does not allow full access to the book (they want you
to buy the book), only the page on which the word appears and the
previous and next pages. Full bibliographic information is available,
however.
My question is: Can I quote this as a source in a research paper?"
---
Randy Cohen's comments and questions:
"Actually, I thought it was even more books, and I just read that Google
is
planning to do something similar. The benign analogy: it's just like
looking something up at the library. The malign version: an author's
work
gets used without payment.
I may be missing something here, but I don't see why you couldn't quote
this
as a source in a research paper. You'd be acting honestly, although the
consequences to the book's author may be unfortunate.
What seems to me the more significant and intractable problem: how are
authors to make a living? For both on-line and library use, I'd
certainly
like to see something akin to what happens when a song is played on the
radio: the singer, songwriter, and publisher each get paid. There's no
technical barrier to creating such a system for books, but it's hard to
imagine in this day when we already starve traditional libraries for
funds,
that we have the national will to undertake such a venture.
I look forward to seeing what you put together.
And as you probably know, libraries in England have long paid a tiny
royalty
to the author of every book that's checked out, an emininently
reasonable
thing to do."
Adam Janowski
Library Media Specialist
Naples High School
1100 Golden Eagle Circle
Naples, FL 34102
E-mail: NHSWebmaster@collier.k12.fl.us
Phone: 239-430-6644 Ext. 390
Fax: 239-430-6673
Library web site: http://collier.k12.fl.us/nhs/lmc/
School web site: http://collier.k12.fl.us/nhs/
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