Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Perhaps they could just liscence google's book database..
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And do what with it?
Technology isn't magic.
What on earth would google's pitiably OCR'd database be useful for in this context?
If the book in question isn't in the database, it is either because:
- OCR errors are masking the fact that it
is in the database.
- Google hasn't scanned the book yet.
- It is in a language that Google doesn't even plan to scan books for.
- It is a newly published book.
If the book is in the database, it is because:
- It is a public domain book already scanned.
- It is a still copyrighted book already scanned.
- It is a book that contains a large portion of a book in the database, but isn't identical to it, and its new portion (if it is unambiguously detected by the algorithm as being such) may or may not be copyrighted.
Not one of the above scenarios say a single damn thing about whether or not the particular user that uploaded the work has the legal right to do so or not.
And if you were suggesting combining the above highly unreliable method with an exhaustive international database of copyright ownership information, consider the fact that such a database almost certainly does not exist and changes daily on a scale that would make reasonably frequent updating prohibitively expensive to impossible.
Technology isn't magic. If you cannot figure out exactly how something could be done by a computer, sometimes it is because there is not reasonable/possible way for a computer to do it.
- Ahi