NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Almanac errors
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2008 Mar 11, 01:51 -0400
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2008 Mar 11, 01:51 -0400
Wolfgang, you wrote: "This is very strange. As you can see from the screen capture, there is no download option on the page that I can access. Looks like google books differentiates between users in different places (continents?jurisdictions?). " Ok. That rings a bell now. There was some legal injunction a year or two ago. Apparently Google goes by the American copyright law which states that when you scan an old book, which is itself out of copyright, you do not acquire copyright in the scan. As I understand it, in Europe and some other countries, you can claim copyright over the scan even though it adds no creative content. Probably this particular book was scanned by some European library (Oxford maybe? that's listed as the source). So Google checks your IP address, and if it's in the EU you don't get to see all the books --at least not until European legal authorities stop threatening to sue Google. They've got a business presence in many European countries, so it's a real risk for them. Google has scanned or acquired scans of an enormous number of books and most are only available in "snippet view" even here in the US. Those are books that are under full copyright protection. Some publishers have then granted rights to publish long excerpts from their copyrighted books. Those are the "Limited Preview" books. Has someone else provided you with a copy of Souchon? I don't think anyone will sue me over a 125-year-old astronomy book. And I have no business presence over there :-). -FER PS: I just had a thought. Does Oxford have an online download service? If they scanned it, then even under the more restrictive interpretation, they can choose to make it available online. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to NavList@fer3.com To , send email to NavList-@fer3.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---