[Corpora-List] Google Books, copyrights, and corpora

[Susana Sotillo]

After Napster was shut down, many outfits sprang up to replace it. The
recording industry's strategy today is to go after individual downloaders
by the thousands. Can corpus researchers rebut a charge that they're using
this kind of free online service so they don't have to buy the books?


That is the question.  The American Book Publishing industry is 
extremely greedy.  I have stopped buying expensive books (expensive for 
me is  $40+).  We order one copy of these $130+ books and put them on 
reserve.  As long as we continue to purchase these "expensive" books, 
which few read from cover to cover, we will never make any progress.

I remember telling an American publisher (someone from McGrawHill) back 
in the 90s that I had brought back 30 books on various topics 
(linguistics, poetry, literature, botany, etc.) from Cuba, and that I 
had paid for each of them the equivalent of one dollar.  He started 
screaming at me, claiming that in his opinion they were probably 
garbage, of very poor quality, etc.  Fortunately I was reading one of 
them, a collection of Cesar Vallejo's poetry, and showed it to him. 
 That was the end of our discussion.  

More and more students are reading everything online.  With Smartphones, 
one can read lots of books with the E-reader and download them for about 
$10/$12.  I do that all the time.  The same will happen to required 
texts.  I doubt it very much that anyone would want to purchase an 
E-book for more than $20.  Things will change.

Susana Sotillo

Mark P. Line wrote:

>Dominic Widdows wrote:
>  
>
>>Well, nobody ever made any money suing poor people. "Google / Amazon /
>>Yahoo are already doing something like this, so if anybody gets sued,
>>they won't come after the corpus linguists first, not if they want to
>>make any money."
>>    
>>
> 
>
>  
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20060614/1942baab/attachment.htm>