Google Book Search Settlement Unfair to Non-US Authors 2009-07-12

Note

This post was first posted by me on etcjournal.wordpress.com (later etcjournal.com) on July 12, 2009. See http://etcjournal.com/2009/07/12/google-book-search-settlement-unfair-to-non-us-authors and the version saved on the Internet Archive on November 24, 2009. The H4 styles for titles are in the original.

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Posted on July 12, 2009 by Claude Almansi

By Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Of Books and Vegetables

I first thought of calling this post “Of Books and Vegetables” because, when I half woke up the morning after I sent a letter of objection to the Google Book Search Settlement, I remembered Ms B. and the building site for a middle school in Cortona. The building activity had stopped just after the ground had been cleared, due to blocked funds. So for two years,  Ms B., who lived on the other side of the street, used it  to grow very tasty tomatoes and zucchini No one objected to this private exploitation of  the site: it would have been silly to waste its potential, and Ms B. generously shared her vegetables with friends and neighbours. When the funding issue was solved, the building started again and her vegetable patch was bulldozed.

Unhide That Hidden Text, Please 2009-01-22

Note

This post was originally posted by James N. Shimabukuro on Jannuary 22, 2009,  in the Innovate blog, which has since disappeared: see the Internet Archive version saved on March 9, 2009. It was then reposted automatically on the etcjournal.com blog, when the content of the Innovate blog was transfered to it.  I am reposting it as it was, except that James N. Shimabukuro’s bolded titles are replaced by H4 title styles and the broken pictures have been removed or replaced

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By Claude Almansi
Staff Writer

Thanks to:

• Marie-Jeanne Escure, of Le Temps, for having kindly answered questions about copyright and accessibility issues in the archives of the Journal de Genève.
• Gabriele Ghirlanda, of Unitas, for having tested the archives of the Journal de Genève with a screen reader.

What Hidden Text?

Here, “hidden text” refers to a text file combined by an application with another object (image, video etc.) in order to add functionality to that object: several web applications offer this text to the reader together with the object it enhances – DotSUB offers the transcript of video captions, for instance: