by Don Wiltshire
It costs the U.S. Mint (and you and me, ultimately) 1.7 cents to make every penny and 10 cents to make every nickel. U.S. House Resolution 5512 states: “by simply reducing penny production costs to face value, the United States will save more than $500,000,000 in the next 10 years alone. Reducing the cost to produce a nickel to face value will save the United States an additional $60,000,000 per year.”
What if we simply eliminated the penny and nickel altogether? Round up or down all total purchases to the nearest dime. Bring back the Susan B. Anthony dollar (or make a new Lincoln or Obama dollar). The savings would be astronomical! How many of us want and need pennies and nickels? How many of us have even noticed the new designs on the back of the 2009 penny to honor the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth? Most of them litter our dresser tops or end up in coffee cans or penny jars. What a joy it is to count out and roll those little buggers. The savings would be enough to pick up the tab to insure those 50 Million of us without health coverage. Problem solved. End of discussion.
Moving on: there is a more sinister situation developing; one with not quite so easy a solution. It involves the legal wrangling over Google Book Search. In effect, Google is positioning itself to have a monopoly over digitized books, both copyrighted and out of copyright.
First, a little background using the Magdalena Public Library as a model: the library has evolved over the last dozen years from a community book sharing effort to a full service public library. Its mission is to provide the best possible selection of reading, audio, video and electronic services at no charge to all of the local public.
I keep marveling at the diverse selection: from Al Gore to Rush Limbaugh, from Michael Moore to Ann Coulter. Like a true democracy, ALL opinions are welcomed and encouraged. Like the stated mission of the American Library Association, it tries its best to “provide leadership for the development, promotion and improvement of library and information services and the profession of librarianship in order to enhance learning and ensure access to information for all.”
The availability of the printed word online promised to be as great a leap of public information as the Johannes Gutenberg Printing Press. This project should have been undertaken by the Library of Congress or some other not for profit organization. Indeed, the Library of Congress lists over 9 million items available online. There are many other groups of organizations that are assembling digitized versions of their archives online such as Internet Archive, American Memory and Project Gutenberg.
A major problem arises, however, when “for-profit” organizations like Google or Yahoo try to capture a chunk of the market. Just like our apprehension and reluctance to let the San Augustin Ranch LLC capture the rights to all of the water below our feet, so we should view with suspicion the seemingly altruistic motives of these companies to provide the world’s literature online.
The American Association of Publishers and the Authors Guild both filed class action infringement suits against Google in 2005. An out-of-court settlement was reached last year in which a Book Rights Registry was set up to compensate publishers and authors who agree to participate in the Book Search project. Part of the revenue for this “compensation” will be garnered from the free Public Access Service terminals to be set up in each public library that requests it. A patron could view the full text of all of the books in the database. A limited number of pages could be printed from the PAS terminal at a “reasonable” per-page fee dictated by the Book Rights Registry. Sound familiar? Didn’t I read something like this in the Cordova Public Relations report on the San Augustin Ranch Water “Project”?
U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin (yes, the very judge that sentenced Bernie Madoff to 150 years in prison) is set to have a final fairness hearing on this case in early October. Keep your eye on this one! The future of our digital world is at stake!
The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of the Mountain Mail.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment