Toolemera Blog

Digital Copyright Battle Continues

News Flash! As expected the Ebay seller with whom I have been having a bit of a set-to, seems to be confused. I took the time to work through their storefront and found one more item of mine (well, there is at least one other that started life as a reprint from the MWTCA, but that is another story).

The little Disston pamphlet of 1875 popped up in one of their catalog collections. This was an early version that did not have a watermark. I directed the seller to take a look at the document properties and read who created the pdf. Strangely enough, that was me.

Herewith is the sellers response:

......................
"Dear toolemera,

Hi Gary, this item has been temporarily removed, I am looking up the person who sold us resale rights to that catalog. Usually we own originals of everything we resale to eliminatr any problems such as this.

That said, you do understand that simply scanning public domain materials does NOT give you a new copyright. Ethics of course are of a differnt matter.

Most public domain material can be found in libraries, so simply scanning a document and claiming it as your own copyrighted works does not give you a valid (or legal) copyright. Otherwise 100 people could scan an identical work and all claim copyright on it. (Check with your copyright lawyer on this).

Check copyright laws, you do not have a legal copyright to any material you simply scan. You are also NOT allowed to post certain public domain items online without getting special permission. Your catalogs fall into this category.

A right usually reserved for the Smithsonian and other goverment and/or non-profit libraries. If someone is causing us grief, you may want to remove such materials before they start picking on you.

I still need proof of ownership of the Shurly catalog, to prove it is not a copy of the same resale rights software we purchased.

Thank you"
......................

I've removed the seller ID as I am not out on a witch hunt. I did respond, yet again, to the seller with a brief statement of the current copyright situation covering digital containers such as a PDF, particularly when a PDF has been created from processed images, held within a customized PDF document. Not only that, the copyright statement on my site clearly states the limits of use under Fair Use. Unfortunately, this seller continues to harbor grave misunderstandings of what Fair Use in the digital age means. Pity.

An additional quirk popped up in another email from the seller:

......................

"A simple (non-enhanced) scan/photocopy of an old artwork should be tagged with the appropriate type of {{PD-old}} tag, provided that the original is old enough to be in the public domain by virtue of its age. The scan/photocopy itself, as a purely mechanical and non-creative act, cannot create any new copyright for the person who did the scanning. Such an image lacks originality: it is a bare copy, no more. That rule applies internationally and, on Commons, is normally taken for granted."

......................

PD-Old? Wow, that's a new one to me. I looked it up and lo and behold! Wiki is at it again. PD-Old is a Wiki invented tag for old images, or something. Interesting, but useless. I gotta tell ya, Wiki drives us library types nuts. If it's in a Wiki, it's fact. Piffle. Piffle. Yes, I say PIFFLE!

Ebay responded to my initial email thusly:

......................
"Dear Gary,

Thank you for writing eBay in regard to this listing.

If you believe that a listing or item posted on eBay infringes your
intellectual property rights, the Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) Program
may be able to assist you.

As you may know, eBay does not buy or sell any items. We act only as a
venue that helps buyers and sellers to do so. We neither see nor inspect
any items that are offered for sale on eBay. However, we recognize that
some posted items may infringe certain intellectual property rights. For
this reason, we have created the VeRO Program, which enables
intellectual property rights owners to identify and request the removal
of allegedly infringing listings.

The many benefits of participating in VeRO include:

- Direct access to a support team dedicated to addressing rights owners'
requests and processing Notices of Claimed Infringement (NOCIs)
- The ability to request the removal of listings that infringe your
intellectual property rights by using the NOCI form
- The ability to request detailed contact information for sellers who
post listings that may infringe your intellectual property rights

How to File a NOCI Report
The first time you file a NOCI, you will need to download, complete, and
submit the document to eBay by fax. If you need to submit subsequent
NOCIs after your initial fax has been processed, you will be able to do
so online.

***Note***
To view and print the NOCI, you need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader
installed on your computer. If you don't already have the program, you
can download Acrobat Reader for free from Adobe's Web site. To do so, go
to:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html

To download a copy of the NOCI form, go to:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/community/NOCI1.pdf

Please be sure to complete all sections of the form, sign, and fax the
NOCI to: 

eBay Inc.
ATTN: VeRO
(408) 516-8811

For more information about the VeRO Program, please visit:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/vero-rights-owner.html

If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact us at the
following email address:

vero@ebay.com.

The VeRO program procedures are intended to substantially comply with
the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C.,
Section 512. To read the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, go to:

http://www.qlinks.net/comdocs/uscopyright.htm

Thank you for using eBay for your online trading needs."
......................

Well, I guess that is one way to try to avoid responsibility. Using this logic, I should go into the auction business and simply not view or inspect anything that I sell. I can stand behind a screen and call the bids. Incognito.

If you really want to get into the Stanford stuff on copyright, check out Fair Use and Public Domain.

Till next,
Gary

PS: I also find it interesting that the seller is following this blog...

PPS: I forgot to mention to our disgruntled Ebayer that, while I do not work for the Smithsonian, I do work in the library and archives of a US Gov't funded engineering research laboratory. I guess I do have some notion of what is and what is not jermain.

Chopped n Channeled Block Plane

There has been a whole lotta discussion lately about the new Veritas block plane. Some love it, some hate it, some beat their savage chests (must keep this blog G rated) and cry 'woe! the death of fine tool design draws nigh!". I consider the Stanley #55 or even the #444 and say "nay!"

Yes, again I say "Nay!". The 55 and the 444 are good examples of design gone mad. Clumsy to hold, too many googaws n gadgets. Funny to look at and impossible to love unless you are a diehard Stanley collector. At last, someone has taken the bull by horns and solved the problem of what to with the new Veritas Block Plane.

Mitchell, aka The Part Time Woodworker, has seen fit to produce an adaptation of this very block plane that exemplifies industrial design at it's finest. If function dictates form, then adaptation of function must further alter form. I am pleased to offer to you The Part Time Woodworker's adaptation of the Veritas Block Plane...

Till next, Gary

Digital Copyright for Dummies

No, not you. This is a brief introduction to the copyright of digital materials for the dummies who think that anything on the internet is fair game. Seems an Ebay seller took the liberty of downloading a catalog from my site and trying to sell it as their work. They sort of forgot to remove my watermark from the cover. I contacted them as well as Ebay & Paypal to file a complaint. Strangely enough, the seller took the item down.

Out of morbid curiosity, I checked some of the other offerings in their Ebay store. Sure enough, a few popped up as material picked from existing material on University or private websites. There has been a proliferation of digital offerings on Ebay in the past year. From what I can see, the vast majority consist of books picked from Google Books and the Internet Archive. Some are from free University sites and some are from private sites. Good old Ebay is becoming a mecca for bootleg PDF files.

I realize that a lot of people either don't know how to do a comprehensive internet search that includes the darker depositories, have connections too slow to handle large downloads or simply want to pay ten bucks for a disk holding a dozen or so ready made books and catalogs. Even if the material is all free to begin with. Or improperly presented as belonging to the vendor.

This seller in question asked me for proof of copyright ownership. Hence tonights post:

Digital Copyright for Dummies
or
A Guide to The Difference Between Content and Package

Say you have a trade catalog. You'ld like to scan it and create a PDF file from the scanned images. The trade catalog was printed way before the advent of copyright. So you do the scanning, work some magic on the images to improve their color, contrast and legibility, compile the images as a PDF, do some more magic on the PDF file to decrease size and load time, descreen, etc. etc.

Where does copyright of a digital object come into play in this simple scenario?

1. The original trade catalog of a company that is extinct is not copyrightable by anyone living at this time. You may own the original. You may even claim rights to the disposition of that catalog in your will or asign rights to someone else for current usage with limits (i.e.; an historical archive). But you cannot claim copyright over the hard copy item sitting on your shelf.

2. You scan or otherwise image the catalog, adjust the individual images to meet your personal tastes, compile the images as a PDF according to your chosen settings and smile at your handiwork. What is this PDF?

3. A Portable Document Format (PDF) object is essentially an image container. A PDF does not contain text... it contains anywhere from one to a series of images. OCR is achieved, in most cases, by creating a secondary hidden layer that contains a good guess at what the various included images (font items) represent. That's your text part. The original image is still there, although now it contains a whole mess of invisible links to the hidden layer.

Update: As Luke Townsley so rightly pointed out, I can be scan-centric at times. A PDF created directly from a word processed file is not an image container. The textual fonts are real, or as real as a digital image can be. That said, the PDF as a file is the container holding the information, which only serves to further confuse the matter. So I correct my former comments to read:

3A. A Portable Document Format (PDR) document is a created container comprised of images, text, video objects, or other digital items such that the container functions as a file distinct from it's parts.

4. Now that you have your image container or package, AKA, the PDF, you have in digital format an object of your creation. Known to the intelligentsia as a hunk of Intellectual Property. Sure, it's an intangible thing composed of little electrical charges, those beasts that makes your computer seem alive. In the eyes of international copyright organizations, that digital object is your Intellectual Property.

5. You may hold copyright on a PDF because it is your creation. The original is not, but we are not talking about the original. And therein lies the core of this problem. When I slap my copyright on a PDF, or load it to my site (which displays a copyright statement), the digital object is covered by copyright laws of the USA, Canada and the European Union.

In summation, these bozo's who grabbed that PDF thought that they had the right to use it as they saw fit because the original was not protected under copyright. They even tried to bring up Fair Use. But Fair Use limits the use of the item to educational and research purposes. Personal monetary profit is not allowable under Fair Use.

For a better explanation of Fair Use, I direct you to the following video....

Till next

Gary

Catalog Resurrection & Survey

Some time ago Brett Rochette sent a Millers Falls catalog to me for scanning. He had found it in a toolbox. Unfortunately, the catalog was soaked in machine oil. Ever hear of oiled paper? Well, add oil to paper and the paper becomes translucent, not to mention a better medium for mold growth. Oiled paper also attracts dirt like a magnet. This little guy was Catalog H, the mini-me version of Catalog #32, as attested to by Randy Roeder.

I was stumped at first on how to handle this catalog. Oiled leaked onto any contact surfaces, the two staples were rusted through, the cover was hanging on by a corner and it smelled like, well, machine oil.

First: Into the freezer, well wrapped in multiple baggies. Freezing will send mold and mildew into dormancy. Some forms will be killed outright and some won't. I had to do two rounds of freezing to keep the nasty stuff at bay.

Second: I removed the staples. Of course, once staples are removed, there is little holding the catalog signatures together. A signature, BTW, is book term for a set of folded pages. In this case, some signatures were loose and some stuck together by years of oily gunk.

Third: I inter-layered the pages with absorbent paper, applied a weight and waited. In time, enough oil was absorbed to allow me to get on to the process of scanning.

Fourth: Scanning. Color is nice, but stained and messed up paper is more legible when scanned in grayscale. Not intending to go for OCR, I scanned the pages at 150 dpi 8 bit grayscale TIFF. If I was going to OCR the text, I would have scanned at 300 or 400 dpi and then reduced the overall size later on.

 Fifth: PDF processing. I assembled the TIFF files into one PDF, then ran a set of optimizing functions to bring the size down from 41 MB to 8 MB. The settings I used removed a whole lot of PDF junk that was not needed while leaving the image content untouched. Add a watermark and security and the PDF was ready to go. It now lives at The Toolemera Press website. Where else did you think it would be?

Now for the impromtu survey:

There have been a few changes to the Blog, notable a navigation bar of sorts up top, and threaded comments. All courtesy of Typepad, not of my nascent html coding skills. It's been so many years since I took an HTML course, I wouldn't even attempt this stuff now. The website is undergoing yet another makeover as I ready an estore for it's grand opening.

So my question to all and sundry is... what changes, additions or gadgets would you like to see in either the Blog or the Website? What don't you like, don't care about or annoys you in either one?

Till next, Gary

A Woodrough Genealogy

Just when you think the internet is a vacuum, pulling all that dust and detritus into the black hole of server farms, macerating and dumping it back as a Google search, something happens that lights up the day with the wide-open possibilities of communication by bits and bytes.

I received a comment from Margaret Woodrough to an older post, The Ohio Saw Works Catalog. Do you recognize that last name? Ms. Woodrough is a descendant of that saw manufacturing empire. I have only just begun to peruse her genealogy site and already I am becoming lost in the depth and breadth of information contained therein.

In this, what may be the next shortest post of this blog, I can only recommend that you skip over to Margaret Woodrough's family history site and get to work.

Till next
Gary

PS: A descendant of the Christensen workbench shop has also been in touch. More once I receive approval from him.