In response to the Phoenix editorial about the New York Times committing a copyright violation by posting a PDF of a 36-year-old newspaper article even as Op-Ed columnist Bill Keller blasts the copyright violations of others, Keller suggests that irony should be “[kept] out of the hands of the clueless,” but seems to be clueless that he’s committing a significant irony himself.

Keller writes that since the paper the article came from was long defunct without digital archives, he assumes the author of the article felt reposting the article “seemed a logical way to let today’s readers see Booth’s work and pay it homage.”

Keller continues:

In my column and blog post I disparaged some of the recent attempts to expand copyright enforcement, and said reforms of the law should be focused on genuine pirates who profit by distributing films, music, books, etc. (sure, columns, too) that belong to other people. The law should not go after minor transgressions. Moreover, I specifically said a real reform should also relax some copyright protections – such as cases where a work that is long out of print could be made widely available to a new audience. Nowhere did I suggest that the law should criminalize the illustrative uploading of a 36-year-old alt-weekly article that is otherwise unavailable.

The thing is, the law currently does criminalize (or at least provide civil penalties for) posting someone else’s work without permission, no matter how old or hard-to-find it is. (Anyway, the New York Times does profit, perhaps not directly from the reposted article, but from posting content in general.) You can’t just ignore the law as it is in favor of what you want the law to be.

I would have thought a paper like the New York Times would understand that—it’s certainly quick enough to object when it thinks other people are ripping off its content! But Keller airily “leave[s] to lawyers—if any care to waste the time” the matter of whether the PDF repost broke the law at all. (Good thing Righthaven is on the ropes. It has spent its short existence suing people and blogs who did exactly the same thing as the New York Times just did—reposting copyrighted newspaper articles they found particularly insightful so members of their communities could see them!)

The irony is, of course, that a lot of pirates Keller rails against, who illegally repost the copyrighted works of others, do it for the exact same reason: the works are not currently available any other way and they want more people to be able to see and enjoy them. But they don’t have the clout of a huge organization such as the New York Times behind them, so apparently what is okay for the Times is verboten for them.

And as a final amusing note, Keller says that the Times “took down the PDF” when the Phoenix objected. Except it really didn’t—it removed the links to it from the articles, but if one types in the URL from the screenshot in the Phoenix editorial, the PDF still loads perfectly well (at least at the time I’m writing this).

Most of the comments on Keller’s rant don’t subscribe to his point of view either. One commenter summarizes his argument as “I want my copyright violations to be legal, and your copyright violations to be illegal, I leave it for the lawyers to explain why this is okay.” And another most insightfully points out:

What Keller either fails to understand, or refuses to understand, is that current copyright law is already used against minor transgressors. What he also absurdly fails or refuses to acknowledge is that his original rant was aimed at those opposing SOPA – an act that, if it was passed, would have made it legal for the Phoenix to demand without ANY judicial oversight that the nytimes domain be taken down!

in other words, the debate is not about Keller’s dream copyright enforcement, but about real copyright enforcement – both as it is now and as it is envisioned by players like the MPAA.

Indeed, there are too many insightful comments to quote. It seems Keller may not have an easy time finding many people who agree with him.

(Found via BoingBoing.)

It happened with Larry Kirshbaum, the long-time publishing-industry exec and agent who Amazon tapped to run its publishing subsidiary, who Mike Shatzkin says “has gone from one of the most well-liked people in publishing to the one of the most reviled.” And PaidContent’s Laura Hazard Owen reports it seems to be happening to respected librarian Nancy Pearl, who has partnered with Amazon to republish some of her favorite out-of-print books.

“By aligning herself with Amazon, she’s turning her back on independents,” Seattle Mystery Bookshop owner J.B. Dickey told the Seattle Times. “Amazon is absolutely antithetical to independent bookselling, and, to many of us, truth, justice and the American way.”

But before approaching Amazon, Pearl’s agent shopped the reprints to the 20 top publishers in New York, and not one of them was interested. She says she stands to earn only “a couple of hundred” dollars per book. David Streitfield writes in The New York Times:

Ms. Pearl still seems a little shaken by the intensity of the response. “I knew the minute I signed the contract that there would be people who would not be happy, but the vehemence surprised me,” she said. To protect herself, she did not read Facebook or Twitter or any of the social media sites.

Pearl says that she is not sure at this point whether she would do it again, but she “would still want those books back in print.”

Perhaps the interesting thing is how polarizing the issue is. The PaidContent piece seems to me to be a little unnecessarily snide, harping on some (admittedly silly) comments Pearl or the Times made and suggesting that six books per year is few enough to clear rights on that Pearl should just have self-published them instead. (Of course, even if she had self-published them, guess what on-line bookstore would still be selling the majority of them?)

Meanwhile, the New York Times piece calls out the Nazi iconography in the burning-book Bloomberg Business Week cover of the issue that profiled Larry Kirshbaum, and suggests the most remarkable thing about it is not that it used that iconography, but rather that nobody complained about it. “In the struggle over the future of intellectual commerce in the United States, apparently even evocations of Joseph Goebbels and the Brown Shirts are considered fair game.”

The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an article and blog post talking about it. (At the time of this writing, the link seems to be gone from article and blog post, but when I manually typed in the URL displayed in the Phoenix piece, I found the PDF is still on the server.)

Presumably, the Times had the permission of Clark Booth, the story’s original author, to repost it. However, his permission only covered the text of the article, not the photos, ads, and layout featured in the original paper story.

Carioli uses this as a springboard to discuss the thorny matter of copyright in the digital age.

[Former New York Times executive editor Bill] Keller would like you to believe, even though he thinks of the world as being populated by digital pickpockets, that a sane anti-piracy legislation will be enforced only against the largest and most egregious copyright offenders. It’s as if he lives in some alternate universe where major labels haven’t already sued individual downloaders and their parents for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. The onus isn’t on the public to prove that copyright legislation won’t be used against us: it’s on legacy media protectorates to come up with solutions that don’t punish their customers.

He brings up the matter of the Pulse RSS reader, which the New York Times got yanked from Apple’s app store because it had the temerity to incorporate a publicly-available RSS feed of the Times’s articles into its app on launch. He also mentions a copyright case that the New York Times lost to freelance writers that has made it more expensive and difficult for newspapers to post their own archives online.

And he notes that the state of indexing and archival surrounding old newspaper articles such as the one the Times reprinted is something of a mess. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the Times reprinting it, it is likely few people would ever have had the chance to read it again. And if the Phoenix did have a lawyer request the article be taken down, it would probably cost more money than either they or the Times would make out of it, and due to those thorny archive rights issues, it is doubtful that the Phoenix could post it anywhere itself.

So here’s my best suggestion: the Times should help us track down the photographer, pay him or her the going Times rate for the photos they republished, and then, with our permission, upload the Booth article to Scribd.comor a similar service, so that anyone can embed the piece wherever they want. (In the case that Clark Booth didn’t already give the Times permission to reprint his words, they should pay him, too.) Then the Times should promise never to do it again. On pain of — let’s say — taking down their paywall for a month.

I suspect the article will just end up being taken down instead.

Regardless, it’s amusing and perhaps instructive that one of the most distinguished newspapers in the world is capable of making this kind of copyright mistake, at the same time it blasts “pirates” for misappropriating other people’s material. If even the New York Times can’t keep it straight, what chance do the rest of us have?

(Found via BoingBoing.)

First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari itself, but the Kindle Reader at least does it simply and well. People who are in the habit of reaching for the Kindle app first will undoubtedly be happy to be able to use it for PDFs, too.

The other change is a bit more important, however: for the first time, the app allows (almost) the same access to periodical subscriptions as the hardware Kindle. (The “almost” comes in if you have a subscription to something, such as the New York Times, that specifically only allows direct Kindle hardware integration.) This is one of the major hardware features that has been noticeably absent from Kindle apps, and it will undoubtedly come as a welcome addition for those who use it on their readers and had wanted to on their iOS devices.

I just noticed something else about the Kindle app that I imagine it has had for a while and I just never noticed: the ability to sideload your own DRM-free content onto it (and pull downloaded content off of it) through the iTunes apps tab. I never noticed this before, though I hadn’t looked in a while. Of course, for all I know it may have had it since sideloading through iTunes was even possible; I just know that its lack was something I complained about when the app first launched.

Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the next ten years, to real “Google goggles”, or otherwise computerized glasses, that use the smartphone as their processing hub. Wouldn’t that be an interesting way to read e-books, having the text floating in front of your eyes?

But Kevin Fogarty on the IT World blog says not so fast, pointing out that the New York Times obtained this information from anonymous and unidentified sources. Without knowing who they are, it’s impossible to gauge such sources’ reliability—or their motives for revealing what they do.

No matter how convenient, cool and wearable our computers become, they’ll still only be a conduit for the information we get through them.

If more and more of that information comes from "people" hiding their identities and touting products they hope they’ll eventually be able to produce and sell, we might be better off sticking with the old, clunky technology we have to stick in a pocket instead.

Amazon has been coming in for a bit of criticism for the promotion, given that it is trying to pull even more dollars away from brick and mortar retailers at the time of year when they make the greatest amount of sales. Author Richard Russo has a fairly long opinion piece on this in the New York Times in which he takes aim at Amazon’s promotion as being aimed expressly at stealing money from bookstores. (As far as I know, it’s actually aimed at brick and mortar stores in general, including Walmart, Best Buy, and so on.)

At least some of the people Russo talked to about it seemed to recognize this fact, and couched their response in those general terms:

[Authors Guild president] Scott [Turow] supplied lawyerly perspective: “The law has long been clear that stores do not invite the public in for all purposes. A retailer is not expected to serve as a warming station for the homeless or a site for band practice. So it’s worth wondering whether it’s lawful for Amazon to encourage people to enter a store for the purpose of gathering pricing information for Amazon and buying from the Internet giant, rather than the retailer. Lawful or not, it’s an example of Amazon’s bare-knuckles approach.”

But others seemed to take this as yet another example of Amazon’s war on the bookstore, and decried Amazon taking advantage of their investment of money and effort by treating their bookstore as a showroom for web-order goods.

Something that I find amusing about the whole thing is that everyone seems to be acting as if Amazon invented the idea of smartphone comparison shopping. But smartphone apps and other pricematch services have been around for several years now. (Here’s a piece about one such app, Mobiletag, from last year, and one about cell phone comparison shopping from 2009.)

I used to use Frucall, which launched all the way back in 2006 (it apparently went under sometime within the last couple of years), to save me a lot of money on my shopping with my non-smartphone. The way it went was that I would text the UPC number of an item to Frucall, Frucall would tell me I could get it more cheaply online, so I would forego buying it at the store…and then by the time I got home to where I could buy it online, I would inevitably have forgotten that I even wanted it to begin with. (See? Money saved!)

Perhaps the difference is that the other services were just services to find prices at other stores, rather than one launched by an on-line store itself. But I still remember reading in years past an article that stated some retailers were outright trying to prevent people from using smartphones to comparison shop in their locations—so it’s not as if it’s a new worry for them.

When you get right down to it, Amazon’s price-matching app is really just a symptom of the larger trend toward doing more shopping online rather than in person, especially at this busy time of year. I know my parents are delighted that they can do most of their shopping via Amazon and not have to venture out amid the hustle and bustle of holiday shopping. And perhaps the retailers should actually be glad those people are even venturing out to where they might buy something from them. It at least shows that they’re in the market for physical goods, rather than staying at home and buying e-books.

Honestly, who enjoys dealing with holiday crowds and traffic? People had put up with it until the last few years because it was the only game in town. But when you offer someone an alternative, it’s not surprising that they’re going to take it. Perhaps these retailers should try to figure out a way to make themselves more attractive to consumers who at least bother to comparison-shop in them, so that they’ll be willing to buy it in person even if they can get a better price online. They at least have the chance to interact with those people; they may never meet the ones who do all their shopping from their keyboards at all.

The rapid price drop of the Kindle led some to speculate that, if prices kept falling at the same rate, it would be free by the end of this year. It doesn’t look like that is going to happen, but the prices sure have fallen, haven’t they?

Rumors have long been with us about free Kindles. In 2010, Mike Arrington heard from someone claiming Jeff Bezos was considering giving free Kindles to all Amazon Prime subscribers. More recently, Amazon reps told an AllThingsD reporter that they still couldn’t work out the economics of such a givewaway (though that was before the latest price drop).

A couple of years ago, the Alley Insider estimated that, if the New York Times stopped printing the paper edition of its paper, it could afford to give all 830,000 print subscribers two free Kindles every year. Back then, the price was $359, and now the cheapest model runs considerably less than that. Indeed, at $79, you could buy five Kindle Classics for the cost of the original $399 device.

On Memeburn, columnist Martin Carstens wonders whether the decreasing price of the Kindle might make it more economical for newspapers to consider going that route: giving subscribers free Kindles in exchange for being able to reduce the amount of physical papers they have to print.

I wonder, if in fact, we should be looking to content creators and large institutions like the New York Times rather than Amazon to answer our question [whether the Kindle will ever be free]. When the economic logic of going purely digital becomes sound, news institutions like the New York times could be the key to forcing a free Kindle.

When that happens, it could be a pivotal moment in history, the final death knell to the traditional print newspaper, as digital devices become the new standard for consuming news

Of course, as I pointed out when I covered the Alley Insider’s calculations, the fly in the ointment is print advertising revenue. Print advertising still makes up the bulk of newspapers’ revenues, and if they eliminated print they’d also eliminate that advertising revenue. Of course, they’d also eliminate a lot of expenses. The question is whether the papers could also eliminate enough costs by giving away the devices to be able to continue making a profit on what they had left.

Sooner or later, newspapers will have to figure out how to make the transition. And if the Kindle keeps getting cheaper, the question might not always be a theoretical one. How low will the price be by the end of next year?

The New York Times reports

The owner of the papers speculated that the mysterious buyers could have been “someone involved in a truly monumental school project; someone really proud of their grandchild on the honor roll; someone with a great deal of precious glassware to pack; or, as I suspect, someone intent on suppressing the dissemination of a particular news story.” Suspicion seems to point toward associates of a local doctor accused of Medicare fraud.

Of course, this gesture was ultimately futile for a couple of reasons. First, since the papers were weeklies, the publisher was able to do another print run the next day and replenish the depleted stocks for other area buyers. Second, the stories were also posted to the paper’s web sites (see link in paragraph above).

And, perhaps most importantly, the papers themselves aren’t going to let them get away with it. A statement from Andrew Olsen, the papers’ publisher, said:

“We do have our suspicions as to who is behind this and if it’s someone attempting to somehow silence our coverage or make an uncomfortable story go away, they’re wasting their time and their money. We will not be silenced.”

(Found via TechDirt.)

But progress marches on. The New York Times has a lengthy article about a computerized article writer that takes statistics and turns them into prose. It can be used on sports games, financial reports, and other statistics that lend themselves to forming narratives.

The leaders of Narrative Science emphasized that their technology would be primarily a low-cost tool for publications to expand and enrich coverage when editorial budgets are under pressure. The company, founded last year, has 20 customers so far. Several are still experimenting with the technology, and Stuart Frankel, the chief executive of Narrative Science, wouldn’t name them. They include newspaper chains seeking to offer automated summary articles for more extensive coverage of local youth sports and to generate articles about the quarterly financial results of local public companies.

“Mostly, we’re doing things that are not being done otherwise,” Mr. Frankel says.

The article discusses how a few customers who were willing to be named have been using the technology for sports summaries and construction reports. They were impressed by how natural the articles seemed, and also by how reasonable the prices were (“less than $10 for each article of about 500 words”).

It’s some distance from that to writing stories that don’t involve statistics, let alone creative works, so most journalists’ and novelists’ careers are probably safe for now. Still, it’s an interesting proof of how progress marches on so that things that were once thought impossible can become commonplace.

Of course, the usefulness of these free services depends on people being able to keep their connectivity during the storm. USA Today has a guide suggesting ways for people to do that. (And isn’t that a sign of the times? Disaster-preparedness used to be solely about making sure you had a good, sturdy storm shelter. Now it’s also about keeping your cell phone fully charged and getting gadgets that can recharge them from AA batteries.) If all else fails, you may have to fall back on actually talking to other people.

The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics than online newsreaders"; and that print readers remembered "more main points of news stories." When it came to recalling headlines, print and online readers finished in a draw.

The researches suggest reasons for this might include a lack of visual cues as to the story’s importance (due to its placement on pages and so forth) and more distracting ads and formatting in the on-line version.

It’s an interesting idea, not least because it backs up its assertions with some research rather than being entirely opinion-based. Can on-line paper editors find a way to compensate? If print papers continue dying out, sooner or later they’ll have to.

From the press release:

“New York Times readers on Kindle are a very loyal and important audience, and we are pleased that online access is now a part of their subscription experience,” said Yasmin Namini, senior vice president, marketing and circulation, and general manager, reader applications, The New York Times Media Group. “With this added benefit of online access, Kindle New York Times subscribers can enjoy complete, around-the-clock coverage of breaking news, video, audio, multimedia and blogs from the world’s premier news site.”

To gain access to NYTimes.com, customers can now link their Kindle New York Times subscription to their NYTimes.com account by visiting www.nytimes.com/kindleaccess.

Barnes & Noble made a similar “coming soon” promise to its Nook NYT customers, but I haven’t seen any announcement that it’s active yet and a few hours after Amazon’s announcement it announced active web access too. Kobo doesn’t offer this feature with its subscription.

It’s probably going to be a while before anything gets decided in this matter, but the Lodsys cases are definitely ones to watch—the outcome could have some big implications for the future of mobile app development.

The app was fixed sometime on Tuesday, and presumably subscribers are now happier, but this points out an important rule paywall app developers need to remember: if people are paying for access, make darned sure they get what they pay for. Free riders might grumble, but paying customers will kick up an unholy fuss if they feel they are not getting their money’s worth.

(Found via Slashdot.)

Out of 26 national paper sites, most had already completed their print run—only 6 were able to print updated copies. 7,000 copies printed in Queens had to be destroyed, and 165,000 extra copies were printed. And the New York Times website, even with its much-vaunted paywall, was having trouble:

With the world now alert that something momentous was under way, user traffic to NYTimes.com was mounting and the servers that handle news articles were “gasping for air,” Mr. Roberts said. Ms. Cooper’s short story first was posted as an article but, with the servers under duress, it had to be shifted over to a different set of computers that serve up Times blogs. Now it appeared not as an article but as a post on the blog The Lede.

As far as I know, it’s pretty rare that a story this huge breaks this late in the evening, so I’m not sure whether needing to stop the presses is as common anymore. But it is certainly an area where the immediacy of the web can trump the once-a-day production of printed papers—assuming that the web sites can handle the traffic. I wonder what lessons the New York Times will take from this?