Found via Slashdot: A patent filed by Google in 2008, made public last week, covers methods of separating printed magazine articles into individual digital articles that Google could deliver individually. This technique could make it easier for Google to add periodicals to its Google Books program.
As Erik Sherman’s article on BNET notes, there are considerable technical hurdles to doing this (which is what the patent itself is trying to address), but perhaps more challenging are the legal hurdles.
The Tasini case (which TeleRead mentioned here and here), in which freelance writers sued over their articles’ inclusion in a database, established that permission for article publication in print did not cover further uses such as syndication and database rights.
Of course, since that time publishers have simply added those rights to their standard contracts—and many freelance writers may not necessarily have registered the copyright for their older articles giving them little legal standing to sue.
I remembered the time when I involved in a digitization project for the whole run of so called ‘London Times’ for an online information service company 10 years ago.
We 1) OCR’d the digitized images; 2) tagged the words and their associated coordinates within each scanned image; 3) provided zoning techniques to separate articles from advertisement, sidebars, tables, charts, etc.; 4) identified patterns of OCR’d errors and provided word list to correct the OCR’d errors; and 5) enhanced query processing by translating American English into English English from the perspective of historical timelines when appropriate, etc.
Of course, this was just a research protype, which later became a collboration project with other medias, and constituents.
No one thought about patenting 10 years ago at all. Good luck to Google!
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