On the library of libraries
In today’s New York Times magazine section, Kevin Kelly offers an account of what he calls “the moral imperative to scan” books into digital searchable, linkable, taggable, etc. files. The essay is called “Scan This Book!”
According to Kelly, the “chief revolution birthed by scanning books” is that “in the universal library, no book will be an island.” As Kelly explains,
Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.
Kelly makes a number of interesting points. You know the saying: Read the whole thing!
[…] Both Frank and Kaimi expressed some dismay at Major League Baseball’s right of publicity claim against CDMsports, a fantasy baseball service website. Frank, riffing on MLB, called Baseball’s demand for royalties for the use of named palyers’ statistics “Misusing Law Brazenly,” as well as “bizarre” and “astonishing[].” Kaimi, for his part, links the fantasy baseball story to Kevin Kelly’s meditation on the universal library, to which I’ve linked previously. Like Frank, I reacted to the story with deep skepticism about the strength of MLB’s royalty claim. Not knowing that much about right of publicity law, however, I thought I would investigate a bit. It turns out that MLB’s claim appears to have some merit in the expansive doctrine that the right of publicity has become. So much the worse for the right of publicity. […]
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Markus
It was quite useful reading, found some interesting details about this topic. Thanks.
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