Posts by Richard Milner 13 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Sep 2007
In a book there are two pieces of copyright, one is the text and the other is the layout or typesetting.
The text of a book goes out of copyright 70 years after the death of the author. The layout of a particular edition goes out of copyright 90 years after the date of publication (I'm assuming it was typeset and published by a company.)
It's therefore possible for a company to print an edition 69 years after the death of an author; it would still be in copyright of the author's estate and the company would have to licence the text. by waiting a year and a day they can use the text for free, but so can anyone else. If they now print a new edition, it will still be in copyright for 90 years. If someone buys a copy and scans it as imgaes, the scans are a derivative work of the layout, and their copyright does not belong to the person who scanned them. However, someone could OCR scan the book, and the text is not copyrighted.
As far as I understand it, if an edition of a book is out of copyright, scans (or reprints) of the edition are also out of copyright, unless a substantial amount of creative work has been put in to creating a new work. The edition being out of copyright would not stop the publisher of the facsimile from charging for it, but he could not claim the copyright.
He was a Croatian news-seller originally. He got the idea from looking at magazines in the US on holiday.
Dennis Publishing paid him £1 million for the title and he used the money to buy Practical Electronics and set up two new mags called Astronomy Now and Programme Now.
I worked for Angelo for several years up to 1994, doing production and editorial work, but he got tired of the stress and sold the magazines to another company who immediately made me redundant. However, I got a job with a CD-ROM company and from there moved on to where I am now, so it all ended happily for me.
Okay, I've got one so I'm biased because I got it at a super discount price for being a Sony staff member.
Even, the screen is really readable, the buttons are well placed for turning pages with either thumb, and it's a great travelling library.
The main drawbacks are the rubbish library software and the slow menu navigation. And the software doesn't work on Vista or Mac OSX.
The screen could be larger though it might make the whole machine too large.
There is a version with a keyboard for searching but it's not available in the UK.
£199 is good value given it comes with 100 classics, and there is a huge amount of stuff available copyright free online.
I pray that no-one in a position of serious technical power and responsibility decides what OS to buy by watching a TV advert.
Who is it aimed at? Presumably the users who converted to Mac because they thought it was cool. Why would hardcore Mac OSX or Linux users change? They know they've got a better OS already.
90% of Windows home users have Windows because that is what the salesman pushed when they went into PC World. This advert doesn't address them.
Is it just all a warm and fuzzy feeling generator? Does anyone with a brain get warm and fuzzy about software?
The UK may have one of the best wind environments in the world. It certainly has one of the best tidal environments.
Tidal power as mentioned above is completely predictable. It can be stored if you use barrages, or if you want to keep everything neat and offshore you can use tethered buoys. Perhaps some tidal or wave arrays could be made part of sea defences in areas which need them.
What about geothermal? We have plenty of disused coal mines we could plumb equipment into.
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