Thursday, November 14, 2013

Copyright Infringement and Google Notebook

I was surprised to see that my quote links weren't working at the bottom of this blog. When I investigated, I discovered that my shared notebooks had the following warning:

This notebook was flagged as violating Google Notebook Program Policies. If you feel it was flagged incorrectly, let us know.

Admittedly, when you follow the dialog to share a notebook, Google does a fair job of warning you this might happen:

Important
When publishing a notebook that contains content from websites, please remember to respect the hard work (and legal rights) of the people that created the content. Publishing a notebook is the same as creating your own web page — don't include content in your notebook that you couldn't legally publish on your own webpage. For more information on our program policies, click here.

But what I wonder is how to avoid this? My primary use of Google Notebook is to store relevant quotes/quips from websites for future reference. This has a couple advantages over bookmarks...
  1. It cuts away the cruft of webpages so that I only see my notes, while still allowing me to store a simple link to the original reference for context
  2. It allows me to tag/organize my notes/thoughts and provides a nice search to make them retreivable
  3. Using the Google Notebook Firefox Extension makes all this a breeze
I could do something similar using the Delicious Bookmarks Add-on, by using the summary text for the relevant quotes, but I honestly doubt that is any more/less legal.

When I was at EclipseCon this Spring, I had the privilege to hear Cory Doctorow talk about copyright law and the possible societal repercussions of laws which make the majority of its population criminals.

What do you think?

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