Google Books and Copyright Law : New Feature Creates Word Clouds for Published Materials : The Example of Stars Stones and Scholars by Andis Kaulins

Words. Words. Words.

Google Books has a special page for Legal Analysis relating to Google Books and copyright law.

Our photo shows the sculpture "The Word" at Groote Markt, the marketplace in Sint-Niklaas, capital of Waasland, Flanders, Belgium,the largest such marketplace in the country:


Google Books is a wonderful information resource which can assist greatly in determining whether to buy a book or not.

Google Books has expanded in the course of time to include many new features. Among these new features are word clouds - in a book's "Overview" section - showing a selection of frequent important terms found in a book. Here is the Google Books word cloud for Stars Stones and Scholars, the Decipherment of the Megaliths by Andis Kaulins.

"Common terms and phrases

Ain Ghazal Ancient Britain Andis Kaulins Andromeda Aquarius Aquila Arbor Low astronomical Auriga Autumn Equinox Barclodiad Y Gawres Bouar Canis Major Carnac Cassiopeia Catal Huyuk Cave Paintings Ceide Fields Celestial Pole Centaurus Cepheus Cetus Clava Cairns Cohen Gadol Coma Berenices constellations Corona Australis Corona Borealis County Sligo Creswell Crags Cygnus Decipherment Delphinus Deneb Dolmen Draco Dschubba Ecliptic Pole Egypt Eridanus Estonia Externsteine False Cross Fowlis Wester Gardom's Edge Gavrinis Gemini Ggantija Gozo Herefordshire Beacon Hierakonpolis Hyades Hydra Hydrus Kents Cavern Lanyon Quoit Large Magellanic Cloud Lascaux Latvian Leo Minor Magdalenians Malta megaliths Menhir Miami Circle Milky Mnajdra Mulfra Neolithic Newgrange Ophiuchus Ordnance Survey Perseus planisphere Pleiades Pole Star precession Richard Hinckley Allen Rock Drawing Rollright Stones Sagittarius Sarsens Saulheim Scorpio Scotland Serpens Caput Serpens Cauda Silbury Hill Solstice Stonehenge Tarxien Taurus Trethevy Quoit tumuli Ursa Major Ursa Minor Virgo Wayland's Smithy Yarmukian Zhangye"

We are very happy to be part of Google Books and view "word clouds" of our published works to be "fair use". But is the legal issue here so simple?

Take a look at these word cloudsvia Federal News Service transcriptsregarding the Democratic Party and Republican Party conventions leading to the US Presidential Election of Barack Obama.

It would certainly seem to be the case that a particular design of a word cloud is copyrightable, and since every word cloud has its own design, then word clouds would appear to be subject to copyright protection. But who owns the words in a cloud?

Word clouds are essentially one example ofdata visualization, for which there are numerous programs online.

Is a "word cloud" a derivative use (in which case it belongs to the original copyright holder) or is it a transformative use (in which case it belongs to the transformer). We favor the latter interpretation, but the issue has never been litigated.

As software applications show, "word clouds" appear to have a very "proprietary" character.

Online anyone can generate word clouds for free at WORDLE.net, which, however, claims the copyright to the word cloud image created, licensing it under a Creative Commons license with attribution. Here is a Wordle word cloud of the most recent postings at LawPundit:


There is also a free networking site for writers at The Word Cloud.

Crossposted to LawPundit.

Intellectual Property Rights and Scribd : Uploading of Book Texts Online as a Violation of Copyrights

Scribd is becoming a force to be reckoned with on the Internet.

At ScribdBlog in their posting What ever happened to Fact Checking?, the Scribd Team goes one on one with the Times of London on copyright issues relating to Scribd, involving such famous novelists as J.K. Rowling, Ken Follett, Nick Hornby and John Grisham, who has the current Number 3 Bestseller on the New York Times list of hardcover fiction with his book, of all things, called The Associate, which Patrick Anderson of the The Washington Post calls "A DEVASTATING PORTRAIT OF THE BIG-TIME, BIG-BUCKS LEGAL WORLD."

We were gratified (but of course "legally shocked") at the Times of London article which incurred Scribd's wrath to learn that immensely popular and writingly gifted novelist Ken Follett's World without End (a New York Times No. 1 bestseller) had been uploaded to Scribd and had been viewed 500 times in five months.

We recently uploaded some of our own published works to Scribd. After only one month we have more than 500 views of two of our documents:

The Norse Pharaohs: Astronomical Decipherments re Tanum Hierakonpolis Nazca Sahara Near East DOC

The Origin of the Cult of Horus in Predynastic Egypt DOC

We are strongly considering entry into the publishing field with a novel of our own. Ken Follett and cohorts, look out, there is competition on the way!

Who Rules America? A Book by William Domhoff about Wealth Income and Power in the United States

Who holds America's riches?

Professor G. William Domhoff of the University of California at Santa Cruz is the author of Who Rules America?, a book which he describes online as follows:

"My book, Who Rules America?, presents detailed original information on how power and politics operate in the United States. The first edition came out in 1967 and is ranked 12th on the list of 50 best sellers in sociology between 1950 and 1995. A second edition, Who Rules America Now?, arrived in 1983 and landed at #43 on the same list. Third and fourth editions followed in 1998 and 2002, and the fifth edition, upon which most of this web site is based, came out in 2006. Keep an eye out for the sixth edition, due in summer of 2009, which updates the story to include the rise of Barack Obama and the nature of his administration." [emphasis added by LawPundit]

The Amazon.com description of the book is enlightening about the subject matter:

"Drawing from a power elite perspective and the latest empirical data, Domhoff's classic text is an invaluable tool for teaching students about how power operates in U.S. society. Domhoff argues that the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant figures in the U.S. Their corporations, banks, and agribusinesses come together as a corporate community that dominates the federal government in Washington and their real estate, construction, and land development companies form growth coalitions that dominate most local governments. By providing empirical evidence for his argument, Domhoff encourages students to think critically about the power structure in American society and its implications for our democracy. . ."

The current financial credit crisis in America can only be properly understood with a good background of knowledge about the wealth figures that Domhoff presents. Many important facts can be viewed at Who Rules America? online at Wealth, Income and Power, illustrative of which is the following graphic of the development of income in the United States between 1982 and 2000:

Distribution of income in the United States, 1982-2000

Year	Top 1 percent	Next 19 percent	Bottom 80 percent
1982	12.8%	39.1%	48.1%
1988	16.6%	38.9%	44.5%
1991	15.7%	40.7%	43.7%
1994	14.4%	40.8%	44.9%
1997	16.6%	39.6%	43.8%
2000	20.0%	38.7%	41.4%
From Wolff (2004).

These statistics will of course have gotten much worse during the Bush administration. Essentially, the top 1% of the population already in the year 2000 earned nearly double as much income as it did in 1982, while the bottom 80% of the population earned 16% less than it did 20 years previous.

This pattern of wealth misappropriation by the upper classes in America has been going on for quite some time now and the current financial credit crisis can in a Franz Kafka like way be viewed as the point in time when the paying public had been bled so bone dry that the entire mercenary system of income in America became its own exploiting impediment - the small guys ran out of money and could no longer make their mortgage payments to finance the money-grab of the big guys.

Things have gotten so bad that the United States, according to Domhoff, ranks 2nd in the world after Switzerland, a nation of banks, for God sake, in terms of the total national wealth held by 10% of the population:

Percentage of wealth held by the Top 10% of the adult population in various Western countries

country	wealth owned by top 10%
Switzerland	71.3%
United States	69.8%
Denmark	65.0%
France	61.0%
Sweden	58.6%
UK	56.0%
Canada	53.0%
Norway	50.5%
Germany	44.4%
Finland	42.3%

The result of this increasing concentration of wealth is power and corruption -- under the motto that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The only available solutions to keeping the United States from dropping further and further into its present near-status as a 3rd world country are: 1) rigorous, indeed draconic controls of its financial institutions, and 2) quick and speedy redistribution of the nation's wealth to the broad mass of America.

Indicative of the giant divide between reality and what you read in the newspapers is Domhoff's graphic comparing the development from 1990 to 2005 of CEO pay (up ca. 300%), the S&P 500 (up ca. 140%), corporate profits (up ca. 100%), production workers' pay (up ca. 4%), and the Federal minimum wage (down nearly 10%).

The papers are constantly full of overfed executives ranting about the minimum wage, but in reality, that is not the issue. A nation running its economy as a vast system of worker exploitation will not long endure and America must get its act together quickly if it is to survive the present financial crisis and move forward, or - perhaps forever - fall behind. Heed the warning signs.

Vincent Varga : Library of Congress : Cartographia : Mapping Civilisations

We are a bit late on this, but Cartographia: Mapping Civilisations by Vincent Virga and the Library of Congress is a "Must Have Book" for your library shelves. For example, it features the Waldseemüller Map, the first map to ever use the term "America":

"Waldseemüller map is the first map to include the name "America" and the first to depict the Americas as separate from Asia. There is only one surviving copy of the map, which was purchased by the Library of Congress in 2001 for $10 million."

We show this map below from Wikimedia Commons but see also LOC:


You can view 16 of the maps in small images at NPR.

The original Library of Congress press release stated:

"September 26, 2007

Library's Map Treasures Are Highlighted in "Cartographia"

New Publication to Be Subject of Program and Book Signing on Oct. 23

Maps are a visual record of human endeavor, each with a tale to tell. In their various forms, maps are models of time, diaries of political maneuverings and works of art that provide a unique vision of how the world evolved.

Drawn from the world’s largest cartographic collection, housed in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, "Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations," by Vincent Virga, has been published by the Library in association with Little, Brown and Company.

Comprising more than 250 maps, "Cartographia" celebrates the work of those who have charted the world from the dawn of civilization to the present. Among the rare gems included in the book are the 1507 Waldseemüller world map, the first to include the designation "America"; Orelius’s "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum" of 1570, considered to be the first modern atlas; rare maps from Africa, Asia and Oceania that challenge traditional Western perspectives; William Faulkner’s hand-drawn 1936 map of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Miss.; and a map of the human genome.

Vincent Virga is the author of "Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States," which was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the History Book Club.

Virga and co-author Ron Grim will discuss "Cartographia" as part of the Library’s Books & Beyond author series at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 23, in the Montpelier Room, located on the sixth floor of the Library’s James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington, D.C. The program, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored jointly by the Center for the Book, the Geography and Map Division and the Publishing Office. For more information, contact the Center for the Book at (202) 707-5221.

"Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations," a 272-page hardcover book with more than 250 color maps and illustrations, is available for $60 from major bookstores nationwide and from the Library of Congress Sales Shop, Washington, D.C. 20540-4985. Credit card orders are taken at (888) 682-3557. Online orders can be placed at www.loc.gov/shop.

# # #

PR 07-192
09/26/07
ISSN 0731-3527"

Bloody Old Britain by Kitty Hauser

Current Archaeology, in reviewing a new book on O.G.S. (Osbert Guy Stanhope) Crawford, known as "Ogs", titled Bloody Old Britain by Kitty Hauser, calls Crawford "one of the greatest figures of 20th century Archaeology" and writes next to a photo of Crawford as follows:

"Crawford on his bike. Note the roll of 6 inch Ordnance Survey maps across the handlebars. In the background is the garage at his lodgings where during the war he stored most of the archaeological records, thus preserving them from the bombing which destroyed the OS offices. These records now form the basis of Sites and Monuments Records throughout the country." (emphasis added)

Crawford was a controversial figure, who, among other things, served as the first field archaeologist at the Ordnance Survey, who was one of the inventors of aerial archaeology, and who in 1927 founded the well-known and still influential periodical Antiquity .

The book has also been reviewed by Tom Fort at the Telegraph in Mapping Britain's Archaeology, Simon Heffer at the Literary Review in No Ordinary Surveyor, and by Simon Garfield at the Guardian in A real backwards man.

A mention is found at the blog Carolyn Trant & Parvenu Press.

Tom Fort writes about Crawford in Hauser's book in this text, excerpted from his review :

"Crawford's supreme attribute was his eye; in Hauser's words, 'he saw things where others saw nothing.' With it, he was able, as he himself put it, to decipher the palimpsest: to make out the burial mounds, abandoned settlements, Celtic fields, Roman causeways, Iron Age tracks and other vestiges of the remote past.

Having served as a mapper and aerial reconnaissance officer during the First World War, Crawford was aware of the extraordinary way in which photographs taken from the air could reveal whatHauser calls 'the ancient text' of the landscape.

Most famously, he used negatives stored by the RAF to identify the avenue leading from Stonehenge to the river Avon.

Until Crawford came along, field archaeology was pretty much left to gentleman amateurs interested in ley lines, morris dancing, obscure fertility rites and other aspects of imaginary Old England. As Hauser demonstrates, Crawford turned it into a professional discipline, both through his work for the OS, and his editorship of Antiquity, the journal he founded to promote his version of the search for the past.

He was a visionary, in a limited way, and prodigiously hard-working."

Book Review : Wordgloss : A Cultural Lexicon

The following is our book review of Jim O'Donnell's book, Wordgloss : A Cultural Lexicon , which we have reviewed at Amazon.co.uk:

"Was this the wish of the Demiurge? Boston to Washington DC is a conurbation! Cui bono?! Do we live in a lexical dystopia awaiting a thaumaturgic gloss revival? Who today knows that "pleonasms are tautologous and should be avoided"? Errata need not be repetitive - a verisimilitude!

Do you need this book? Do you know the words?

Author Jim O'Donnell (book Foreword by John Banville) writes in his preface that "the extraordinary expansion of modern knowledge and its fission into micro-specialties" has created "a niagara of words and concepts flowing from a wide range of disciplines that we have never explored."

The everyday result is that our increasingly sophisticated modern world of communications is confronted by the Hydra-headed cultural stumbling block of a classics-based "verbal universe" manifesting an erstwhile lexical heritage to which most readers no longer have any personal or educational connection.

Wordgloss is not a quintessential corrective panacea for this problem, but O'Donnell writes that "Wordgloss is full of the words and concepts you always meant to look up. It tells you where they came from and how they acquired the meaning or meanings they now have."

The book is written "associatively", which is "pedagogically" more effective than the "linear" scientific style of dictionaries.

Definitely a fun and educating vade-mecum read.

Fons et origo!"

Science a Go Go : Evolution, Astronomy, Cosmology

Science a Go Go (http://www.scienceagogo.com/) has a zippy website from down under devoted to "the latest science news, research tidbits and science discussion".

What caught my attention were their science book reviews. See:
Science a Go Go Book Reviews 2005
Science a Go Go Book Reviews 2006
for a good overview of what is going on in science,
through the medium of books.

Online book reviews, still fairly rare outside of e.g. Amazon,
or involving the payment of online fees for viewing, as at Antiquity magazine,
will surely play an increasingly greater role in science and literature,
and we were gratified to see Science a Go Go review our book Stars Stones and Scholars
on the same page as their review of Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
by legal expert and Pulitzer Prize winning author Edward J. Larson (2006).

Tim Radford in an interview with Larson in the Guardian titled A Life in Writing: A Voyage to the Origin of Species, writes:

"Larson won the Pulitzer Prize for his Summer for the Gods, a book on the Scopes trial, in which American anti-evolutionists challenged science in the 1920s. He followed with Trial and Error, once again about the creation-evolution controversy. Right now, he is contemplating one book on the coming of telegraphy, another on Antarctica. Evolution's Workshop grew out of a preoccupation with the history of ideas, rather than of kings and presidents. In the course of looking at the progress of the great Darwinian idea, it seemed to him that the Galapagos were the Clapham Junction of biology: all sorts of people passed through.

"I believed that ideas in general are the most powerful thing in the world. An idea was more powerful than an army. In the western world it seemed to me that science was the criterion for truth," [Larson] says. "Darwin wrote his Origin of Species in 1859. At that time Queen Victoria was on the throne in England and James Buchanan was president of the United States. Now who has a greater impact on us today? How we think, how we live, who we are?" "

We agree.