Well, lots of problems here.
This reminds me of something I say about Sarbox, email retention, paper correspondence retention, etc. Now this article is talking about the UK, but I know this happens in the US. Considering we inherited a lot of their crappy legal system, it wouldn't surprise me if they have this too.
We have a policy of charging potential defendants with collecting, retaining, investigating, and providing potential evidence against them. Now, besides this being a braindead policy that could only come from the mind of a lawyer, it's, IMO, cleary a violation of the 5th amendment.
This, from what I know, is kind of how it works in medical studies. For example, if a local restaraunt gets a health complaint, what happens? Do they "swear" they've double checked everything and found "no violations"? And then the local health board just accepts that? Hell no, they get a visit from a health inspector. Now I'll agree that these kinds of systems are prone to abuse themselves, but any form of self-policing is just ridiculous on its face.
Yet, with a medical study, these companies certify that their drugs "pose no serious side effects". ORLY? Drugco said that? Well, then I guess Ritaxiloril must be safe right?
2nd, and this is another big obvious one that I push, abolish IP. In fact, abolish all government-granted monopolies. It has the nice side effect of abolishing all monopolies. That reduces the incentive to pull this kind of crap.
3rd, academia needs to grow a pair and throw off the journal middle men. Journals should be public domain, as well as all source data. Anything less shouldn't qualify as science, and shouldn't be treated as such.
But a world like that wouldn't leave much room for parasites, so I guess I'm just dreaming.
But that would imply that they aren't property. We can't be having that.
If you put it in the peoples' heads that IP, rather than someone's private property, is only a monopoly granted by the government, well then they might just want to abolish it. Better to leave them thinking that anyone who wants to abolish "Intellectual Property" is a communist.
A communist who hates them for their freedom.
"Dear Publisher,
We're working on a policy and procedure change to fix a customer experience problem caused by multiple copies of public domain titles being uploaded by a multitude of publishers. For an example of this problem, do a search on "Pride and Prejudice" in the Kindle Store. The current situation is very confusing for customers as it makes it difficult to decide which 'Pride and Prejudice' to choose. As a result, at this time we are not accepting additional public domain titles through DTP, including the following: The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
Traces of a Hidden Tradition in Masonry and Medieval Mysticism
The History of the Knights Templar by Nicolas Notovitch...
If you believe that we have wrongly identified this title as a public domain title, and you are the copyright holder or are authorized to sell it by the copyright holder, then please reply to title-submission@amazon.com with appropriate documentation of your e-book rights.
Thank you, Amazon.com
As can be seen, this brings an entirely new issue into play: apparently, if I owned the rights to a public domain book and can prove it, they will reconsider. However, nobody can own a public domain book. Amazon is telling us that in order to post our books we need to prove a contradiction!
One key point is that Amazon has applied this ban completely non-selectively. Established publishers such as myself and others who have never had any quality control issues whatsoever, and give good value for the price, have all been tarred with the broad brush of 'Public Domain Publisher--do not post'.
By banning new public domain books from the Kindle, they are making an implicit decision as to which books people should read. You can argue that 'you can get these texts anywhere' but by excluding high quality Kindle books of them from the nascent Kindle marketplace, Amazon is implicitly trying to decide what is a valid part of our culture and what isn't. This trend does not bode well for the future of ebooks.
How does rockbox work on your sansa? What's the battery life like? Thanks
We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. -- Patrick Moynihan