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posted by on Wednesday April 26 2017, @07:42PM   Printer-friendly

You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that's ever been published. Books still in print you'd have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You'd be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you'd be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages.

It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. "The universal library has been talked about for millennia," Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, has said. "It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution." In the spring of 2011, it seemed we'd amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.

"This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life," one eager observer wrote at the time.

On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century's worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an "international catastrophe." When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who'd had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.


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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:55PM (2 children)

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @12:55PM (#500645) Journal

    Which patent dispute on tapes?

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  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:37PM (1 child)

    by Aiwendil (531) on Thursday April 27 2017, @03:37PM (#500734) Journal

    https://www.google.se/search?q=fujifilm+tape+patent [google.se]

    Sorry for dumping a google link, but it seemed like the best way to get multiple sources

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:01PM

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday April 27 2017, @04:01PM (#500746) Journal

      Seems like a complicated lawsuit.

      These US patents seems to be what the dispute is about per 2017-01-16 [ipwatchdog.com]:
      7016137, Tape Drive Apparatus, Recording and/or Reproducing Method, and Recording Medium. It claims a tape drive apparatus with a means for detecting inconsistencies in read/write operations which can identify potential tampering.
      6345779, titled Data Storage Cartridge Having a Retainer for a Leader Pin. It protects a data storage cartridge with a new leader pin configuration which prevents the pin from becoming dislodged if the cartridge is dropped.
      6896959, entitled Magnetic Recording Medium Having Narrow Pulse Width Characteristics. This discloses a dual-layer magnetic recording medium using magnetic pigments in one of the magnetic layers.
      7115331, same title as ‘959 patent. It also claims a dual-layer magnetic recording medium which utilizes the characteristics of metallic pigments.

      Looks like a corporate cat fight ;)
      Given Sonys stance on Linux on PlayStation. I'll guess I'm more sympathetic to Fujifilm.