October 25, 2003

Eugene Volokh posts a letter from the Author’s Guild claiming that publishers do not have the automatic right to allow Amazon.com to use an author’s works in the new Search Inside the Book feature without the author’s permission. This feature allows a user to search for words and once a matching book is selected access the two pages preceding and the two pages following the page containing those terms. The letter notes that it is simple to extract a hundred or more consecutive pages from a book with this feature. Furthermore while Amazon.com sets a limit that permits a user to see no more than about 20% of a particular work the letter notes that in many cases such as cook books or travel books this would allow a user to effectively copy all the information they wanted from a book without buying it. Other issues are that people could group together and copy an entire book. Overall authors should consider whether this feature is good for their sales and if not examine their contracts to see if they control the submission of their books to this service. 6:34:05 PM

The Toronto Star reports that the Canadian government has decided not to submit Darlington as a site for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) thereby walking away from the field of nuclear fusion research. The U.S., European Community, Russia, China, South Korea and Canada will choose a site for the multi-billion dollar experiment later this year. 6:20:40 PM