A Place for Errata?

Yes, I know, another CK request.

With more and more authors making errata for their books available on their websites, it would be nice to have a place on LT to add those links. I just added a link to John D. Rateliff's errata page for The History of the Hobbit to the book description field but I don't think that's the best place for it. If not a new CK field, a book links box in the sidebar, like the author links, would work too.

Perhaps it would be even better for LibraryThing to support errata directly. It would probably have to enrich its data about books with information about editions and printings, but it could be a great tool for authors to get important feedback from their readers and thus might attract them to LibraryThing.

> 2: Errata are copyright protected too, so it would be illegal for LT to provide them directly. Providing some link to published errata would be okay though.

Meaning that a reader cannot write something like:
"something" in page xxx should be "some other thing"
where "something" is a small piece of text?

If this is so, publishers and authors might be contacted before making the service available in LibraryThing for each specific book.

No, users can comment and suggest corrections. I was thinking of "official" errata published by authors / publishers.

#4

No. Meaning that official errata cannot be copied.

User-generated errata (and annotations) can be stored on LT I think as the The Annotated Pratchett File does it for Terry Pratchett's works (but that maybe because Terry is an all-round nice guy).

User generated errata, I don't believe, could be considered copyright infringement, as it's effectively a statement of facts, which, in the US is not covered by copyright. If you're saying "on page xyz, the word blaj should be blah," you're not really threatening the affecting the distribution of authorized copies of the book (or even the errata).

Additionally, unless the officially sanctioned errata has some level of creativity (that is, commentary) involved with it, I don't really see how that is copyrighted, but, that's another matter entirely (I don't even understand why there's a copyright notice in the front of my recent bare-bones copy of Alice in Wonderland!).

Furthermore, this seems like it would be edition-specific, which I doubt would go on the CK page. My second edition may have all the errata fixed, so I don't want to see it in the CK of the book unless it applies to MY copy.'

Good request, though.

I don't even understand why there's a copyright notice in the front of my recent bare-bones copy of Alice in Wonderland!

I guess there could be some degree of creativity involved in the editing, but "Alice in Wonderland" has been out of copyright for over a century now.

p.s.: but we're digressing

I prefer having the books bound in wub fur, so they can correct themselves :-)

Actually I write stuff like this in the comments field especially if it is a funny error, like spelling errors in the copyright notice or mistaking the river Somme with the season summer. Reference works are another can of worms since the errata list can be quite long.

You would have to go even finer than edition level since many mistakes are fixed in the next printing of the book. One edition can have several printings.

That is quite right: mistakes are corrected from printing to printing. I suggested support for such a feature because I have contributed with errata for several works (I find some pleasure in giving my minute contribution to the quality of the works I appreciate, such as Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language), but only those for which an errata page has been set up by the author or the publisher (e.g., http://www.research.att.com/~bs/3rd_old_errata.html). Since this usually requires some technical expertise, most authors will probably shy away from it. If LibraryThing (or maybe OpenLibrary) provided such a service, more authors would probably embrace the idea that readers may contribute to the detection and correction of errors. Notice that a crucial feature of the service would be to give authors the power to approve submissions of errors: an errata service should not be seen as a kind of open forum about the works.

7, 8 >

Alice's copyright is for the edition, not the work. You can retype and republish Alice, but you cannot photocopy or otherwise photo-reproduce that edition of Alice.

But I digress.

Further digressing:

But what are they copyrighting? The layout on the page?

That's not very creative, considering most books published these days have layout done by a machine.

It leads me to believe that the copyright system is broken.

Yes, the layout on the page. The work they put into it to turn the words into a publishable book, the typography, and anything else outside of Lewis Carroll's text.

Take a look at books in your own library that are newish editions of out-of-copyright texts. They are very often photo-reproductions of the older editions which are out of copyright.

If you photo-reproduce an edition still in copyright, you've just pirated it. One of my husband's books was pirated just that way. He never saw a dime from it.

Copyright is not a testament to the quality of a work or its level of creativity. It merely says that someone in particular gets credit for the work that went into making it. Someone's belief that it is lame does not diminish its value to the maker.

Copyright is not a testament to the quality of a work or its level of creativity.

Very true. Though without any creativity there can be no copyright - at least here in Europe, not that expert on international copyrights - the law avoids making value judgments. After all, what you see as a masterpiece might be a piece of %^@ to others - it wouldn't be workable.

14 > Actually, copyright requires creativity here in the US; "sweat of the brow" work, however meritorious, does not get a copyright. See Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 1991. It is rewarded by other means -- e.g., first-to-the-market advantage -- but not by copyright.

In fact, there is a case directly on point to photoduplications of public domain works, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., in which the court held that photo-reproductions of public domain artworks (e.g., for slide sets) do not have an independent copyright.

The quantum of creativity required for some level of copyright is low -- in gatherings of factual information, for instance, some creative ordering (i.e., not alphabetical, chronological, or anything obvious or standard) or creative selection (i.e., not "all" or anything obvious or standard).

Creative work added to an edition -- scholarly annotations, modernization of language, and so forth -- are independently copyrighted.

I have never heard of typesetting getting a separate copyright -- not to say that there's not a case on this -- but I would think the typesetting would have to be something rather extraordinary and would be worried if it were not and a court still recognized a copyright.

16> In the US, typography and typesetting of any sort doesn't get a new copyright. In the UK, there's a special 25-year copyright for a newly typeset book.

12> A new copyright on a cheap copy of Alice in Wonderland is most likely on the introduction or on the cover. Or simply a false claim. While it is a criminal offense in the US to knowingly claim a nonexistent copyright in a work, I don't know that anyone has ever been prosecuted for it.

17 > Hey prosfilaes -- Interesting about the UK -- glad to know that. Digging around in this I was also interested to see the hash of issues around copyright of typeface design.

Although I found some introduced (and not passed) legislation on protection for typeface design in the US, I couldn't find anything that squarely addressed the typesetting -- from a very cursory search. Do you know of a case on the typesetting question in the US? Or has the Copyright Office ever looked at it?

... As for "copyfraud", as it has been called, Jason Mazzone @ Brooklyn Law wrote an article about it, available on SSRN at http://ssrn.com/abstract=787244 . Might be of interest.

To further the digression:

I thought about this a bit yesterday. Just like how at the beginning of DVDs, there's that scary FBI warning, the copyright statement in the book is additionally just another scary warning.

In the matter of a legal ruling re: copyright infringement, the actual US Copyright law supersedes the copyright statement in a book (which is inaccurate, as you can make as many copies of a work as you like, provided they are all for personal use; and you can give away your original copy of the media (even ebooks) provided you destroy any residual copies, or give those to that same recipient), and the fact that the statement is written there, or on some seal you have to open to read the book does not actually make it a legally binding document.

I think the people who published my copy of Alice just wanted to instill the fear of the copyright hobgoblins in the heart of the reader, making the average person who doesn't actually understand the purpose of copyright feel that they have to pay someone for a copy of a book, no matter how old it is. (For the record, there was no introduction, just the text of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, alongside the Tenniel illustrations.)

Nice link on Copyfraud, btw, lq. I think that copyfraud should be up there on the crime scale with falsely claiming a registered trademark, to force less-than-ethical publishers to be honest with their customers.

End digression.

18> I can't find anything that directly address the typesetting either.

19> "as you can make as many copies of a work as you like, provided they are all for personal use"

I doubt it. The law says:

"Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

I'm pretty sure that if you made copies of a painting because you wanted one in every room of your house, that it wouldn't be considered fair use even for personal use.

Besides the legal interpretation which seems to be leaning to making it available, who polices this?

Not the copyright, but the errata? Do members post the errata attached to the book page? I think perhaps errata from the publisher is vetted, and if LT made it available great, but if LTers were able to CK errata, it becomes a wiki. Also a spoiler, "author meant to say knife was the murder weapon and instead wrote dagger" which could be a very telling reveal...

In the Wargaming world which I am also involved in, one site has as many games as I can think of listed. It also lists errata and a click and you can see it. (A good thing with rules. Sometimes knowing the errata can make an unplayable game playable.) This site started long ago in internet years, and probably did not concern itself with copyright minutia, but is only updated by the site admins, not the hoi-polloi.

The U.S. Constitution does mention copyright in Article 1 Section 8 (this is in the main section, not the Bill of Rights):

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

One kind of errata that might be very useful to note in CK is the ones that are listed otherwhere than in the book itself.

OT: 'otherwhere', what a beautiful modern use of an archaic word. Lovely.

Thank you! ;-)

>20 prosfilaes:.

As long as it's noncommercial (point 1), and your creation of the product is not deemed a substitute for the original work (point 4), it's most likely going to be fair use.

According to the EFF, many legal experts consider time-, space-, and format-shifting to be valid cases of fair use (an extension of the precedents set by the Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios (1984) and RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia rulings (1999)), as well as producing back-up copies of your media for home use. That is, they believe that you may make personal, noncommercial, trans-media copies of a work that you have legally acquired. You are not adversely affecting the market, as you have already acquired the media and are not distributing it, and since you're not selling it, you're doing so non-commercially (as an aside to an aside: commercial use can fall into fair use, just not in this case).

I'm pretty sure that if you did make copies of a painting, 'cause you wanted one in each room of your house, you would have a very, very good chance of winning any infringement cases, claiming fair use, as long as you weren't tried in east Texas.

Any US copyright lawyers want to chime in?

26> But making copies of a painting, because you wanted one in each room of your house, is doing it for purely decorative, non-educational reasons (not good on point 1), it's an artistic work (bad on point 2), uses the whole work (very bad on point 3) and is a substitute for just buying the posters (bad on point 4).

I think there have been cases about it, about house plans, where even if you are copying a copy you own for private use, you're still in violation of the law. Again, point 3 and point 4 come in to play, with some weight being put on point 4 in that they offer a complete set of all the plans you'll need along with single copies.

"You are not adversely affecting the market, as you have already acquired the media and are not distributing it"

True in the case of time-shifting; not so much in the case of backup, where I'd point to the general concept of fairness as much as any of the points as leading a court to rule it permissible. But the more copies you make, especially for simultaneous use, the more I'd be concerned that you aren't covered by fair use.

>27 prosfilaes:.

There is no set limit for personal copies, though most courts consider

I too would like to have a specific place for reader detected errata, probably in the "Common Knowledge" section. Many books will never be reprinted; sometimes their authors are dead. No publisher is going to maintain an errata section. But librarything could do it, without too much trouble.

The problem with putting errata in the "Comments", is that, while the "Comments" are not private, they are not made available to other readers, which is the whole point of errata. I tried the experiment: https://www.librarything.com/work/8928314/details/117993774 .

I still support the original idea, and while "reasonable" has never been confused with "legal", it seems silly not to be able to list errata for a published work without running afoul of copyright. Certainly curious as to how that was managed prior to social media sites as this one, but that's a digression.

And still agree that Comments is feasible but unwieldy and doesn't service users interested in tracking and documenting errata.

>30 themulhern: Comments are available to everyone. PRIVATE comments are not available to everyone else.

>32 gilroy: They are technically available and not private but unless you know to look for them, there is no indication for someone to go look under a specific account’s record of the book. Which is what >40 jjwilson61: meant I think.

>33 AnnieMod:
That's my take, too.

>34 elenchus: You got it!

The problem is that CK is meant for things that refer to the whole work. And while there are works that only have a single edition, many works come out with multiple editions, some of which might have the same mistakes, but some might not.

I would suggest that if you find important errata, that you enter them in your comments, but also write a review, including what edition you read, and that you have put some errata in your comments.

I do see the problem, and I don't even know how to certainly figure out what edition of a book I'm holding. In the meantime, though, I've started a list: https://www.librarything.com/list/45038/Books-with-Errata .

Could not the errata be keyed (via clicks) to specific copies of the work?

>38 Crypto-Willobie:
Presumably this concept relates to the fabled "editions layer" missing from LT data.

But the fact LT tracks Cover Images for a work shows it's not impossible to include edition-level data even in the absence of a formal edition layer. Worth considering whether the number of errata needed for works would be a different order than the number of cover designs -- perhaps the covers approach wouldn't be suited to tracking errata. I assume it's not that different, but am guessing.

Cover images are attached to books and they role up to the work layer. There is no edition there.

>40 jjwilson61:
That's what I meant to state, evidently I didn't phrase it well. The further point being, an edition layer isn't necessary to capture edition-dependent information (like the cover).

Covers aren’t necessarily edition-level data - many users scan their particular cover with blemishes, price tags and whatnot, so the images really only apply to their particular copy.

(I’m inconsistent about this; if the cover is more-or-less pristine, I often grab a pre-existing image of the same edition, but if it has any major idiosyncrasies I try and use a scan.)