{"id":1324,"date":"2010-01-22T00:22:59","date_gmt":"2010-01-22T07:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=1324"},"modified":"2010-01-22T00:22:59","modified_gmt":"2010-01-22T07:22:59","slug":"caught_in_the_a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=1324","title":{"rendered":"The scanner&#8217;s hand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s always slightly disturbing, when scrolling through an old book in Google Books, to suddenly come across a page obscured by the fingers of the technician who manned the Google scanner. You find yourself, for a moment, both repelled and beguiled, as if you were witnessing a secret, ghostly act of violation.<\/p>\n<p>The writer Caleb Crain, in doing research for a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenational.ae\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20100121\/REVIEW\/701219974\/1008\">review<\/a> of Adrian Johns&#8217; new book, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0226401189\/amazingbooks0b0\">Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steamthing.com\/2010\/01\/copywrongs.html\">came upon<\/a> a particularly eerie <a href=\"http:\/\/books.google.com\/books?id=eZYn5EYifGoC&#038;dq=kant%20on%20the%20injustice%20of%20counterfeiting%20books&#038;lr=&#038;pg=PA234#v=onepage&#038;q=&#038;f=false\">image<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"fingers.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.roughtype.com\/images\/fingers.jpg?resize=357%2C696&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"357\" height=\"696\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And what work, you might ask, is the scanner&#8217;s hand so boldly groping? It&#8217;s an essay by Immanuel Kant, the title of which is &#8220;Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thenational.ae\/apps\/pbcs.dll\/article?AID=\/20100121\/REVIEW\/701219974\/1008\">Comments<\/a> Crain:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Could there be a fitter representation of copyright\u2019s contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant\u2019s defence of writer\u2019s rights? An author\u2019s consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, \u201ccan by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another\u201d, yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn\u2019t have read Kant\u2019s essay so easily without the Google technician\u2019s labour \u2013 in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all \u2013 but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet\u2019s attitude toward Kant\u2019s words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s always slightly disturbing, when scrolling through an old book in Google Books, to suddenly come across a page obscured by the fingers of the technician who manned the Google scanner. You find yourself, for a moment, both repelled and beguiled, as if you were witnessing a secret, ghostly act of violation. The writer Caleb [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1324\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}