On Sun, Apr 09, 2017 at 11:33:52PM -0400, Andrew Zyman wrote:
> Have your thought about business model?
> Who will pay for liberated papers and for development of
> such a process/software?

It would probably develop slowly, evolving out of
existing open source tools, modeled on Wikipedia and
Project Gutenberg.  The modules would grow as various
subsets of academics decide that it is cheaper to
collaborate with this project than to pay for annual
upgrades of Word from Microsoft.

Hosting?  I bet Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) would
love to do so.

Which is to say, I have no idea.

I am more concerned about whether we even know how to do
such a thing, especially the semantic reassignment and
plagiarism/copyright detection aspects.  There will be
legal attacks, and battles are decided by who has the
most money for lawyers, so this would need IBM-scale
backing to crush the mid-sized whiners. 

Perhaps the Saudis would like to reformat papers for
their students, adding appropriate Qu'ran citations.
No joke; a contractor friend went there in the 80's
to modify programs so that all line printer output
began with a prayer and recitation from the Qu'ran. 

This could be a process that would make Google's goals
easier to accomplish, so perhaps they might throw a
few kilodevelopers and a kilolawyer at it.  After I
hear from you clever people about whether this seems
doable and valuable, I'll ask an IP-lawyer friend
who works for Google for her off-the-record opinion.

I once asked an artist for permission to redraw and 
reformat some of his work for an entirely different
non-commercial purpose.  He said "Bad artists copy;
great artists STEAL.  Redo my stuff, do a good job,
link to my website, help commercial clients find me!"
I assume academics want to be found by grant agencies.

In a era of draconian copyright extension, facilitating
"new" art by calling attention to non-Hollywood "art"
may be difficult, but hopefully we can do so.  If
academic work was more available and readable, more
people would read it and a few less would spend money
in theaters and bookstores.  That's the real threat.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]