Now, Jim, One question on this. As I do prepare Braille books for Texas school for the Blind, mainly kids books and not a lot, but I do make them off of the scans I also share to bookshare. These are electronic Braille files, and I do also do hard copy Braille for my students every once in a while, when I am teaching. The TSBVI site does have password protection though. Smile. So just checking. I will give you a heads up there are actually two or three such sharing lists. Just to let you know. In a lot of other countries it is break the law or don't read. Or so the other people have explained to me. In Germany the only one to produce books in alternate format is the German Library service, so the selection is very limited. I believe in Australia, it is illegal to scan a book for your own use, which all my Ausy friends violate, of course. So... I can kind of empathize with them. Shelley L. Rhodes and Judson, guiding golden juddysbuddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx Guide Dogs For the Blind Inc. Graduate Advisory Council www.guidedogs.com The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs. -- Vance Havner ----- Original Message ----- From: <Jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 4:05 PM Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Follow up from Jim on my email Thank for Gerald for tipping me off to look at the list sooner than when my daily digest arrives. Let me clarify a few things! One, I don't think that our active volunteers have been a problem, and it just happens that I'm on this list and not the general Bookshare.org list. I'll ask one of our team to post it there for me and monitor any questions. Second, there are several areas of practice that should be addressed: A. Sending electronic books downloaded from Bookshare.org (either finished or in process) to third parties. I think everyone is pretty clear that's a violation of your user agreement and a no-no. There is flexibility around this when it comes to downloading for a student as our school members do, or someone who is assisting a member get their books, or prepare Braille, etc. And, if you use Bookshare.org to create a Braille book, we're ok with you circulating it to other people in hardcopy form. B. Grabbing books from somewhere else (cracked ebooks, pirate lists, state repositories, etc.) and submitting them to Bookshare.org. We don't want them, because we don't want books where someone broke the law or a license to get them to us. C. Sending books you scan for Bookshare.org to someplace illegal. Also uncool, and against the volunteer agreement. We don't want a publisher to discover a Bookshare.org book on some warez site, compare it to our copy (which we will let them do) and find it is the same scanned book. Why are following these rules important? Well, as a volunteer with Bookshare.org, you are actually appointed an agent of ours, and our Section 121 exemption is wrapped around what you do, making something that is generally illegal (scanning books and giving them to lots of people) ok as long as we follow the exemption. You have special liability protections under U.S. law. If an author or publisher sues Bookshare.org because they think we are violating Chafee (or whatever) on a specific book, and it turns out that you scanned that book, you are protected as a bona fide volunteer from liability as long as you are operating within the scope of your volunteer job description. I could go on and on about this stuff, but it's probably not needed. We don't want to be heavy-handed, or nannies. We are not seeking out problems, or trying to split hairs. I'm not worried about situations that look just fine. I am very worried when our books show up on the Internet for free. That's a big problem, and one I can't be flexible about. My main message to you is: help protect the Bookshare.org community. As leaders in our community, your opinions matter most. If we keep Bookshare.org's reputation with the publishing industry as a community of people who take following copyright law seriously, I think we have a real shot in the next few years to getting a big slice, maybe even a majority, of our books in high quality electronic form directly from the publishers. I think we all share a dream of every person with a print disability in the world have access to books on reasonable terms. Upholding our promises so far has been a key part of our path to realizing that dream. Jim Fruchterman President and CEO Benetech 480 California Avenue, Suite 201 Palo Alto, California 94306 USA +1 650 475-5440 extension 106 Fax: +1 650 475-1066 jim@xxxxxxxxxxxx www.benetech.org <http://www.benetech.org/> The Benetech Initiative - Technology Serving Humanity Benetech is a nonprofit organization To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.