Google Books wins case

Excellent news. The BBC is reporting that…

“Google has defeated a legal action mounted to stop it scanning and uploading millions of books. In 2005, the US Authors Guild sued Google alleging that its plans to create a digital library amounted to massive copyright infringement. In its defence, Google said its plans constituted “fair use” because it was only putting excerpts of texts online. U.S. judge Denny Chin has now sided with Google and dismissed the case brought by the Guild.”

Wired has the full text of the ruling.

FeedDemon Pro, now free and ad-free

Read a lot of news feeds? My desktop RSS reader FeedDemon has sadly just stopped development, with a new final 4.5 version. But the developer Nick Bradbury has very kindly made the latest FeedDemon Pro 100% freeware…

“As promised, this last version of FeedDemon is completely free. All of the features of the Pro version are available, and ads are no longer shown in the bottom left of the screen.”

“Nurse, the screens!”

There’s a nice inclusion of Jurn.org in a new survey of Google alternatives for search, from France’s National Network of Hospital Librarians. In this instance they’re pointing to JURN’s usefulness for biomedical search, which JURN really isn’t intended for. But they find that…

“the biomedical field is still relatively well covered” [by JURN]

Which a few of my own tests just now found is true, and that’s kind of cool.

They also report that their No.1 choice, Elsevier’s Scirus search engine, will…

“unfortunately be abandoned in January 2014 [Scirus] indexes more than 575 million records of scientific content from the open web”