Is BookLamp violating copyrights?
Fundamentally, BookLamp is a review system that uses an objective algorithm to score a book as opposed to human reviewers. We never publish or make publicly accessible, for free or for money, any copyrighted material that is used in the creation of a book’s scores. The data we do publish are transformative works – graphs and similar data – in the same way that a mathematical analysis of how the Mona Lisa is painted is transformative. After a text is analyzed, the full-text of the book is separated from the resulting review, so the system at no point incorporates a book’s full text as part of the live system – even if the system were somehow hacked or compromised, copyrighted material would never be exposed. No amount of copyrighted material is ever published or distributed without permission, and at no point does the analysis of a book degrade the ability of the copyright holder to sell, distribute, or control the distribution of a copyrighted work – at least no more so than a positive
