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I want this thing on my v902SH.

The software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page.

Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work.

This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images.

But with the new software entire documents can be captured. As a page is being scanned the OCR software takes dozens of still images of the page and effectively merges them together using the outline of the page as a reference guide. The software can also detect the curvature of the page and correct any distortion so caused, enabling even the areas near the binding to be scanned clearly.

This beats the current OCR functions that can scan only one line (that’s not too long) by a few hundred times. And of course whenever an exciting new technological development takes place, the first thing people do is not to pay respect to the advancement of science, but WORRY ABOUT GODDAMN COPYRIGHT.

But the concern now is that this technology will catapult the publishing industry into a copyright furore similar to that which has gripped the recording industry in recent years.

“There’s no easy solution,” says Andrew Yates, intellectual property adviser to the UK’s Periodical Publisher’s Association in London.

“The music industry has been struggling with this for some time,” he says. But with music the issue is whether or not you allow people to copy music they have already purchased, says Yates.

Maybe I’m just crazy, but maybe, just maybe, the fact that copyright is being threatened by new technology advancements everyday is hinting at the fact that the entire goddamn copyright law was written in the prehistoric period when record labels did not exist and media conglomerates did not own the goddamn judicial system.

I swear, the stupidity of the corporate suits is getting on my nerves. Instead of receiving rightfully-deserved praises for an incredible technological breakthrough, these innovators have to worry about fossil copyright laws. Unless I am mistaken by a few football fields, I believe that copyright was not designed to impede creativity and innovation. It was to encourage inventors to share their ideas freely.

So, pardon my French, fuck you to the corporate-driven establishment that continues to maintain the status quo.