NEC has developed software that lets you wave your cameraphone at a page of text for 3-5 seconds and produce a scan that includes optical-character-recognition-extracted text as well as any images and a graphic of the page itself. This is abominably cool, so of course there are a couple of alarmist Luddite publishing types who are predicting that this will napsterize the printed page and cause gigantic copyright headaches.
Using the new software with a 1-megapixel camera held at least 20centimetres away, an A4 sized page takes about 3 to 5 seconds to scan. This produces between 21 and 35 images which the software merges together to extract the text and record any images.
"The goal of our research is to enable mobile phones to be used as portable faxes or scanners that can be used any time," an NEC spokesman told New Scientist.
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.
(via /.)
