Yesterday's entry about Google digitising out of copyright works has generated quite a few supportive emails in my in-box. Today in The Times Ben Macintyre has written a great piece in support of copyright, the need to protect authors' rights and the continued requirement for would-be users of intellectual property to seek permission to offer digital versions rather than Google's posited offer to take down material if the rights holder complains. Ben describes what I think more eloquently than I ever could:

'For centuries, artists have fought to protect their work from being copied and disseminated without payment: in 1623 the composer Salomone Rossi wrote a setting of the Psalms that included a curse on anyone who copied the contents. These days authors can rely on more than a curse.

The tutting librarian should be replaced by another authority figure policing the stacks: the copyright lawyer, ensuring that every new addition to the online collection comes with the express permission of the writer, and a royalty.

Silence is golden in a library; but the law of copyright is beyond price.'

As this is the first of September I have been totting up the numbers of visitors in August. I was expecting a fairly quiet month given the holiday season etc. We had 42944 visits, up 38% on July. Here's a graph attempting to show progress through the year: