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Google Print Holds The Presses
brokenarmsgordon writes "Google Print, the project launched in December to digitize the entire collections of five major libraries, has been put on hold until November. Google will stop cataloging in-copyright books until November to give publishers time to decide if they would like to participate and to mark which books they want excluded from the index. "
It will be interesting to see which titles will be available through it once Google Print is ready for prime-time use.
my geeklog
check out their own blog
It's actually kinda funny..
That's right: Google won't even scan any book copyright holders ask them not to, even though doing so is perfectly legal. It's as if copyright holders got to dictate what books get placed in libraries. Their short-sighted selfishness will cost us all, depriving us of our heritage in our online Library of Alexandria.
Losers whine about their best, Winners go home to fuck the prom queen
This is old news; it was posted on the Google blog 2 days ago. I am surprised it has taken this long to reach /.
5
/. isn't accepting my password...)
The real question is whether someone has yet implemented a hack (as described in this K5 post http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/3/7/95844/5987
I am a student, and my reading list for next semester will cost me $1850 (Amazon prices). If anyone has any updates on the 'google print hack' I (and thousands of others like me) will be most appreciative!
(PS, sorry for posting as AC, but for some reason
The ideal library, obviously, would be every book ever written neatly indexed and available on-line at Wiki-type sites or dedicated sites, searchable by Google. Knowledge should belong to humanity, it should be among the commons like clean air. Authors obviously tremble with fear of the idea of any and every book being available to anyone for free, for it could potentially cut the revenue they are currently earning on humanity's mass-murder of trees. This destruction must and should stop, moving literature on-line is only a natural step toward a sustain able development.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Hah. I'm not surprised. I never believed this would really happen.
Remember Al Gore talking about digitizing the Library of Congress so that a little girl in Carthage Tennessee would have access to books? That never happened either.
Al Gore talks big and the Library of Congress never delivers.
Google talks big and doesn't deliver.
And meanwhile, eccentric Michael Hart and his wild, impractical idealists digitize book after book after book.
About half the books on the Net, as indexed by the UPenn online books page were digitized by Project Gutenberg.
Hart drives all the eBook mavens crazy. He does everything wrong. He doesn't use Open EBook markup. He doesn't worry about conforming PG texts to authoritative academic editions. He doesn't posture.
All he does is get the job done.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Yes, AFAIK that is accurate: Google does have the right both to scan the web and to scan the books. Google is not suspending the scanning of copyrighted books because it's against the law; they appear to be doing so as a kind of "good faith" gesture towards publishers. It appears to be entirely legal for Google to scan copyrighted books on behalf of libraries that own the books (a lot of people seem to forget that bit!). It certainly doesn't seem that anyone is under any actual legal obligation to stop scanning.
At the same time, I guess Google doesn't want any legal hassles from publishers, no matter how illegitimate their lawsuits would be. It's not hard to see why they're doing this, though (a) it's disappointing that the publishers get their way many books are excluded from one of the greatest research tools ever imagined; and (b) it's good that Google has not admitted that what they are doing is in any way illegitimate.
For me, the issue is that Google, a rich corporation, has talked some libraries into providing access to their collections, even though the library is not the rights holder for the copyrighted works they own. The library that is most eager to let Google scan everything is the University of Michigan, a public institution.
The contract with U.Michigan was confidential until they posted it in response to a request I filed under Michigan's freedom of information law. Google gets to scan everything, and U.Michigan gets a copy of the scanned files. However, U.Michigan is not able to do anything with their copies except to offer it on their own website, assuming that they take measures to prevent excessive downloading and automated crawling.
By way of contrast, Google gets to do anything it wants with its copies, forever, and that includes selling it to partners, or passing them along to any successor of Google. They will show ads for where to buy copies of out-of-print books. The entire book will be scanned, but only snippets will be shown surrounding the search term for books that are in copyright. With this latest announcement, they say that they will not show sponsored links unless the publisher agrees to join in the Google Print program.
Google considers anything published after 1922 to be copyrighted, except for government documents that had no copyright to begin with. Now they are inviting publishers to opt-in to their Print program, so that more than snippets can be displayed, and the publisher can get a cut of the sponsored links that are clicked on.
But you have to ask yourself, how many books that were published since 1922 are represented by current publishers who are aware of Google's plans and inclined to respond to Google's invitation to opt-in or opt-out? Consider that many publishers are no longer the rights holder once a book goes out of print, as contracts often stipulate that the copyright then reverts to the author. When Google talks about allowing publishers to opt-in to the Print program, or opt-out of the scanning, my guess is that we're talking about less than 20 percent of all copyrighted material that Google plans to grab.
The other 80 percent will be grabbed by Google without the "express consent" of the rights holder that is required by copyright law, usually with the rights holder not even being aware that an opt-out is available from Google. This is what Google has its eyes on, but it's not what they want you to think about when considering this issue. The used-book purchase links alone will be a cash cow for this 80 percent. Their statement that they will not show sponsored links on pages from copyrighted books that have not opted-in is not enforceable, given that they can chang their mind about that further down the road. It's just not fair to rights holders.
The proper procedure would be for Google to solicit permission for anything in copyright, and skip that book if there is no response. They should make an arrangement with some entity similar to the Copyright Clearance Center, and invite rights holders to submit permission forms for Google to scan their books. A license fee might be involved, so that these holders can get some compensation. The question of whether ads are allowed, or how much content can be displayed, could be negotiated as part of the license fee. Then if the library has the book, no one will complain when Google scans it. If it doesn't have the book, perhaps the rights holder can make a copy available if Google still wants it.
That's what Google should be doing, instead of ripping off every rights holder since 1922 by default. There is more on this issue at Google Watch.