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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
Which means that either Google doesn't have the right to scan the web or it does have the right to scan books. Either way, both websites and books are copyright by the same laws and google downloads full copies to its servers to make them searchable for its commercial gain.
Perhaps it is the tremendous usefulness of Google that has kept it from dying underneath an avalanche of lawsuits for its downloading of websites, but whatever the case Google is a company that uses other people's copyrighted material for commercial gain.
Is it fair use? It is to me, but I think downloading the entirety of a commercial work on an opt out basis is not fair use under the historical legal of fair use in the US.
Publishers who refuse to participate should be punished. While I respect their right to protect their property I do not respect their lack of foresight nor do I appreciate the damage they do to the free exchange of ideas by artificially limiting access to these valuable resources. Take the time to write to your favorite publishers and let them know that you support the Google Print project and will vote with your dollars for those publishers who do. Here is contact information for three of my favorite publishers.
u s.jsp
Tor Books
E-mail: inquiries@tor.com
Fax: (212) 388-0191
Dead Tree:
Tor Books
175 Fifth Avenue
New York NY 10010.
Perseus Books Group
2300 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Phone: 800-371-1669
Fax: 800-453-2884
Email: perseus.orders@perseusbooks.com
http://www.perseusbooksgroup.com/perseus/contact_
Random House
customerservice@randomhouse.com
Random House, Inc.
1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
Phone: (212) 782-9000
http://www.randomhouse.com/about/contact.html
It is funny how the rules for print on the web seem different than the rules for print on paper, even though there is no legal difference between them (IANAL). Hopefully, people will figure out these copyright issues and Google be able to finish doing what is good for consumers.
From your link: Google Weblog is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google, Inc.
Google's actual blog is http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
From there we have:
"So now, any and all copyright holders - both Google Print partners and non-partners - can tell us which books they'd prefer that we not scan if we find them in a library. To allow plenty of time to review these new options, we won't scan any in-copyright books from now until this November."
So unless told otherwise, Google will assume they have permission to scan copyright work.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
You fail to see that the copyright periods keep getting lengthened over time, or ask why, or was why it was not made forever in the first place?
You failed to see whether copyright is necessary to protect the interests of writers, why increasingly unneccessary publishers are asking for more money for cheaper books made on shittier paper.
You failed to explain why we need basic calculus 17th edition when nothing a schoolboy needs to learn has changed in at least a century.
You fail to see that most writers, coders, musicicans, actors, etc. get very little because they aren't annointed as the "in flavor" by their corresponding distribution megalith. These distribution chains are far less necessary than ever before, yet they we have never seen such a rampage against fair use, privacy, individual rights as we see today. All driven by your favorite media special interest group.
you fail to explain why a writer or coder is somehow more deserving than a plumber who cannot write plumbing 1.0 and then sit on his fscking a$$ for the rest of his life. People sitting around doing nothing their whole lives are just as indicitave of "imperfections in the system" as the unemployed poor.
Try working for a living. Done writing a book or some code? Write some more! If your product is worth it, and you price your code correctly, you will make enough money to support you and your family in non-extravagant way - like the plumber. If your project requires more people, scale up accordingly, but stop looking to retire rich and live the rest of your life like f-ing bobby brown and that crack hoe whitney houston.
Musicians, Writers, Actors are all the same, they want to hit the f-ing jackpot while the rest of us work our lives to support them. Arguments of utility to society are bullshit. how did brad pitt make my life better than the guy who unplugs the sewer, or the laid off engineer who designed my 802.11 pcb?
WAAAY TOO MANY creative types worship this jackpot mentality, thinking only about the riches they will win if they join the system. but most who swing for the fences miss and get nothing. How is that different than playing lotto?
Copyrights, patents, IPOs, etc. are not for regular people, they are for publishers, producers, lawyers, Wall Street types, and other parasites who spend their time getting between you and your customer while you spend your time working. Why let them? Is it because your reach exceeds your grasp?
Stop fighting their battle against individual rights for them. Stop helping them to plant spy chips in your DVD player and computer, "to keep you honest".Stop letting them sell you perfectly good hardware with broken software that is used to pull you by the nose where they want you to go. Stop helping them lobby for media taxes and keeping you from looking at your movie on the OS you choose.
In short, just STFU you pompous a$$.
"due to greed in corporate society today..
I fail to see how copyright represents 'greed in corporate society today' anymore than it would have fifty years ago when the writers and publishers would have also objected to this kind of thing."
If google print becomes a success, it will mean a huge loss in sale if the book is *not* in the index.
When you make a google print search, you get a box in the left for each hit, with suggestions where you can buy the book.
Sure, some people will not buy the book because they can get the small part they need from the scanned pages. But a lot more people will only know the boox exists because they find it with Google Print, and if the book is any good, some of them will buy it.
Books are not like music, most people will prefer the analog version over an online version where you can search your way to scanned extracts.
I expect very few publishers to "opt-out" of the index.