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The Implications of Google's Digital Library
Connectmc wrote to mention a CNN article discussing Google's Digital Library project. From the article: "Tony Sanfilippo is of two minds when it comes to Google's ambitious program to scan millions of books and make their text fully searchable on the Internet. On the one hand, Sanfilippo credits the program for boosting sales of obscure titles at Penn State University Press, where he works. On the other, he's worried that Google's plans to create digital copies of books obtained directly from libraries could hurt his industry's long-term revenues."
Seems to me that very few would object to Google creating and running a library on the model of public libraries. I go to our library two or three times each week to get books, music, and movies. I return the things I've borrowed and someone else borrows them.
Here's the problem: the digital stuff, especially the music, is very easy to copy. I copy some of it. The books however, are too difficult to copy and I don't need to own a copy anyway. (I've moved enough times in my life to realize how much books weigh and noticed that the library is significanly cheaper and Barnes & Noble or Amazon.)
But if Google runs a library, everything will be digital. That's fine if what they were lending was in the public domain, but, thanks to Disney et. al., public domain is a thing of the past.
Seems to me that a Google library will be a marketplace for copying. Then again, most of the people who run Google are about a foot and a half smarter than I am. So maybe they have this all figured out.
I'm curious to see what they come up with.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
A bookseller who's worried that making books that are in the public domain available on the net will hurt his revenues.
The initial reaction I have is, 'Cry me a river.' These are books in the public domain and are meant to be freely available to everyone. Google's just making it easier.
My second reaction is that he might have a point, and he's deserving of some sympathy. But then I realize that he's a university bookseller. The books people pay for college and university classes are overpriced as it is, ($80 for my USED calculus text, and that was ten years ago; I can only imagine how much it is now.) Somehow I don't think that a university bookstore is going to be hurting all THAT much. So this is just another case of someone whose industry needs to 'evolve or die.' Though he really only has to worry if the textbook publishers 'evolve' before he does.
Besides, the printed word isn't going out of style anytime soon. There are plenty of books I prefer to have in dead tree form, to hold and read and carry with me on trips when I don't have or don't WANT to have my laptop with me. And what a lot of us on slashdot seem to forget is that not everyone in the world has a laptop or a PDA with e-book software on it.
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Why don't you go ahead and create new knowledge and give it away for free? Take your own money to build your own laboratories, do your own experiments, etc. and give that away to the world.
"...he's worried that Google's plans to create digital copies of books obtained directly from libraries could hurt his industry's long-term revenues."
Yeah, and Gutenberg's press had a devastating effect on long-term revenues of the copy-manuscripts-by-hand industry.
Feh.
Google is using other people's intellectual property to create new publisher's value. That's not the same as creating something entirely new that obsoletes something that previously exists — and what Google is doing is forbidden by law.
If we don't like copyright law, then it needs to be changed. In the interim, Google is clearly in the wrong if they publish anything without the explicit permission of any rights-holders in the domain of said publishing. I fully expect them to get burned by this.
Copyrights exist for a reason. Current copyright law is in my opinion excessively biased in favor of the rights-holders, but we need to change that, not break the law. If we don't want copyright at all, again, the law needs to be changed. Nothing about the current situation makes what Google is doing right.
Disclosure: I own a literary agency.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
IMHO books will never be obsolete, gazing at an LCD will never replace the printed page.
But then again I'm a graphic designer and I still love the Letterpress and all of it's shortcomings, they are sooo beautiful!
My wife is working on getting her Masters in Library Information Sciences and I asked her what she thought about Google and their efforts. She actually is pretty much for their work, she thinks that speeding up searches through books will help people find the information and books they need a lot faster than the current method. Her main worry is that people are going to use this technology to bypass the book all together, and thereby possibly only getting a portion of the entirety of the book (seeing only one side of an argument, for example)
I blog, they blog, do you
My brother used to work in a company that printed law books, except they weren't bound books, he'd drop in a couple dozen reams of paper with 3 hole punch into a big Xerox made machine and out would come books, or the essence of them anywho, they would get dumped into 3 ring binders and sold off to lawyers. He would do a print run of a hundred or so copies, it wasn't quite print on demand but it was close
I seem to remember the company's name was Bender, and got bought by Penguin.
A great deal of the research and publications generated by these universities are done so at the public expense. Tax dollars, grants, etc.
That info needs to be available to the taxpayers for use as they see fit.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I might agree with you on books that are still in print. However, for books that are no longer being printed, a socially responsible publisher would release the publication into public domain when it has run it's commercial course. I particularly loved the publisher who said it was not the pubisher's responibility to police their copyrights. "We don't know if we published it or not, but we sure don't want you to be able to use it!" Wow. If you don't know whether it's yours, then you are not generating revenue on it any longer. Put it, then, where it truly belongs: in the hands of the public. There are so many useful things that could be done with it! But since you aren't generating money with it, and don't ever intend to, GIVE IT TO THE PUBLIC! Unfortunately, Congress has mangled and bungled copyright law to the point that this doesn't happen automatically anymore, and never will. So the onus is on the publisher and/or author to earn a little karma and give back to the public. Do it!
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
Content producers need to start using moral ways to get paid, rather than relying on immoral copyrights.
Ok, so what you're saying is that if there were no copyright protections, that would be fine, because the person who spends a year recording music, or 10 years writing a novel, will certainly find that she'll get what she asks when she wants to sell it, right? There won't be anyone immorally deciding to skip out on paying her for her work, right? Certainly, people who don't want to pay what the artist is asking would just say, "oh well! I'll have to find an equally talented artist who wants to work for me for free!"
Sorry, but that doesn't happen across the board. And how would you handle the reality of an unscrupulous publisher simply taking a copy of the work and selling another printing of it, ignoring the original artist's intent, permission, and moral ownership of their own work?
With no recourse against people that decide to rip of the artist, the artist will not have the protection needed to attract the investment off of which they live while working. Or, choosing to live like a pauper while putting time into what the artist hopes will become a paying creative project will become a fool's choice, and the world will be much, much worse for it.
So, what is your idea of a "moral" way to get paid? I'm always amused by people who think they're doing artists a favor by removing the protection those artists have against actually immoral people who have no problem ripping them off.
Your position is that artists are acting in an immoral way. That makes the artists immoral. Why would you want art produced by such a person? You obviously already know of proper, moral artists that are working for you in some other way, right? Surely you have the intellectual honesty not to want the work of people that you consider immoral. Immoral people like Peter Jackson, or Christopher Walken, or Maya Angelou, or Stephen Hawking, or the Blackeyed Peas, or U2.
It's quite a secret you're keeping - the cadre of artists you know that produce work of that scope and quality without any concern about being compensated for their efforts. Your morality comes at quite a price (the price of eating, and putting a roof over your head).
If you can demonstrate the absence of any actually immoral people that would disregard the price that an artists is asking for their work, then we'll have something to talk about. But even with such recourse in place, there are millions of people willing to give the finger to the very artists they say they respect.
But since artists can, right now, waive their copyrights any time they see fit, the only people you're worried about are the "immoral" ones, and since you hate them, why not just let them, and their customers, be? You hate the artists, and thus you must feel the same way about their fans, so how is this hurting you (who would never want their work anyway?). You, and the nice, moral filmmakers and recording artists that you patronize with your money outside of the copyright system are in a self-contained universe, no question. Somewhere in that everything-belongs-to-everybody universe you occupy, there are surely still people making movies that take years, and involve large casts and crews - because they all are willing to make that investment, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Our university did that with a few textbooks which had gone out of print. The company charged them a small fee for printing out the text of the book and selling it in a binder. It was a good sight cheaper than the rest of my college textbooks ($5 for a 200-page textbook? Unbelievable...), although unfortunately, the printing quality was along the lines of a 2nd-generation xerox.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
how about we donate our time and energy writing and making new compilations in our spare time and help out those less fortunate gain access to fundamental public domain knowledge?
copyright is an abomination, in terms of mother nature and human morality.
it is UNNATURAL. that much is certain. the original agreement between the public and the authors was that they would have a limited monopoly after which the information/knowledge would fall BACK into the public domain.
everything that is published by default is in the public domain. but through copyright, we're trying to encourage new works that in a few measly years would become widely available to the public for just the price of duplication. NOT waiting after the heat death of the universe for it to come back to the public domain. NOT having laws like the DMCA and all the like preventing us making use of products we paid for.
the cartels broke the contract. period. everyone is entitled to judge for themselves if they wish to continue with copyright law is as or if they wish to rewrite it for themselves.
and as for the shills who argue straight-faced that copyright = property, why is there any time limit on it then? clearly, property belongs to you forever (forever as in scientifically, not the supreme court's time dilation experiment which makes 100 years + authors life seem "limited").
that's the argument you make when shills bring up that copyright is a natural right, like property rights. then by that definition, it should, logically and ethically, belong to that person forever.
no, the original contract (and even the extremely perverse version of copyright laws we have now) say that the author is given temporary exclusivity to their "compilation" (knowledge isn't created or destroyed) in order to promote progess of science and the arts such that the copyrighted material is soon brought BACK into the public domain from which it sprang.
you cannot promote progress of science and arts through the use of property rights... because property rights last forever... even if the owner dies, they can leave it to their children and so on.
so no, the shills have it wrong and hope we aren't paying attention.
copyright is an UNNATURAL right GRANTED by the government on behalf of the public to encourage progress in the science and the arts through having a LIMITED (that's like saying if i have a penny, then i am almost a millionare... too bad sane judges would throw you out of court if you argued that using that type of logic) monopoly, from which the author would profit and then give it back to the public domain from which it came.
throw that in the shills' faces when they have the nerve to hide among us and promote their sick and anti-public agendas.
the contract is severly broken. any other legal contract that was violated would be decided by the courts but money speaks louder than logic and contracts. and frankly, the dumbasses in the supreme court thought that 100 years + the authors lifetime is LIMITED. they need to have the decency to say they are incompetent and step down.
and please no replies about how this is all about "piracy" because as you have noticed, the argument isn't even remotely related to not paying for products. it is about cartels that broke the agreement. and if you do see people trying to make this about "piracy", call them for what they are.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I think one of the major reasons for Google to be doing this is to detect sites that have simply scanned in dozens of books and presetn the content as their own along side ads, to make quite a fair bit of money. There are many sites out there that do this. Google already detects duplicate content across web sites (ie sites that scrape others), but its a bit difficult when the content has been 'scraped' from a book.
I.O.U One Sig.
Perhaps not a very helpful analogy. How about, "Buggy whip stores concerned that rampant theft of buggy whips from the factory will reduce retail demand." OK, not the best analogy either, but the point is that someone who goes to a lot of trouble (and time, and money) to produce something that people will want for their education and entertainment are not going to be buggy-whipped out of demand.
Even that doesn't apply to the situation. The most relevant passage in the article was the guy claiming the burden of producing the titles they don't want copied shouldn't be on them because they don't really know about all of their old titles.
That just proves what a crock these near-eternal copyrights are. These companies aren't selling or reprinting the old books - they don't even know their titles. They just don't want anyone else to get any use from them. This continual lockout is the exact opposite of the result intended by the original copyright law. I say good for Google. This is information that not only wants to be free but should be free according to the law when it was written.