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Google Responds to Authors Guild Lawsuit
Phoe6 writes "Google has responded to the Authors' Guild lawsuit of "massive copyright infringement". They point out that the Library Project is 'fully consistent with both the fair use doctrine under U.S. copyright law and the principles underlying copyright law itself, which allow everything from parodies to excerpts in book reviews.'"
Who cares if it falls under those specific examples of "fair use."
This is from copyright.gov:
One of the rights accorded to the owner of copyright is the right to reproduce or to authorize others to reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. This right is subject to certain limitations found in sections 107 through 118 of the copyright act (title 17, U.S. Code). One of the more important limitations is the doctrine of "fair use." Although fair use was not mentioned in the previous copyright law, the doctrine has developed through a substantial number of court decisions over the years. This doctrine has been codified in section 107 of the copyright law.
Section 107 contains a list of the various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered "fair," such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
I think google's implementation of this project very clearly falls under scholarship and/or research purposes. Giving the reader brief snippets of the written work along with bibliographical information so they can find a copy of the work themselves certainly satisfies (3) by not reproducing a substantial portion of the work and (4) by, quite possibly, increasing the demand for the work when users desire to seek out a copy to actually read/study.
The Author's Guild also was the organization that attacked Amazon for selling used books. (Previously reported by /..)
I know a couple of best-selling authors personally, and none of them have a high opinion of the Author's Guild.
basically googles stance is that they can do whatever they want with the librarys books unless you specificially tell them to not do it.
Actually Google, and the law as I read it both say Google can reproduce and publish small excerpts of any book they want to, but if you ask them not to they will exclude your book to be nice. Legally, they have no such obligation.
which actually sounds a bit funny as they seem to be searchable in full and basically readable in full as well
Being searchable in full is sort of the point, and is metadata, i.e. data about what is in a book. That data is a fact and is not copyrightable. As to entire books being viewable, that should only apply to public domain works and works where the copyright holder gave Google their permission. If you can view more than a few pages of any one book, and you don't think it falls into one of those categories, you should submit it as a bug.
making indexes that contain the copyrighted material in full is copying - or else we would have a very convinient loophole to destroy all copyrights.
Sort of like copying a work in RAM, and/or across network devices is copying? The courts have taken into account the intent and the end result of this sort of copying before. If the end user only sees a few pages, then that is probably what the courts will rule is the copied portion in any given instance.
Actually, my understanding of what Google is claiming:
d f)
A. Under Fair Use, we have the right to display exerpts of ANY book, copyright or no.
If they dont copy the whole book, but rather, store the book as an index, they are on (from my little understanding of the law) fairly solid ground here. If they store the book, in a serially readable fasion, they might have some greater issues with the scanning. But if they never actually store the book in a serially readable manner, and merely make trees out of the book, they really dont need an authors permission at all.
IANAL but Google scanning and indexing of the books has some case law behind it, as being leagle, also. If you read the linked article (http://www.policybandwidth.com/doc/googleprint.p
you will see an argument that the storing of the books, totally, with the use of only providing exerpts of the book is also leagle.
So what google is saying is "look, I can do this one way or the other, with out without your permission. However, if you REALLY dont want to be included, then hey, no big deal, I will respect your wishes. I dont have to, but I like being polite."
So Google basically it doesnt have to be opt in or out. But Google is being polite in letting you opt out.
It is interesting to me that on slashdot people are so "Screw the man" when it comes to the RIAA defending itself from people copying copyrighted works. But they feel that a corporation should not be able to use principles of fair use. Consider the priciples, not who is invoking them.