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Tim O'Reilly on the Google Library Project
dkleinsc writes "The New York Times is running an op-ed piece(free registration required) by Tim O'Reilly arguing that the Google Library Project is a good thing for authors in general, and suggests a lawsuit by the Author's Guild against Google is acting against authors' best interest."
Note that O'Reilly has their own electronic book service called Safari. Most of their own books, and those of a few affiliated publishers, can be completely read online and fully searched. It's very handy considering reference material can become outdated so quickly. So rather than spend $100 on 2 paper books you can look at 5 at a time for one year of their service. And you can change what's on your "bookshelf" every month.
They have a lot to gain by people getting used to electronic books.
Developers: We can use your help.
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/c9f39e0a8a543c694 dfe466032f26f6b/index.html
No registration required.
True, and I have spent a fair amount of money through Safari. What I like is that it lets me pick and choose what I need instead of buying an pricey book for only one chapter. The result: I get what I need, O'Reilly makes money, and the book authors make money. The best of both worlds.
Making books searchable (and buyable) will result in more money for everyone, not less. This is what Safari has shown.
As mentioned in this CNN article, "Under Google's strictures, readers can see just five pages at a time of publisher-submitted titles -- and no more than 20 percent of an entire book through multiple searches. For books in the public domain, they can read the entire book online."
They are not even making the full contents available, so refresh the page and change your IP all you want, you will never see more than 20 percent of the book.
What would seem to make more sense is for Google to only scan this 20 percent of the text that they will use and not the full text, thus relieving the publishers of their worries that Google has the full content and could inadvertently display it. But they say they need the full text to determine all the context of the work.
What would seem to make more sense is for Google to only scan this 20 percent of the text that they will use and not the full text
I was under the impression that the 20% would be determined by what portion of a book most frequently matched a given search criteria.
Alternately, they may be saying that only 20% will made available to a given IP address. If that's the case, then creative use of a few proxy servers can get you the whole book.
Of course, most books worth pirating have already been scanned and OCRed, and can be found in various file sharing networks already. The fact that the Author's Guild is going after Google for this only makes sense when you realize they want Google to pay them a licensing fee to offer this service.
Yep, they want Google top pay THEM for offering a Service that will make THEIR writers more money.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
The first is their Open Books project which includes out-dated, out-of-print, or community produced texts.
The second is their embracing of the Founder's copyright, under which they will release hundreds of books in decades to come, in collaboration with their authors.
It would be great if those books were released earlier, but at least they have taken a stance on releasing them earlier than necessary.
1. Transformative Fair Use--Taking a lot.
The first form of fair use is what Judge Laval in the 2nd Circuit referred to as transformative. In this case, you can take quite a bit from the original, but you're within the law because you transform it into something else by your labor and thought. Literary criticism is a typical example. To do good criticism, you have to discuss the plot, describe characters, and even quote the author. But you're being transformative because you are turning it into something different from the original, something with a completely different use and often something the author would never do.
Making a movie from a book isn't transformative. Movies are derivatives and the copyright holder owns derivative rights. And one factor the Courts looks at to the tell transformative from derivative is whether the new replaces the old. A book about Tolkien's characters doesn't harm an interest in reading the book and may even add to it. But watching The Lord of the Rings movies may keep someone from buying and reading the books. That makes it a dervative. Ditto with etext. Having the etext means you don't have to buy the printed book. That's why Google is being sued. Is what Google doing an etext or an index?
When I wrote Untangling Tolkien, the first and still the only book-length chronology of The Lord of the Rings, I regarded what I was doing as fair use even though my book of necessity lists in chronological order virtually everything done by every character in the tale. I argued that my thought and labor sorting out Tolkien's complicated and often hidden (in the narrative) chronology was legitimate scholarship and thus fair use. Unfortunately for me, no court has ever ruled on whether a chronology of a complex fictional work was fair use or not, but when the Tolkien estate sued me in federal court, they were forced in the end to recognize that my argument was strong enough they were likely to lose at summary judgment. So, they bailed out and the judge later tossed their case out "with prejudice." I'd taken an awful lot from Tolkien's tale, so you can see the plot in infinite detail in my book, but was safe because I'd transformed it from a story to a commentary.
2. Non-transformative Fair Use--Taking just a little.
A 9th circuit case that weighed in my defense involved a web site that indexed art and pictures on the Internet. Want a picture of a "fat horse," that site could find it for you. In that case, the webmaster was doing little to transform the original. He was simply using automated software to prowl the web and turn the large images it found into small thumbnails. If you wanted the large image, you had to go to the copyright holder through the link he provided. That's very close to what Google wants to do and, in that case, both the district and appeals court ruled what he did was legitimate fair use. (The webmaster also had an opt-out scheme like Google's.) But a major part of the court's rationale for their decision was a recognition that thumbnails are virtually useless for any purpose other than finding the original. If the website had been taking a 600x400 image and turning it into a 599x399 image, it would have been in big trouble.
Google is claiming that what they're doing is like thumnails. The excerpts are so brief, they suggest, that most users will have to track down the original to get any real value out of them. Google has good reason to want users to do that. They get a kickback when the user goes to Amazon and buys the book.
But authors and publishers can legitimately ask if Google is going to keep drawing the lines where they now draw them and if they're going to be careful to make sure some clever programmer can't come up with a way to extract the entire text. Other search engines can be manipulated just that way. I saw someone who wanted the entire text of a book even though