Second Google Suit Over Print Library Project

linumax writes "The Association of American Publishers, an organization of book publishers including Pearson Plc's Penguin unit and McGraw-Hill sued Google over its plan to create a digital Web library of printed books. The Association of American Publishers sued Wednesday after talks broke down with Google over copyright issues raised by the Google Print Library Project. Publishers say Google will infringe copyrights unless it gets advance permission for the scanning. The suit is the second by the publishing industry against Google's library plans and underscores the worries sparked by Google's expansion beyond Web search." From the article: "Google, which is working with five of the world's great libraries (Stanford, Harvard and Michigan university libraries, the New York Public Library and the Bodleian library in Oxford) to digitise their collections, stopped scanning copyrighted books in August after protests from publishers. However, it intends to resume its work next month."

Comments

Re:Won't matter for long

[MaestroSartori]

We are mere months (maybe a year) away from the ability to completely scan any book and convert it accurately to text based PDF in under an hour. It will likely be F/OSS software that does it, released ostensibly to save old books in the public domain.

When this happens, books will end up on P2P just like movies, music, porn, and images. Just as P2P helps people find interesting musicians and performers, it will help people find interesting writers and authors.

We're already practically there. Books already appear on P2P just like all of everything else. I downloaded a book just this weekend in fact, completely infringing the copyright in the process. I don't feel a shred of guilt, however, because I can't buy the book I want here yet (hardback only, paperback release date seems to vary between some time next month up to a year away). It's the 11th book in a series, I have 1-10 sitting on the shelf, but I'm not gonna buy a completely oversized hardback to continue the series.

So yeah, I'm guilty as sin. But who am I really hurting, since I have the cash in my pocket and am willing to exchange it for something that just doesn't exist yet? And which I 100% guaranteed *will* buy when it does?

High and mighty

[ifelse]

It's interesting to note that authors don't really have any say in this affair even when they're in favour of Google Print.

Re:How is this different from a library?

[GreenPhreak]

What no one seems to understand here is that just because Google is scanning all of these books, the end-user can NOT see all of the text of a given book. Unlike the online information that Google indexs, where one can search and then connect to the full webpage of any search hits, the library project will only make available the search quotation and the sentence or so around it for context.

For example, if I were to look up: "JubJub Bird", it would return something like this:

-----------
Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll (from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch!"
-----------

Now is this giving away the entire contents of this copyrighted work? No. It is merely giving the searcher a hint of where to look for more information. In order to give away all of the information in a copyrighted text, one would have to know exactly what to search in sentence after sentence of that text. So it really isn't giving away anything. It most assuredly isn't giving away more information that Amazon.com does when you can open up the book and look at a few sample pages.

In the same way that Google offers a searchable catalog of online web information, it will now offer a super-catalog search for library contents. I, for one, think that this will be an invaluable resource for anyone who does academic research, or a person who merely wants to know all of the references on a particular subject and relevant resources. Have some forsight, publishers of the world! This will only increase your profits when people purchase relevant texts to their interests.

                                                                              greenphreak

Re:Celsius 232.78

[ke4roh]

ROTFL! For those who didn't get it 232.78*9/5+32=451, the kindling temperature of paper in Fahrenheit, and that leads us to a popular Ray Bradbury novel about a society that burns all the books - wheren the citizens (who care about knowledge) must preserve the knowledge by memorizing their favorite books. The title: Fahrenheit 451. If you haven't already, read it now.

Google's Response

[nmec]

Surprised this wasn't in the article but you can read Google's response from Eric Schmidt here.

Speaking of twaddle....

[cpt kangarooski]

You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen."

Yes. But so what? The goals of society are to both encourage the creation of works and to have those works be in the public domain. While we can cause a lot of creation to occur by slightly delaying entrance into the public domain, and only granting a modicum of protection even during that initial period, there does come a point of diminishing returns. In fact, we eventually reach a point where granting more protection reduces the amount of creation.

So there will always be unprotected authors, because some works just aren't worth protecting to the extent that it would take to cause them to be created.

Furthermore, we should be responsible with copyright policy. We should provide no more incentive than the minimum amount necessary to get the maximum amount of net public benefit (i.e. the benefit of creation minus the harm caused by their not being in the public domain). To provide more of an incentive would be wasteful.

Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid.

Failure to give artists an economic incentive to create works is hardly comparable to forcing them to create. If artists aren't incentivized, they can be accountants or something. There's no one cracking a whip over them, so please stop with your useless hyperbole.

It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.

It's not theft, and neither is evil. Copyright is utilitarian and essentially amoral.

Although if there were a moral component, it'd be in favor of pirates, who spread and enjoy knowledge and help ensure that works will survive, as opposed to authors, who act as gatekeepers.