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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."
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.
No one can stop it. The big delay was caused by lack of available hardware to handle the intensive scanning and converting. We've seen software that can use a webcam or cellcam to scan documents quickly. This is processor performance driven. PCs aren't getting slower.
5 huge libraries and a multibillion dollar corporation can not compete with hundreds of millions of end users volunteering a few hours a year to copy their favorite books. The entire published collection of books for the last hundred years could be online by 2007.
Google should be embraced by publishers, not sued. Google could track interest, topically sort similar novel(list)s, and provide a great research tool and froogle-to-buy source.
If the RIAA had iTunes before Napster, who knows where we'd be. If the MPAA embraced e-distribution at a reasonable price and quality, the same is true.
People don't become pirates for financial reasons of theft, but of supply and demand. Hundreds of millions of BT users would rather pay $1 than waste hundreds of hours on low quality, low speed, high risk piracy.
...They're hitting walls that they don't (for)see. Between this and the multitude of other legal issues that have arisen like the "name copyright" issue in the UK and the similar problem in Germany that forces them to call it Googlemail, I have begun to wonder how many more sectors/markets Google can possibly penetrate before hitting a legal or societal brick wall. They might do something that deems them as a "big business" or "monopoly" with all of the associated negative connotations. They've already infringed a little on privacy recently with their policy on using users' data. It will be interesting to see how far Google gets.
I hope Google wins this one, and wins it big. I'm tired of living in the 19th century, and being told I should remain there by people who consider an electric typewriter to be too advanced for their use. Google believes they are within the current copyright laws, and they have more expensive lawyers than I do.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They are carrying out the greatest copyright violation in the history of...well...all of history. What possible argument can they have in their favor? I can't even see where they'd start such an argument and I can hardly imagine a more clear cut case against them. Copying entire books wholesale can hardly be called "fair use" and they're using the copyrighted text to drive up hits on their ads. I think print.google.com is a great tool, I've just printed out a few useful pages from a book with it myself, but I don't think they have a legal leg to stand on. If I did the same as them as an individual I'd be considered a copyright thief.
Penguin have a good reputation in the UK. However, I found out that they actually use every legal means to protect IP as their own, even when legally that IP is legally in the Public Domain.
Case in point - Beatrix Potter - the cute bunny children's stories - Penguin owns the company that publishes Beatrix Potter books.
Nearly all of these stories are in the public domain, and even a lot of the artwork. However, you try to publish any of it... They have trademarks on all the character names and images, so although the copyright is public domain, the character names count and images count as trademarks of the company so you can't use them.
Doesn't seem right to me that a company should be able to prevent public domain works being published because they have trademarked the character names...
As a published author without a novel, I'm in a "unique" situation. I've been shopping out my completed novel for 2 months now with 2 publishers interested. I'll likely lose both opportunities as both offered decent advances for "first publish rights" but I want to release the novel freely on P2P and ebook sites.
I'm offering to negotiate zero advance for a higher percentage (2.5% more) and control over online first publishing. My published friends and editors I know said its suicide. Yet I know the novel has worth, and i know free licensing of its digital form would triple sales.
... could it spell the end of search engines?
If Google loses these lawsuits, can I then sue Google for caching [and copying] my website without my permission?
If not, what is the difference? Whether I create my copyrighted work in physical book form, or in digital web form, it's still copyrighted. What is the difference?
The logic Google is following for Google Print appears to be established reasons why a search engine can scan, cache and allow people to search websites.
Now, I believe Google is in the right, however if they told they are wrong it could open the pandora's box and thus increase lawsuits from greedy people....
-Z
Excellent rationalization. This is a nice murky gray area for you to have a swim in. Funny how copyright law never mentions 'the look of the bookshelf' as a valid reason for ignoring its provisions. Just admit you've done something wrong, and forget trying to make your greed into some sort of heroic stance against 'the man' for not producing the format you want yet.
I don't grudge anyone piracy - everyone is a thief at heart, especially when they can get away with it easily. Greed is just a fact. What I can't stand is the constant need to have this illicit behavior validated by others of questionable moral character.
Go ahead and mod me down - it doesn't make me wrong, just unpopular.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Like it or not, Google *is* violating their copyrights.
Is it? The argument that this is fair use is an interesting one, and might just succeed.
If it doesn't, we can kiss goodbye to Internet search engines, because I see no difference at all, at least from a legal standpoint, between what they are doing with books and what they have been doing with web sites all along.
Here is a possible sequence of events that I can forsee:
1. Google indexes all the books in the world.
2. People are able to find these books online.
3. Authors begin to give the rights to distribute their works through google, google takes a cut of each purchase. (this will probably yeild a better deal for the authours given the enourmous market and subsequently small profit margin per sale that google can get away with)
4. Publishers no longer are needed.
Granted, this process could take many years.
I think that bringing these lawsuits up against google may be the only way to keep publishers running.