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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.
Books are so 20th century. It it's not made of pixels I won't look at it.
I once almost collided with Pat Schroeder crossing the street in downtown Denver. Maybe I should have (we were both on foot, btw).
I'm surprised Pat Schroeder is involved with or leading the charge in attempts to throttle Google. She offers tepid reasoning (probably not enough prep time spent with handlers) (from the article) :
She's right! This does go far beyond creating a digital version of a card catalog! Google's super-sized revved up digital card catalog qualifies as a godsend to the publishing industry.
The ability to do Google indexed book searches will spur reading, and sales, not muffle it. How many slashdot readers have been thankful for the Amazon.com feature of letting you peek inside their books? Many times this has been the feature giving me the final nudge to buy (though there also have been times where that nudged me the other direction).
When people start "discovering" books with Google's book searches, the very worst thing that would happen would be that people would be briefly exposed to books they otherwise might not have. But for "searchers" who find an interesting book, they won't be ripping the publishers off by printing (stealing) or downloading (stealing) these books, since Google isn't offering that as an option.
And assuming for the moment some figure out how to download a copy, they're left with a book on their computer... not convenient to read (e-books, still on respirator), and way too expensive to print (and aesthetically "not a book").
So, the most likely result would be a library visit, or purchase.
Come on Pat!, think again.
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."
I guess we'll all have to memorize our favorite book.
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.
Books are a bit like software, and the try before you buy model works well. I have a hard time imagining most people deciding to read the entirety of a long book on their computer, even if it's available for free. I can imagine quite a few people looking at a new book online and using that as the basis for choosing to buy the book if they're going to read it though.
Fortunately, at least a few companies display a bit of understanding. The people initiating these lawsuits should read the introduction Here, and then check Baen's profits, and note that they're still in business and doing reasonably well, thank you very much.
Of course, everybody else should go there simply to check out some books for free, and (perhaps) to support Baen Books for being decent people and doing good things.
--
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
These associations of book publishers should be careful with what they do, or they could quickly find themselves in the position of the RIAA and MPAA amongst far more people than just geeks. I'd wager every single person I know has been to our city's library system at least once in their lifetime. (Columbus, OH) And I'd also be willing to bet that should the courts be stupid enough to allow this to spill over eventually to the library's that there would be a lot of people pissed that they might cripple our city's library system which happens to be the best one in the nation because there are about 30+ library's "linked together" across the city. In other words, I can go to my local library building (or even online: http://www.cml.lib.oh.us/) and reserve just about any DVD, CD, book, or magazine that I could ever want. It's like a physical version of Kazaa, eDonkey, or any other P2P system, except all the content IS stored on the central "server". (The library drives trucks of books around all over the city, transporting them from one location to another based on patron requests)
So, how is Google any different, except that it's potentially more massive, EVEN faster than the library system I'm used to, and available to even more people?? It's just an extension of the concept that's been around in my city in "snail-mail" form for quite a while now. Keep it up and they're liable to piss off a vast majority of the population of the US if the laws about copyrights keep getting extended further and further away from the original intent of copyright law.
No, this isn't my most well-though-out post ever, but I wanted to highlight this facet of the debate over Google's LIbrary Project.
I work with one of those academic library institutions.
This is more like an effort by the libraries, and Google is basically under contract to do the heavy lifting of scanning and technology, because they're good at such grand data projects. Traditional libraries simply aren't scaled and don't have the budgets to do it all by themselves. There's major cost savings in consolidation and expense-sharing. Why scan 7 times when you can scan once?
It seems like the publishers are really aiming for a for-fee privatized electronic library system, cutting out traditional non-profit libraries.
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.
As an author, I couldn't agree more.
Most people want to curl up with a good book and read in comfort, lying in bed, on their couch, in their recliner (cracking fire and comfortable cup of tea/coffee/hot chocolate optional). A few folks don't mind sitting in front of a computer to read, but the rest of us like good old fashioned, physical books in our hands, and what Google is doing is not only NOT a threat to the sale of traditional bound books, it is a boon.
What it isn't a boon for is old guard publishers having a stranglehold on exposure anymore, meaning that self-published, POD, and other less traditional forms of publishing gain more leverage in attracting interested eyes, without having to somehow get ahold of that coveted shelf space in a brick-and-mortor store.
Not that I don't covet that for my novel (I do), but the more accessible the information is to those looking for it, the more people will buy the physical version of the book.
The AAR has its head up its ass, and win-or-lose on this particular lawsuit, they and their constituents are going to lose bigtime if they don't update their mentality to fit with the technological reality of today, and begin exploiting the opportunities it offers.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The substance of what you said has an implied presumption that when something is coppied, distributed, or even sold without the creators permission, then the creator/publishor is in some way violated. While I understand that's the theory, and we have all been spoonfeed that that is an "intellectual property" right, the reality is quite different.
While protected rights, naturally lead to incentives - protected incentives do not naturally lead to rights. Perhaps somebody feels violated when you freely copy, then again perhaps plantation masters feel violated if you steal, oops I mean free, slaves from the plantation. That is what I mean. Property and incentive are not an ends in themselves, to be just they need to derive from the real world - like the fact that not everybody can use the same resources at the same time, but with information they can!
Copyrights are particualrly evil because they have the effect of stealing away our culture and giving it to hollywood. They also have an effect, that to secure them, you need to microregulate the internet and everybody that uses it. They have an effect that leads to anti-trust behavior in large software companies, and tend to make the information itself more valuable then the people who provide the services. The cost of having them in the information age is simply too high and they can not survive the information age any more than micro-controll of the labor market (slavery) could survive the industrial revolution.
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
I drink to prepare for a fight; tonight I'm very prepared. -Soda Popinksi
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...
Surprised this wasn't in the article but you can read Google's response from Eric Schmidt here.
Free scan, free search, free marketing. Of course the book publishers would be against it. It might mess up their carefully constructed marketing plans by creating a demand they were previously unaware of
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.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Inventors get seventeen years (actually it varies) of protection. Is there a reason that authors need "lifetime plus 75 years"? I have only the greatest respect for authors (with some exceptions...) but I think the transistor, antibiotics, and the airplane have more of an impact on my life than Gore Vidal and Dave Barry.
Many of the works that are currently on the shelves will NEVER go into the public domain. And there is one thing authors need more than anything else--people that love reading. A large free corpus is a good way to build that.