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The Point of Google Print
vinohradska writes "Eric Schmidt has written a good article called the The point of Google Print. It clearly lays out the argument against the current lawsuit: 'Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages.'"
SOME use of books, particularly books in reference libraries, is PRECISELY to find quotable snippets.
The old days:
I'm making a speech and I need a nice quote.
I remember a partial quote and look it up in a quotation-reference book and while I am in the library, look up the original source material to see if there is anything more I can use. The library paid for all the resources I am using, and while I am using that particular copy nobody else can use it. If I like the book, I buy it.
The Google way:
I search for the quote, find the source with enough context to be useful, and I'm done. If I need more context, I go to the library or buy the book. FOR MANY SEARCHERS, THE PUBLISHERS RECEIVE ZERO RENUMERATION.
The Library's preferred way:
Same as Google's way except publishers get paid somehow.
The open question is this:
Just how much money, if any, will Google's way cost compared to the traditional way? Maybe it will even EARN publishers MORE money since searchers won't be "in the library" where it's easy to access a "free" copy - they may just click to theirfavoritebookstore.com or drive to their nearest bookseller.
What the publishers are afraid of:
Nominally, the publishers are afraid they will lose substatial revenue. My guess is this particular incident is pretty much a wash and not worth fighting over and most publishers secretly know it, BUT it may set precedent for things we can't yet forsee. As one of the first repliers suggested, this is all about control - who if anyone gets to set up the toll bridges.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't see the business case against opposing google print. Could the net effect be anything else but higher sales due to the amount of people who will find just the right book when searching through google?
The business case is simple:
"It's my football."
I've talked to a publisher about something similar, and his attitude was "I don't care if it will make me more money - if I want it indexed, I will do it myself, so I can charge for it. I don't want anyone but me making money by providing a service for my products, even if it's a service I can't or won't provide myself."
They don't care about more money, all they care about is control.
Google print, Amazon book search, this lawsuit and others are just small steps in the evolution of copyright into something else. I don't think we can anticipate what that will be, any more than our ancestors anticipated a day when making and distributing copies of information would be as easy as talking. In the time it's taken me to type this message I could have sent the lifetime works of Benjamin Franklin to someone on the other side of the world. Not just his published writings, but every single word he ever wrote down. It's ludicrous to think that our ancestors would have formulated copyright in the same way if they had known what we know, or that copyright shouldn't evolve like everything else.
Here's a fairly funny satire about Google Print:
http://www.vortex.com/reality/2005-10-23
It argues that you can copy anything you want-- as long as you promise to index it and put the index on the web. Then you can keep the text around and do what you will. If anyone gives you a hard time, come up with some inane opt-out policy with a real nasty bureaucracy and blame them for being uncool.
I hate to say it, but this satire convinced me that Google is pretty sleezy. The creators are getting nothing and a bunch of guys who happen to build a few automated indexers are multibillionaires. I'm happy to reward innovation, but this is nutty.
Tim O'Reilly made an excellent point in support of Google Print when he
pointed out that the biggest threat to authors is not piracy, but obscurity.
Actually you can access much more of the book that you might realize. Run a search, and then click "More results from this book," then select a page and you can view several pages. Try a new search, view more pages. They currently have several pages left out from being viewable, but I would say you can access a substantial amount of the book.
Given a person with enough time and a book worth copying, they could probably reconstruct almost the entire thing. If Google is so confident, they should offer a reward to anyone that can do it. If it can't be done, Google might have a better argument.
What?
Blockquoth the AC:
No, based on the fact that the strongest argument I've seen anyone make in this thread is some tentative claim about "fair use", a concept that is far from uniform across different jurisdictions anyway, without any legal references to back it up even in the US. The burden of proof is clearly on Google here, and even their own publicity for Google Print has steered well clear of this subject so far AFAICS.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The ABE (http://www.abebooks.com/) is a searchable inventory of a gazillion independent bookstores world wide.
If Google Print tells you the book exists, you can go to ABE and find it in some bookshop in New Zealand, and order it with your credit card. I've used ABE to buy books that are out of print on several occasions.
Now, if Google integrated their Print search with ABE, then the "buy it now" could be buying it from that rare bookseller in the middle of nowhere.
This kicks all kinds of ass.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
This rare information is all the more reason for electronic full texts. Rare stuff can be a lot easier to find electronically than via whatever method. While books can go out of print and disappear from the libraries, the file can still exist if they scanned the book.
> You fail to mention that authors, you know the ones who own the damn material, are also protesting this.
Yeah, so what?
This is about public policy and everyone should be concerned. If the only people that mattered were those that had a financial interest or acted in a works creation - well, then the tactics of the Association of American Publishers, the MPAA and the RIAA would make complete sense and we would all just shut up about it. But they are not the only people that matter because very few works are acts of such originality that they do not derive from culture as a whole - so while a brief monopoly is good in order to encourage acts of creation, most things still really belong to culture as a whole and should get tossed back into that great melting pot of ideas pretty soon. How to decide where the lines get drawn is a matter for everyone to be involved in.
Here's an example of what I mean:
Fairy tales exist. Disney thought it would be cool to make some movies based on fairy tales. The estate of Charles Perrault did not come knocking looking for a slice of the pie so Disney made his movies undisturbed because the works in question were absolutely in the public domain - which means anyone could make a derivative work with impunity. So now we have "Disney classics" like Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and so forth. Now here is the greedy bastard part: Disney wants to extend their own control over these admittedly derivative works forever if they can. That is simply unfair and untenable.
It's lucky for us that Disney does not get to decide the issue. It is unlucky for us that the likes of Disney can pay our politicians better than we can.
As far as the amazing creative act of authorship is concerned, I seem to recall a UCLA English professor who made the interesting claim that there are only 12 basic plot lines and all works are based on those 12 basic stories. Look at it another way: Shakespeare is himself considered by many to have been the best writer of his own or any other age, and yet most of his works are derivative in nature. The stories for Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet were well known before Shakespeare got to them. So that raises a question: How much of the material of the plays Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet should really be attributed to Shakespeare? He didn't really come up with the stories, he just framed the context interestingly and came up with some great and memorable dialog - a worthy accomplishment surely, but why should it be said that he owns those works per se? Would it have been fair for someone like Marlowe or Webster to come along and simultaneously come up with their own versions of Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet? Why or why not?
Originality is not all it is cracked up to be. There is nothing new under the sun.
The reason I don't feel it's wrong is because it's an "everybody wins" type of situation. We (consumers) win by getting better access to information, copyright holders (I think so, anyway) win by getting more book sales and more publicity, google wins by getting serving ads. Yes, publishers should be able to opt out. I don't see why this is such a huge deal. Holders of the copyrights in question usually hold a lot of them, right? So, a single letter to google saying "don't index anything we own" should be simple enough, easy enough, and honestly, not that big a deal. Or make it opt in, and have some intern at google call/write all the major owners of copyrights and ask.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
As much as I support the idea of indexing all books, these two arguments claimed by Eric Smith just don't hold. The problem is that there are good reasons that "fair use" differs depending on how you initially made the information available:
1. It is ok to record an entire tv program for personal use - it was broad cast to the public. However, it is not acceptable to broad cast the recorded program again, this is not for personal use.
2. While webpages are not broad cast as a tv programs they are published to be freely accessible. The web builds on linking accross pages and sites from the very birth, so it is reasonable to argue that you should have known before hand.
However, one thing is linking another is copying entire sites or pages. To provide the context in which a keyword appears in a given page, google must actually have the entire page stored. That may not constitute fair use - in particular because the copying is not for personal use but for commercial use.
For books, these are not made freely available anywhere in any form. Copying entire books for any use - even if only an extract is shown to the user - does not constitute fair use. In fact, at least in Europe, it is not considered fair use to borrow and copy a book for personal use, just as you are not allowed to copy a music cd. It is only within fair use if you restrict to copying a limited extract of the book.
Giving opt-out for tampering with others rights is never acceptable - as much as we dislike sites that require you to opt-out of their commercial e-mails - google should not require authors to opt-out. They should opt-in.
Now Googles strong arguments are the benefit for the general public, in particular for the advancement of science and education, and in particular in 3rd world countries where access to litterature is limited and expensive. And the fact that by making litterature findable, otherwise lost works that constitutes part of our cultural heritage would remain lost.
If Google can argue for the benefit of the general public at the minimal cost of the copyright holders, then Google may be able to make it through.