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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.'"
This is about control. I guess I didn't notice the corporate copyright lawyer trawling the library taking photographs of the card catalog, which is an index of books in the library's holdings. Of course our library doesn't *have* a card catalog any more; it has an online search utility. Funny that didn't get mentioned in the lawsuit.
Who cares if Google has copied every book ever printed. As long as the copyrights of the author and publisher are honored (they don't give copies away for free), the who cares? If I took every book off the shelf from my library, copied them, and then took the copies home and stuffed them in my garage, who would care? That constitutes 'fair use'. But if I start making more copies and giving them away, or give my copy away, now I should be held to account.
The publishers are just ticked because they see themselves losing control over content. Meet the new RIAA.
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.
Is Schmidt the only one who gets the webpage angle? I would beat the publishers over the head with this one. What do you want to bet that they all have copyrighted webpages indexed on Google. Did they ever protest this fact?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Aside from law issues, 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 only reason I could see is strategy: the publishers are afraid that google print could be _so_ successful that it gains power against them, ultimately maybe even replace them and directly connect authors and publishers and providing a print-on-demand service. A situation not unlike Apple vs. The Record Companies.
Fleur de Sel
even used google print? You can barely see any of the book, just the "about" page in the beginning. This service is used to DISCOVER books. If millions of people can search and find the book they have been looking for, and they happen to buy it off of amazon let's say, why in hell would they sue Google. THIS WILL ONLY HELP PUBLISHING COMPANIES SELL MORE BOOKS.
public class null extends java applet { System.out.print ("Tabula Rasa"); }
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.
This case will never make it to trial.
I assume that you know that attourneys & the courts serve only the wealthy & connected few. They exist to keep the rest of us down. If I were writing the search engine, it would have been taken down by DMCA notices day one. Only a rich company like Google can compete against a rich company like Perfect 10.
Trial by pocketbook, togeather with the trampling of the Bill of Rights, makes our "government" illegal. Some of us have known this for quite some time, and have been preparing for the revolution for years. The rest of you have either caught on, or are too stupid to deserve to live.
The revolution is coming in the next year. It will be a pleasure to hunt down the attourneys, hiding in basements, and exterminate them.
Andy Out!
His fair use argument will be very difficult to make indeed if he's making money off it -- and that can be interpreted VERY broadly. Is his plan pure altruism, or is he using the content as a traffic magnet, for ad sales, etcetera?
and the summary's VCR analogy? Lame. Home VCRs are personal use, which this isn't, and not for financial gain, which this is.
Schmidt is just trying to win in the court of public opinion a battle that can't be won in the courts, and hoping publishers will go along before he gets to the litigation stage.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
If I buy a new gadget and discover that it fails to meet my needs or expectations, I can return it, not so with books movies or music, If I cant return something, then you better beleave that I am going to be damn sure that I know what I am getting when I purtchase it.
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.
So suppose it's a close call, because there is no precedent in copyright law that exactly anticipates this sort of search capacity. One option for a judge would be to try to bend some precedent to fit the case, but I think that would be wrong to do here. You see, nobody thinks that copyright law is supposed to mirror anything like moral law. This isn't like murder or perjury. Copyright laws exist only for the purpose of their good consequences. We allow people to own copyrights and patents only to encourage them to produce good stuff by making sure they will be financially rewarded for that stuff. The good consequence of this system is (supposed to be) that it provides us with more good stuff. That is its only justification.
Because of this, I think decisions about copyright should not take the original laws as sacred, on the level of moral laws, and instead maintain the pragmatic spirit of the original laws themselves. When we're unsure about precedents, we should ask: Which ruling would have the better consequences? And I think it's clear for reasons outlined by Schmidt that allowing Google to go on will have better consequences for researchers (obviously), but also for publishers, because it's free advertising. This will disproportionately benefit small, specialty presses who don't have the means to get the word out about what's in their books. This should be reason enough to allow Google to continue.
Of course, they might turn evil at some later time, or (gasp) unveil a revenue model to make back all the money they spent on scanning. But this is the sort of this that companies should be encouraged to do for money. They really are improving the lives of people through their work, without taking anything away.
Yes they did, when the library bought the book, as did the author.
True, but that's one copy for every county in every state of the United States that wants to grant its residents access to the book. Google Print, on the other hand, obtains only one copy and uses it worldwide.
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.
http://www.copyright.gov/records/
What?
That may be one of their fears, that their marketing will become less valuable when people can search for themselves to find books that interest them, but I would say that would be an unreasonable fear. Consumers often enough become interested in new books because of the promotion, and not because they already cared enough about the subject matter to actively search for it. Else they'd just browse shelves (or online categories).
The indexing, then, would be most useful to people who are actively searching for particular information that may not be captured in titles, reviews, or descriptions, meeting a need that isn't currently met by publishers' marketing. So it seems to me this project should augment rather than replace that marketing. One allows people to find what they're already looking for while the other introduces it to people who wouldn't have been looking for it otherwise.
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
If I write a book and tell Amazon they can't sell it, they can't.
Hold on. You think if you write a book and get it printed, you decide who can and can't sell it? Since when? Ok, maybe you have control over who gets the books straight out of the printing house, but once they hit the secondhand market, you really think you can say "Nope, sorry, you can't sell my book."? Maybe amazon will humour you and honour it, but I seriuosly doubt they have to.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
I'm not saying Google Library is fair use, the only way we'll know for sure is when the courts rule on it. There is a precedent for fair use where a search engine copied the full work in order to substantially less than the full work to be delivered to the user of the search engine. But if it is fair use, then Google doesn't need to ask permission, and if they're using an opt-out system, it's only for PR reasons. Eric Schmidt's article is not a legal defense, but it's a PR piece to try to explain how the Google Library project works, and why it's good for the public at large.
IANAL, but I don't think copyright works the way you claim. For example, I think you're confusing the right to choose who publishes your work with the right to choose who sells copies of the published work. The owner of a copy of a book does not need permission to resell it. Since taping a TV program for personal use and rewatching it at home has been classified as fair use, you don't need permission from the copyright owner to do it.
There are 4 points that the court uses to determine fair use. One is the extent of the copying, another is the nature of the use, and another is the effect of the use on the marketability of the work. So, even though Google is copying the entire work, the other points, like the fact that returning 2-3 line snippets for copyrighted works will not adversely affect the markets for the works, may be the more important points for the court.
The Google Library lawsuits are really about 3 things. On the face of it, it is to determine if it is about whether this is a form of fair use. But it's also about the copyright holders (Author's Guild lawsuit) trying to get a cut of the ad revenue on the Google Print search results page, and it's about the publishers suing to make sure that Google Print doesn't somehow turn into something some sort of on-line viewing system or on-demand printing system that makes the publishers obsolete.
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.