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Google To Resume Scanning Books
SenseOfHumor writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will resume scanning copyrighted books from Stanford and Univ of Michigan libraries. Let the battle resume!" From the article: "It isn't known just what percentage of library holdings fall into the category of being in copyright but out of print. About 18% of the books held by the libraries working with Google were printed prior to 1923 and are therefore in the public domain, according to an analysis by the Online Computer Library Center, a Dublin, Ohio, nonprofit library cooperative. An unknown percentage of the rest still are protected by copyright, depending on whether it was renewed. Google's resumption of its scanning of copyrighted works comes amid heated debate in the library community over participation in the program."
Is there some machine they have that separates all the pages and scans each one?
How do they verify that the items being scanned are being scanned properly?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
I'm not usually one to support the knee-jerk slashweenie response, that all intellectual property is theft, but I do object to commercial enterprises refusing to sell me something and insisting that I can't copy it.
It might be their intellectual property but it's my culture, dammit. If they won't keep it in print and sell me a copy, which I'm willing to pay for, then they should keep their mouths shut when I go and find one for myself.
Anybody got a DVD of Dance of the Vampires they can let me copy then?
until this is available! I can't count the number of times that I have been flipping thru a book and wished I could use the search function, only to realize that it doesn't work in meatspace. Searching is up to me, using old fashioned tools, like the table of contents or the index!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
Would Google be allowed to store scanned copies of books even if the authors opt out? Someday, those print copies are going to be destroyed or deteriorate to the point of uselessness, which means that Google could be archiving works that might otherwise be lost forever.
I still don't get the uproar over the scanning, because it's not like the entire book is made available for free. The search is so crippled that it makes me think the people who are upset have never used it before.
Goo goo g'joob.
A lot of folks are going mental about the "copyright implictions" of google books, and I'm just laughing. On my bookshelf is a first-edition colleciton of George Bernard Shaw plays, printed in the UK in 1911. There's a legend on the inside cover that is a reference to the U.S.'s lack of copyright laws at the time: (paraphrasing from memory:)
FTA: "I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at California State University, Fresno. "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue."
The sad thing is, scholarly texts are so abundant nowadays that it's neigh impossible to keep oneself current with all the new things published. Already there are magazines that only (or mostly) contain abstracts or reviews of new dissertations and articles. I fail to see how Google Print is a greater disaster than this. If anything, it'll only improve the situation.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Seriously, though, I feel like I'm missing something here. What is it?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
As a recognition of this debt to society, intellectual property that is not in the public domain should be taxed. Just as our other physical property is taxed, why not intellectual property?
And the taxes can be used to invest in new science, technology, and the arts.
This has the added benefit of also moving a bunch of stuff into the public domain.
If the taxes aren't paid within two years, then the item moves into the public domain. If you aren't sure on the status of an item, see if it has had IP taxes paid in the last two years. If not, then it's free!
Abstinence is a government conspiracy. www.SafeSexZone.co
There are actually books that do not have an index. And boy is it a pain in the ass! I can understand why. From what I've heard from authors, indexing a book is the most boring and tedious thing to do.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
1.Connect to google.
2.Download a rare book only found in a handfull of libraries.
3.Go read it....
In 75 years, give or take, the gap will close for oldest years on. But for a while the internet will not have as much on a wide array content on pre-digital topics.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It's a shame to see many libraries taking such a regressive approach to this. I happen to think libraries and access to information are the cornerstone of a free society -- they level the playing field and provide education and knowledge to people who otherwise couldn't afford it. However as a result of the digital age, our current standard of living and draconian copyright laws, the importance of libraries has diminished of late, as people turn to the web for information, buy their books at Barnes & Noble instead of borrowing them, or are merely incapable of borrowing copyrighted material because of digital or legal barriers created by content owners. What Google is doing here is progressive and in the spirit of free access to information. They're not giving away books, here. They're merely adding the ability to search for and view specific pieces of information. If anything this will only increase demand for the books they're scanning. And on top of that, it will provide access to information for a new generation who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Really now, I thought most librarians were more hip and with-it than this...
Its great that a lot of the people opting out think this will save them, when all you need to do is visit local library and get entire book to read for free. Surely this is worse?
My colleague Jamie wrote the following letter to Wired yesterday regarding Lawrence Lessig's column supporting Google Print.
I think she makes some compelling points about the problems with Google's plan...
-------------
Lessig's Tough Call
In defending Google Print ("Google's Tough Call," issue 13.11), Lawrence Lessig and others overlook one thing. If the publishers and authors have no rights to prevent this, what rights does Google have to protect its own extensive efforts in creating this database? By their own arguments, the answer must be: none. Google does not own the raw data. In almost talking point fashion, Google, Lessig and others describe this as nothing more than a "card catalog." This description could come back to haunt Google, as the only thing they own is their original presentation of the data itself. And the image of a card catalog does not bring to mind "originality."
If the Google DRM is broken and I create my own "Jamie Print" index on the web... without Google's ads... what basis would Google have to argue? Google can scan a million books and by Lessig's arguments, that investment is irrelevant. If I find a way to download those million books from Google, store the data and use my own search engine, Google's supposed benevolence in creating this project will be hard to swallow amidst a flurry of lawsuits against my superior ad-free index. Google would have little basis to sue except under the DMCA, a statute whose very existence is vilified by Lessig and the very people defending Google Print as progress (and I don't care for it either).
If Google's investment in the project cannot be protected, they may have little incentive to create this and other projects. Isn't this much the same for the publishers and authors seeking protection for the right to control their work? Lessig defends Google Print in the name of progress, but progress is a careful balance of reward and public benefit. Google might not create Google Print if it cannot profit from the ads it inserts and publishers may lose out if they cannot choose how to profit from their properties.
It is almost inevitable that Google Print will be subverted and Google will seek the very same protections that it claims the publishers should not have.
Jamie Cole
New York, NY
I currently attend the University of Michigan, and have encountered much frustration in tracking down books. The university has several libraries and finding some books is nearly impossible. Additionally, the University has old collections and manuscripts that are barely indexed in the University's system. For the purposes of research, scanning the books is a dream come true. Searching for keywords, the ability to quickly find books, and the ability to view old manuscripts that one would normally need to be present at the library (and under supervision) to view. The copyright issue is important, but the books that are in public domain (primary sources especially) should definitely be scanned. As for the copyrighted books themselves, Google does not allow the full book to be viewed. If anything, Google advertises for these books. For a student such as myself, I would not buy the book as it is, so what is the harm?
Have you ever thought about how much more effort it takes to destroy a book in comparison to the effort it takes to destroy its digital copy?
It's the same thing with all digital data: in a few centuries this era will be called the dark ages of information - most of the historical data (text, images, sound) will be lost because it was stored on media that just couldn't hack it. People are just too eager to store precious data in a digital form just because it is convenient.
The owls are not what they seem
You've got to wonder if there will be books published where the contents are designed to increase the book's Google Page Rank.
Though I personally believe what Google are doing is not ethically/morally wrong, they are most probably 'breaking' our unjust (injust?) copyright laws. The only reason they are 'getting away' with it is because they are the most powerful domain on the net. No-one dares mess with Google.
A law suit against Google is very bad publicity, and they could subtly drop your page rank and you'd never notice until the visitors stopped coming.. or even remove you completely.
What I find funniest about the entire copyright debate is how so few people are actually aware of what a flimsy basis copyright rests on.Intellectual property rights are not property, nor rights. They're grants (a decidedly un-libertarian form of state monopoly), given by the government, with the explicit intent of promoting the public good. Copyright holders are created for the good of society, not the other way around. The way I see it, once copyright starts being used to limit the creation and propagation of information and culture rather than encourage it, copyright might as well just not exist
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
The fact that out-of-print books have copyright protection is further proof that Congress is more interested in hewing to the corporate line than adhering to Constitutional principles. How does preventing any further publication of a work for nearly 100 years promote the useful arts and sciences?
I would make copyright dependent upon making the copyrighted material available for the duration of the copyright. If it falls out of publication for a year and a day, then the copyright lapses. Making the material available online would be a cheap and easy way to maintain your copyright. Those that don't like that notion are free to publish and warehouse physical copies. In order to close an obvious loophole, I would further require that the copyrighted material be available at no more than the original cost, adjusted each year for inflation.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
What you missed here is that Google intends to make a lot of money from selling ads on the pages where the search results are shown. The publishers see this as someone else taking their intellectual property and using it to make a profit, without asking their permission, and more importantly, without offering them a share of the profits. This is not about fears of people downloading books or not buying the books because they can get a 3 sentence answer from Google (anyone whose question can be answered in 3 sentences wasn't going to buy the book anyway). It's clear that even the publishers involved in the lawsuits realize that this service would result in higher booksales.
It's a question of how far fair use rights extend. Fair use does not prohibit you from making a profit from exercising your rights (the NY Times Review of Books can excerpt content in a review and profit from selling ads on that page). The publishers argue that Google's use of their material goes beyond fair use, particularly because they're copying the entire work and not just an excerpt.
It will be up to a court to weigh the many factors involved and come up with a ruling. The obvious question is, if Google loses the lawsuits, what then happens to web search engines that spider and cache copyrighted text without the author's explicit permission? Will they be held to the same standard, and will plain old Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search and their ilk become "opt in" only search engines?
This has probably been mentioned in previous articles but oh well.
Many librarians I have met (not all, or even most, but some) have this weird mentality of "I am the gatekeeper of knowledge, you must have my leave to access the wisdom of the ages." The basically believe that knowledge is so sacred (it is) that only they are fit to gaurd it and distribute it (very not true).
When I was younger (elementry school, early-mid 90s) and you needed to research something you had to goto the library (either your schools or the public one), use a computer to look up a book (if you knew what it was) or (more often) ask a librarian to help you find books that would be useful for your topic. This gave the librarians great power because it allows them to deturmine all the information you are going to be using. When you learn and retain something, it becomes a part of you, by deciding what you learn they are in essense chaning you.
Now (for me, ever since middle school), you want to know more about ancient egyptian art? Google it and find 100s of pages of information (well, realistically you will only likely use about 10 of those pages but you get the idea). Want to know more about the 2000 US election? Google it. Before, if you wanted to find out information about certain topics (primarily recent or highly specific) then you were out of luck because often the libraries didn't have it. However, with things such as google and wikipedia, you now have access to almost any information you want from anywhere you have a computer with an internet connection.
(Beware, point soon approaching. Be prepared to duck)
Taking all this into account, it is not suprising that many librarians are reacting so harshly to this. They are all for making information more accesible but not if it doesn't go through them. Its like a company with a monopoly that it has had for ages: They've become used to the power and don't want to give it up.
The world has been slowly changing. It has become more and more difficult to control information. And as the cliche goes: Knowledge is power.
Speaking is NOT communication
Mr. Gorman, who said the American Library Association doesn't have an official position on the subject, described Google's argument that Web users will be able to look at several snippets and then decide whether they want to buy or read the book as "ridiculous." Further, he noted that as a published author, he opposes Google's intention to build an enormous database that includes copyrighted texts. "It's a flaunting of my intellectual property rights," he said.
Shouldn't that be "flouting"?
Both the district and appeals courts stressed the service that Arriba was providing to everyone by linking to web sites where an artist/photographer had made his art available online. The thumbnail itself, the court noted, was of such poor quality as to be of no value, something that isn't always true of a quote. (And one of the worst ways to treat an author is to quote them out-of-context, a practice Google's scheme will encourage.) The artist/photographer had also chosen to post his work online, thus putting it on the market. The Arriba link took interested parties to a site where they could pay the artist/photographer for the rights to a usable image. Arriba was creating a win/win situation for everyone and, once the image was thumbnailed, the full version no longer existed at Arriba's web site. All those factors taken together were sufficient to make what ArribaSoft was doing legal.
But the Ariba/Google parallel only exists for books that are in print, being marketed online, and paying royalties to the copyright holder. Out of print, books that are only available used or through libraries do not parallel the AribaSoft case. What Google is much more like sending someone with a digital camera to art galleries and museums, ignoring any wishes of the artist. Owning a copy isn't owning the copyright. That's why the "approval" Google has from the libraries is so silly, as are its claims that it is simply making a 'really big' card catalog.
The reader may benefit. Google and whoever profits from Google's linking may benefit, but no royalties flow to the author due to the linking, nor has the author chosen (present tense) to place the book online or in the marketplace. He may, in fact, consider the earlier work so dreadful, he intends to use copyright laws to their full extent to keep down his embarassment. And despite the squawks of some posting here, we have no legal right to get easy access to what someone else has published. A copyright bestows the right to say, "No more copies will be published." That's why, for instance, an author can prevent anyone from making a movie derivative.
Arriba is a marvelous case for defending unauthorized linking and for indexing the web itself, as Google does. And as a Ninth Circuit appeals decision for someone living in the Ninth Circuit, it was "controlling" in my successful battle with Tolkien estate lawyers over whether my chronology of a fictional work was fair use--the law in that matter having been corrupted by some dreadful Second Circuit court actions in 1998.
But Arriba is weak precisely where Google is being challenged most strongly by authors and publishers--Google's right to scan and index the entire text of books that are in library collections but are, for the most part, are out of print. For those books, Google cannot link to a website where the purchase of the book will result in income for the copyright holder. That's the key issue. Google Print may be a winning situation for Google and readers, but the copyright holder doesn't get a cent. Indeed, the very point of Google's action is to blast ahead, not bothering to even look for authors because that would be too much trouble. Authors, on the other hand, are expected to go to the enormous trouble of tracking down every instance of the use of their material by Google and a thousand Google-clones, and opt-out of each individually.
And I might add that I say this as a "one Mac mini" author/editor/publisher who's placed virtually every
"Scanning" of old books is typically done with a camera photographing a book lying in a cradle (to not split the binding). One image is taken of each page or every two pages (the latter is faster, but has focus problems).
Once photographed, OCR software grinds away. There are errors. Some projects proof-read the errors (this is very expensive), but with Google's volume they cannot. Even when not proof-read, however, the OCR'ed text has high value in search engines.
For examples of the resulting product, see U of Michigan's Making of America or the Library of Congress American Memory.
New, in-print books can be scanned destructively. That is, saw off the binding and feed into a sheet feed scanner. This works with publishers who have extra copies they can expend.
Here's the corrected, live link: http://www.rod-neep.co.uk/books/production/scan/sc anning.htm
No, they would have to go back and find a public-domain edition that contains the story. For instance, if you search for "Moby Dick", you will see several recent editions that have the copyright restrictions on them. However, Google could find a pre-1923 edition of Moby Dick, scan it, and put the whole thing online.
I may twist orthodoxy to partly justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely.
I had this idea once that the only way I can make sure my important document withstands the test of time is to make multiple copies and distribute the copies across different locations (i.e. home, office, gf's house, etc). This is the same reason why I make multiple copies of an important document and post it in multiple locations over the internet.
Making a book available online is just about the same thing -- it only serves to preserve it, and what better way to do so other than making something like Google, with its many layers of protection against data corruption, its backup? It's the best thing to preserve your most treasured works other than spreading it via P2P.
How many times have I tried to open an old link, only to discover that it is already gone or most of the content has already changed? Well, good thing there's Google cache and the Wayback Machine as form of "backup".
Take off every 'sig'!
All your 'sig' are belong to us!
There is really no precedent for what Google is doing, so it has become a test-case for the limits of fair-use. We may all agree that it seems obvious that it is fair-use, in fact many lawyers have suggested just that, but until a court of law deems it fair-use Google will be challenged. It will probably go to the Supreme Court within a couple of years and we can only hope that the conservative justices being appointed by Bush will allow it under fair-use. Fortunately, Google has fairly deep pockets so may be able to win the case.
The owners of the copyrighted works cannot be forced into depending on the discretion of a third party to protect their works, regardless of Google's assurances, or whether the owner ever heard of the ability to opt-out or not.
Yes, owners of copyrighted works CAN be forced into depending on the discretion of a third party to protect their works. That's life. If copyright holders are really so scared of their works being copied, they can lock them all up in a vault and never sell them to anyone. Then they are really protected.
A library has a bunch of books. They protect those books. I can go to a library, steal the books, make copies, and sell the copies. This is illegal. I don't think any court would honestly hold the library responsible. In fact, I don't have to steal the books. I can borrow them, take them home, make copies and violate copyright and the library is STILL not responsible. In fact, I can use the photocopiers INSIDE the library to do my dirty work. That's life. I broke the law, the library did not.
Now I admit that the Google database is a little bit different. But as long as each copy they are making is fair use, then they are allowed to hold the database. Copyright holders can't say "but what if someone steals it and makes copies!!??" If that happens, you can sue the thief/copyright-violator, but not Google (barring any obvious negligence etc.).
Now, is it fair in the first place for Google to make those copies, and let people search (but not view) them? That's a separate issue that the courts are looking into. I personally find that it advances society without compromising the copyright-holder's monopoly. Therefore, I think it's legal. I also happen to think it's the "right" (ethical, etc.) thing to do, for society.
if Google loses control of the data that they do not own, they have very little legal basis to protect it.
Indeed, if Google loses control somehow, it will be up to the actual copyright holders to pursue legal action and so on. That's life. Libraries are not responsible (unless they willfully encourage people to break the law), and so neither should Google be responsible (unless they willfully encourage people to break the law).
It is simply greed. Limiting culture through copyright is the same thing to a society as putting a copyright on the use of the letter "E" would be to language. Language is how individuals communicate with each other. Culture (inclusive of music, literature, etc.) is how a society communicates with itself about its values, aspirations, and innovations. If you freeze culture in the straitjacket of copyright, then you necessarily freeze the ability of a society to dream, improve, and innovate.
There is a reason why the Founding Fathers fought about copyright. In a limited fashion, it could promote innovation, as creators would have the economic incentive to create. Unrestricted, it would stifle innovation as surely as unrestricted reproduction would. We now find ourselves proving out the naysayers in that original debate.
Children of the RIAA will argue that copyright has been a boon to the U.S. But if we had honored it from the first the American Industrial Revolution would have been long delayed because the engineers and entrepreneurs of the Republic would not have been able to copy British innovations. If we had honored it from the first then the evolution of an American voice in literature would have been delayed because many early novelists borrowed liberally from Imperial British sources. And, most famously of all, especially here on Slashdot, this country would not even have had a national anthem if Francis Scott Key had not lifted the melody of the Star-Spangled Banner wholesale from a British comic opera.
So consider that carefully, children of the RIAA. Much of what you associate with American strength would not now exist if you had ruled then. Many of the things, the rights, the freedoms, the material comforts, the power, and the influence would not now be yours to cast away if you sat in a council of influence then. It simply would not have come to be.
Human societies and cultures live and die on innovation, which is wholly dependant on the free flow of information.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.