Slashdot Mirror
Reining in Google
CDPatten writes "The Washington Times has an op-ed piece by two writers typically
on opposing sides of the isle, Pat Schroeder and Bob Barr. The article is
brief, but overwhelmingly opposes the Google
Print service. From the article 'Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright
law, it is also crushing creativity ...Google envisions a world in which all content is
free; and of course, it controls the portal through which Internet user's access
that content. It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively
increase the value of its own.'. It sounds to me like they might
be slightly peeved that Google is resuming the scanning.
I don't see any difference between what Google are doing here and what they do to index web sites.
The roam the web - they take local copies of every web page - they index those pages - then they display a 'snippet' of the page in response to a search query.
Same deal with the books. Scan them into a private archive, index the archive - display the title and a sentence or two of content to provide context. I see no problem with that.
What is problematic (both with the Web indexing and Book indexing) is the Google 'cache' - where you can get the content of the web page from Googles cache if the original web page is missing or slow. That is (in my opinion) a breach of the Web page owner's copyright - and would be a breech of the book's copyright too.
However, the indexing service that Google (and others) provide for the Web is the only thing that makes the Internet useful. Doing that for books would be of HUGE benefit to mankind and absolutely must be allowed - even if copyright law has to be changed to make it happen.
Let's think carefully about the 'Google cache' thing though - that's dubious because it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. That's the thing that deprives the author of value. Indexing actually increases the value of a work because it allows people to find it - and therefore increases the pool of potential purchasers by an enormous factor.
Google indexing should be the savior of printed media and authors should support it.
Google caching is morally dubious.
www.sjbaker.org
...or are they demonizing Google slowly into what Microsoft is today?
Wait a minute. Are these guys saying that Google is some sort... BUSINESS?! Good god!
Who gives a fuck what they say?
This is bullshit. Google may want everything to be digital -- but not neccessarily free. And even if we were to accept that thesis, we might be wrong. This is exactly why copyright laws and lawsuits (re: Napster) discourage innovation: because we don't know what Google is planning until we allow them to launch it. Actually, we have, and I see nothing wrong with it.
The key question will be: Is it for 'commercial use'? Or is it sufficiently 'transformative' (creative) to overcome that objection?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
1. The Washington Times != The Washington Post. One is a bastion of DC journalism. The other is only slightly better than a tabloid.
2. Let Google scan. Let me search. Only by having Google's (or someone's) index available will I be able to easily find a book I never knew existed. The Dewey Decimal System's got nothing on full text indexing.
While I can enjoy the NY times quite comfortably from my Tablet PC, I think I'm in the minority. A lot of people still will want their paper with their coffee and bagel, and just can't stand reading *anything* on the computer. My friend will print off even a 1 page article, instead of just reading it on the desktop. I think libraries should be a bit more concerned. I think they're going to drop off face of the earth this century!
~jennifer.k~
Who wants to start posting Barr and Schroeder's voting records?
Or does their objection to doing it "unilaterally" merely mean "our old colleages aren't getting their cut"?
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
While I'm not sure how I feel about whether or not it's fair use (I think that Google's activity may enable fair use, but not be fair use in itself), it certainly has the potential to be a disruptive technology in terms of research.
People tend to be afraid of disruption. It's natural. Google's got the pockets to deal with the repercussions, so I'm happy to let it play itself out, even if they get spanked with a billion dollar judgement against them.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I think copyright law needs to be changed anyway. Things are getting ridiculous. Perhaps not eliminate copyright altogether but put a single term limit on copyright of any work, 15 or 20 years and once that term is up, the work becomes public domain. I am 100% for google's scanning project. Go Google!
Either what Google is doing is allowed by copyright law, or it's not. The courts will decide, the losers will appeal, and eventually we will have a final ruling. Personally, I think a searchable index might just boost sales of lesser known books (considering that the mainstream bookstores only carry the most "popular" books and if you're not carried by the Barnes & Nobles, et al, you don't have much chance to become known to most of the population).
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission.
It seems obvious that he sees "fair use" as something to be dismissed (as he does in the next paragraph).
I'm unclear as to why he doesn't have problem with book reviews (which often display portions of a book) or student's book reports. The courts have decided that copyright material can be presented without permission for a number of uses. While this seems completely reasonable to me, I suspect the courts get to decide this one.
EFF has an interesting analysis on this as well.
typically on opposing sides of the [sic] isle
Rest assured they are both on the same side of the "isle", the one with a tropical island nest paid for by Thurston Howell III, er, the book publishers.
Bob Barr no doubt made plenty of friends in publishing when he recently wrote a book. Book royalties are a convenient way of laundering money bound for politicians (Newt Gingrich, Hillary Clinton, etc.) since they are ostensibly for something the person did rather than being outright contributions.
This controversy seems no different than the one about SBC's pipes, it's basically people griping that they want more money off someone else's hard work. Let's hope that the courts believe that indexing a book and putting that index online with small excerpts is fair use.
I think downloading a new graphic during the holidays is a small price to pay to be able to search through all of mans literature with a single click. And if Google does charge a price (you mean they want to make money?) and we think it's unfair, competition will arrive to balance it out. It's not like once google absorbs all the info that our libraries worldwide will explode and google will have a complete monopoly on information.
If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more.
Do publishers and authors currently spend time policing libraries, making sure no one is making 10 cent copies of their work?
*DrugCheese rants*
I love it when they intentionally steer away from the whole idea of indexing books. Why am I not surprised?
For those who may not be aware, their objective is not to have the entire book available on the internet because it won't be or shouldn't be. They'll have enough of the book (whatever that is) to help you find the name/author/etc of the book then tell you where to find the book. (Amazon, library)
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
So instead of walking to the library to see the book I can walk to my computer. Oh yes, Google is eeeeevil. Burn them!
I hear there are places where there are shelves after shelves of books, conveniently organized for quick reference, all at the disposal of the public, free of charge. What's more, these places, sometimes called "libraries", will even let you photocopy any of the material you find there for only the cost of the copy machine! Just imagine how much creativity is being stifled by these rackets! If we hope to save our society from the menace of intellectual property theft, we should be shutting them down, and not allowing Google start doing the same!
Join Tor today!
At least the article used the word 'aisle' correctly.
If Google crushes copyright law, and in that proces makes all content free, than the value of all other content will go down, but the value of Google will not go up. With a sufficiently crushed copyright law under which you can copy everything (to a certain extent), nothing will stop another company (lets say Yahoo, or Microsoft) to do the same, and have the same information available, maybe even by copying it from Google.
It just sounds to me that they are afraid of change. Creativity does not by definition depend on money. Why would there be thousands of art blogs, musicians, and writers who just publish it all for free. Some of them are really good, or even mainstream and could sell, but the commercial copyright industry just has no interest since they already have a few others, and profit margins would just go down when you add one more.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
I always think it's interesting that people state this sort of opinion without actually providing any evidence that this kind of move by Google actually reduces creativity. Sure, their model for the way things are produced predicts this, but why is their model valid? What about a model where one posits that having all (or even just more) information freely available for anyone's use actually increases the overall creative output of society because creators have more raw material to work with? Though I present no evidence for this either, it's easy to conceive that this could be valid as well.
As opposed to what lobbyists have done, rewriting copyright laws (extending them infinitely) and crushing creativity (you so much as write something similar to us and we release the lawyers)?
We can only hope, for the good of all society, that this day comes soon.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
...things have quite reached the point where Google has taken over from Microsoft as the source of all evil. It is much more that Google is now beginning to play the Anti-Christ to Microsoft's Lucifer in their quest to turn the internet and the entire computer using world in general into a cororate purgatory. Anybody who says anything nice about either of them will, of course, immediately be modded down to -1 flamebait and promoted to the exulted status of a 'false prophet'.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
You mean one is at Lands End and the other is at John O'Groats?
I am sure many will ask what the difference between books and sites is. And since we all like google scanning out sites, why should we oppose book scanning? ;))
Well, for several reasons:
1. It is WE who like our sites scanned, and if not, we add a Robots.txt file. We can protect some of the content on our site, or all. and we easily know if its being spidered, so we can take action. How will that be with books? Robots.txt is not probably. You know what? if anything, it already exists in a way. All (most) books say have on them, in print, right in the beginning a text saying "copying of material from this book is not allowed unless permitted, prior, in writing, by the author or the publisher". I think that resembles a robots.txt file. no? And authors have little ability to "check the web logs" and see who scans their books.
2. We get something directly from it. Fair use dictates that google links to our sites directly. How will that be with books? You have to go to the shop to at least consider buying the book? Not likely. They can send traffic to Amazon maybe? But still, not a parallel (and if they do, I am sure they will collect referral fee
3. Our sites operate in the internet. Books "operate" in libraries, stores. You go to a library? you can search there for a book. On the internet, you can search for sites. Not only that, but internet has shaped to be mostly a free and open medium. Books - not. Books, you have to buy, or at least subscribe to a library (paid, directly or indirectly). Different "market".
4. Most of our sites are free, and are freely accessed. Most of the sites in google are such sites. As a matter of fact, subscribed sites where their content is protected and paid for (as books are) do NOT have their content on google. And IF they have, THEY take the steps to get it into google. Books are in a sense like protected/paid sites.
A world of difference that is going to be erased very abruptly by google..
Good or bad? You decide (and also authors, publications and libraries which seems to have decided already)
"From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen" - Cat Stevens
I'm sure the authors of the article would rather all these books remain obscured to all but those capable and inclined to visit these libraries. I really don't see who's getting screwed here. Except those who benefit from hording information. If it's legal, who cares. Google's always been good to us. I haven't heard anything about Google changing any laws, so I don't know what "unilaterally changing copyright law" is supposed to mean. I'm tired of this "crushing creativity" argument. I'm certain that if for some reason no one on Earth was paid for creating anything that all creation would not stop.
I see someone modded you -1, Troll, but I have to agree with you. The Washington Times is a right-wing tabloid owned by the Unification Church. It is like Fix News, but less respectable. Why anyone here would take them seriously is beyond me.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
Why should Google be allowed to use content of any kind - be it websites or books - for free? For the benefit of mankind - yeah, right. If they want to benefit mankind they should change their website to Google.org, stop selling advertising on other people's copyrighted content and open up their databases to anyone without restriction.
Within a few years (if it has not happened already) Google's advertising revenue will dwarf all domestic newspaper ad revenues. Is this unchecked growth a good thing?
Good grief. Google's not making the works available. They're just making them searchable. The TV taping isn't a good analogy from either viewpoint as the television show will be watched in whole. What Google makes available would be akin to watching a one minute clip of the television show.
I was going to argue against it stifling creativity, but I guess paranoia would keep you from writing new works as it's hard to type while running from imaginary enemies.
The article claims Google has not defined what a "snippet" is. They go on to ask if it's a paragraph, a page or even a chapter..... This is willful ignorance as Google has provided examples of what a snippet will look like. Best to ignore what's out there so we can create the monster to look the way we want it to.....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I read this as Re-Ining in Google, and couldn't figure out what Ining was or why it'd need to be done over again. I think it's time for some coffee, and what better time than the fire drill that's set to happen in five minutes. Mmm, caffeine. Perhaps Ining has something to do with caffeination. If not, it should.
"The creators and owners of these copyrighted works will not be compensated, nor has Google defined what a "snippet" is: a paragraph? A page? A chapter? A whole book?
.. on this, we can both agree: These lawsuits are needed to halt theft of intellectual property. To see it any other way is intellectually dishonest.
This is the better point of the article: who said that Google gets to decide what's fair use? It can't just be Google's say so, court decisions aside. Nor just the balance of opinion on the web.
I admire Google's robust approach to copyright - that it's better to try things first, find out if you're right second. It's a very cool company. But it's not elected and it is straying into the area of other people's copyrights... be it for good reason, or otherwise.
This is the more unsettling point in the article. In the same vein: why do Schroeder and Barr get to decide what is fair use? To point out the problem, reasonably, is something the article does very well until right near the end. These last few paragraphs stray unsettlingly into RIAA languge, be it intentionally or otherwise.
Libraries didn't make books and newspapers go away, did they? I can go into my local library and read the newspaper! FOR FREE! It's COMMUNISM! OHNOES!
This debate happened a long time ago. The benefits to society from an educated populace with easy access to information vastly outweighs any harm that might come from shared access to the information to the producers.
I'm suprised more of the public does not push for this; indeed, a digital library would be a great boon in many ways. Printed media is not going anywhere, and when people are given a reasonable choice, they will pay for a service to save effort infringing someone's copyright. See, iTunes et al.
Go google!
..don't panic
I do believe in Copyrights (that alone may get this modded down to -255). However, if google lives up to the claim they will only provide snippets, how is that different than what any web site, quoting an author does. Is this web site in violation Dilbert -why you are wrong by quoting from Dilbert? It appears fair use to me.
Where google may have issues, is if anyone figures out a way to reconstruct a book in total. They would give people like this a lot of ammunition against them. Of course, the library does not prevent me from scanning a book if I take it home, but that is something that will be missed in the hype around it. I am not sure how they could prevent this, but these are some pretty smart guys.
In this case, the authors sound more like they want a cut of the click through, regardless of sales. What may be interesting in the end is book sellers would be the most likely to advertise on Google Print. A "click here to buy this book" type of link.
I seriously don't understand what all the fuss is about. All that is happening is the creation of an index, a list of words associated with pointers to the words put into context. It is not like you can realistically download the entire book, and I sincerely believe the small numbers of people who will go through the book and download each image will be far smaller than the number of people who will buy the book. These people who are making so much noise would be better off spending their time making more of their content available digitally.
The world is not coming to an end, just changing.
--
Eric Lease Morgan, Librarian
University Libraries of Notre Dame
And so we find ourselves joining together to fight a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit and in turn denying publishers and authors the rights granted to them by the U.S. Constitution.
It sucks when another company comes along and try and change the rules. It's ok when you do it though huh?
Let's see as I understand it. You look for certain phrases through searching books scanned in on google. It finds those books and displays a page or so of the text (probably less). So you know what you searching for is actually found. Then you can if you want, now see if you can keep up, buy the book.
Wow the authors and publishers really loose out. I see what they mean. Why would you want to sell more books? Google must be stopped!
Didn't amazon do something like this already? Well at least a few pages of the book.
So if I'm an author and I write a book/novel/whatever and instead of people buying the book, they download it and read it for free. This is different from the whole iTunes issue as atleast money is exchanged for goods. This model is more like the old napster or bittorrent....
If i'm going to spend a couple of years writing a book in the hopes that it makes money, I'd hope people that read it pay for it.
-HockeyPuck
If I write a novel, and put on the floor in the street, somebody picks it up and reads it, they arn't violating copyright because they haven't create a copy.
If I write the same novel and leave it on a public file server, if someone picks it up and reads it or saves it to disk they have made a copy of it (because thats how digital reading works) so they have violated copyright, unless I allow them the right to make one copy. So what happens the next time I open the file? Technically I'll have a copy on disk and a copy in memory - so I'll have two copies. Or worse, I decide I want to read it on a different computer, I copy it to the other computer, delete from the current computer and then read it on the other computer. As far as I'm concerned there is still only one copy, but in reality there are three: the copy marked for deletion on my harddrive, the copy on the other computers harddrive and the copy in memory. All this before we start getting our knickers in a twist about caching and registers!
Digital data really stuggles with copyright, because even the most simple of actions require that the data be duplicated, and the reason we duplicate over transfer is because it's faster and safer. Once something is digitized good luck trying to keep control over its distribution.
Googles actions here show a complete disregard for conventional copoyright. Taking a none digital medium and transcoding it to digital, then disitributing it on the web is not what fair use had in mind, and really should involve giving some money to the copyright holders, probably a lot of money.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
Let me guess, you would prefer we read left-wing tabloids like the NYT or Washington Post, correct?
Not that I agree with the article either, but the left-leaning slashbots' response to the source is entirely predictable.
They're a cult, guys. And not the kind that is really really into a science fiction show. Should they be a source we listen to for Google criticism?
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission. Google wants to trash that.
That's what I want to trash,too.
Google envisions a world in which all content is free
That's exactly the world in which I want to live.
These lawsuits are needed to halt theft of intellectual property. To see it any other way is intellectually dishonest.
I believe in freedom of access and distribution of all information content for all mankind. These lawsuits are theft of intellectual works that belongs to all mankind, and they belong to all mankind for the simple fact of being intellectual works.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
1. The Washington Times != The Washington Post. One is a bastion of DC journalism. The other is only slightly better than a tabloid.
Uh, I wouldn't even say the Washington Times is that good even.
It was founded by the Moonies, which is IMHO, a cult and certainly not an uncontroversial organization by any other standards.
Add to that the fact that it was explicitly created by Moon to create an 'alternative' to the Post that was more in line with his own opinions. Which is just a wonderful premise to start a quality newspaper on. Not.
(Not that there's anything wrong with op-eds. But if it's the raison d'etre of your paper, I wouldn't call it a 'newspaper'.)
Ok, but enough shooting the messenger.. The actual op-ed piece speaks for itself. It's a load of baloney. Filled with a nonsense interpretation of copyright law, tons of statements and allegations without any arguments or reasoning to back them up.
And more than a few straw-men like: "Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission. Google wants to trash that."
Google wants to abolish copyright laws. Riiight. (sarcasm)
As a NaNoWriMo participant, I had wondered where my creativity had gone last night. Damn you, Google! Now I'll never make it beyond 50,000 words.
Post anonymously - For when your opinion embarrasses even you!
Re: 1
The Washington Times is a tabloid paper, sure. But this is the exactly same sort of manner that people use to dismiss the information from Wikipedia out of hand. Call the authors stupid. Not the publication. Even if it's Fox News.
>>You're probably reading the byline above and wondering, "What could these two, from opposite
>> sides of the aisle in Congress, possibly have in common with each other?"
nope. wondering who the hell these 2 guys are. never heard of them.
do they really think we all know their names?
As an author, I like the idea of a company as massive as Google has become in essence acting as a free publicist, in fact in some ways I can see how a whole new publisher-free method of getting into print could come about because of it, for example, if I print one copy of a book and donate it to one of those university libraries.
As an open source advocate who is opposed to any single corporate entity becoming a "sole source" of online content, etc., I don't like the idea very much at all. It raises the possiblility of that corporate entity essentially controlling access or profiting from my work with no derivative income to me, the creator of the work.
However, my thoughts (written in 2005 with a 99 year copyright period in the US of A) are irrelevant for what is presumably a major part of this project: there are many many books out of copyright that have no legal encumberance and Google is entitled to do what they wish with these books whether we like it or not.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
With Melinda Gates (Bill Gate's wife) on the Washinton Post's Board of Directors, I'm not at all suprised by this attack on Google.
If we'd had a "Napster of books" that blew the doors off of print like it did for music, publishers would be beyond this now. I know the RIAA/MPAA take the stance that P2P has had a negative effect on the music/movies biz, but with the massive success of the iPod/iTMS/[insert favorite online music store] does anyone really beleive that anymore?
A lot of waffly claims that "Google is changing the law".
No they're not. They're testing the law in a whole new field of endeavour. The courts will decide what the law is, and clearly neither side can claim a cut and dried legal watertight case till the court rules. Neither side can claim the other is "changing the law". The field is too new. Personally, I hope Google wins. We shall see.
Frankly, these two authors are stupid. They can't see straight. Google is not offering the entire works and violating copyright. They are doing what libraries currently do, but do a crappy job. Libraries have been trying to do this, but most college libraries do not have the expertise or resources. Google does have the resources and know-how to do it right. These two guys should wake up and see their arguments are full of crap.
She is not on the "opposing side" of anything except common decency. Pat sold her soul to the publishing industry years ago. She's the public face of the anti-library movement that would love to eliminate print ownership entirely and switch to a pay-per-read model.
Claiming that Pat Schroeder still holds true to any of her former progressive Democratic views is like saying Arianna Huffington is still a Republican.
Patricia Scott Schroeder
:(
Uh, maybe the part about her being the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Association of American Publishers is creeping in on her opinion of this... Google really needs to get a better PR firm.
The authors, while missing the point, do make a very good point. When displaying the work (what portion of the work is still in question) they also intend to sell ads based on the context of the search for the copyrighted work. So in essence, they are making a profit off of a showing of material they do not own the copyright too. What are the odds of Google then directing a portion of that profit to the copyright owners? Perhaps it would be better if Google bought a copy of every book it intends to scan. Therefore, acting in more of a library capacity?
Its online .... print.google.com
As the publishing companies have an abysmal record of preserving the heritage; they leave it to libraries. History is full of important libraries that have burned with all its content.
The argument that these people use is ONLY about copyright and how they THINK they might be worse off in this deal. Their reasoning is not at all why this is a good thing for the society and they do not even consider how it will benefit themselves.
It is a well known but little understood fact that people who go to libraries are the ones most likely to buy books. It is as little understood that file sharers are the ones most likely to buy records.. You do not need to stretch your imagination to understand that when books are known courtesy of this program, that people will be interested in copies these often out of print books.
Please wake up, you are robbing yourself when you spout this nonsence.
Thanks,
GerardM
It was founded by the Moonies, which is IMHO, a cult and certainly not an uncontroversial organization by any other standards.
Let's not forget that "Rev." Moon recently had himself crowned the prince of peace in an elobarate self-congratulatory ceremony. Someone who does that is probably not out to establish an objective newspaper.
The actual op-ed piece speaks for itself. It's a load of baloney. Filled with a nonsense interpretation of copyright law, tons of statements and allegations without any arguments or reasoning to back them up.
So basically, the Washington Times is a lot like slashdot...
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Sure, if by "bastion of journalism" you mean "consistently expresses a left-of-center viewpoint".
Or maybe you prefer that other paragon of journalistic virtue, the NYT, which falsifies stories and believes its writers have some amazing extra-constitutional protection against being served a subpoena?
Isn't it legal to quote text from a book or article as long as you provide the source? I believe it is, and I'm pretty damn sure the point of a search engine is to provide a source (not the technical interpretation). But let's face it, Google WILL provide the link to the source. If they don't, then it is illegal.
Is there something I'm not taking into consideration here?
There are some factual errors in your story "Reigning In Google," to wit:
1) "nor has Google defined what a 'snippet' is"
From Google Print's help page, I found out (within seconds) that a snippet ranges from a few sentences to a few pages. They have not said how they will determine where in the range any given book will be, but I can guess (as could your two authors have guessed) that it will be based on the size of the book itself.
2) "Our laws say if you wish to copy someone's work, you must get their permission."
My understanding was that our laws say "if you want to rebroadcast or republish". Copying (without republishing) is fine. And republishing snippets usually falls under Fair Use, which is also fine.
Since the entire rest of the article is built on these two factual errors, that's all I can really say about that.
Thank you for your time,
-anon
Dumb and Dumber, as far as I'm concerned. Did you ever see her on "Jeopardy", when she failed to come up with basic answers about the US government? Did you ever wonder why he so strongly opposed the will of the people that he wrote (and got passed) legislation to circumvent even PLACING a referendum on legalizing marijuana on the ballot? I don't want to hear or see what these two have to say, it simply brings down the general level of human discourse.
Two wastes of horseflesh, they are.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
A few years back, there was this group of artists (we'll call them musicians) who got really upset because their stuff was being made available on this thing called the Internet. Since these artists were pure, land-loving, do-gooders (translation: hippies), they didn't see the opportunity that lay before them. Instead of embracing this new technology and using to increase album sales (of which they make little money off of), increase merchandise sales (of which they can make alot of money off of - see Kiss for an example), and increase their fan base (and thus ticket sales) by expanding their exposure exponentially in a way that was previously impossible, they sat around and complained.
Now, we have a new set of artists who are again failing to see the opportunity presented to them. If they were smart, they would work with Google, to develop strategies to increase sales through this new medium.
Just another group of people that do not understand the true marketing power of the Internet and what can be achieved by putting information at the finger tips of the general public.
Monetary gain has never been, and will never be, the primary driver of creativity...
:)
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
Heaven forbid that I ever be able to find a book that I want. Anyone ever hear a line from a book and can't remember the title? Anybody else have trouble finding stuff thru the library's search system? My hand was raised twice.
Sometimes the search system is so clunky that it is nearly unuseable, that happened to me in college while doing research papers. I had to have the help of a librarian many times to find usefull results. I learned a lot about boolean back then.
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
Bob Barr: very conservative Republican
Voting Record on Issues 2000
Pat Schroeder: Democrat; pro-copyright, but also pro-access to information
http://www.iastate.edu/~cccatt/p%20schroeder.html
Wikipedia
Life is irony, and nothing ever goes as planned.
Google is the best thing to happen to humanity since language.
Pat Schroeder is president of the Association of American Publishers and a former member of Congress from Colorado. Bob Barr, a former member of the House Judiciary Committee, is an author, newspaper columnist and analyst for CNN.
I guess the warranty on congressmen lasts as long as copyright does*.
* See List of countries' copyright length - USA
That's silly. Google caching is, morally, no different from anybody else's caching. The HTTP protocol has been designed, since early days, to support caching. Caching is a good thing, generally, because it speeds up access to web pages, decreases network congestion, and mitigates the "slashdot effect". There are a huge number of caches deployed across the internet, and you may be reading this content via a cache without even knowing it. Lots of ISPs deploy HTTP caches, and so do many businesses, colleges and universities.
Your "moral" argument against Google caching is that it allows people access to content without going through the content provider's access mechanisms. That's the thing that deprives the author of value. But this argument also applies to HTTP protocol caching. My counter-argument is that caching is an inherent part of the design of the WWW, and it provides a social benefit by allowing the web to operate faster and more efficiently.
If you operate a web site, you should know that your content is subject to caching, because that's how the web works. If you don't want your content to be cached, you can opt out. For example, you can use <META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE"> to prevent HTTP caching, and you can use <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE"> to prevent Google caching.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was passed by a voice vote in both houses of Congress. Pusillanimous toads, the lot of them. So no, you don't know how your Congresscritter voted.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Creativity is more obviously crushed by the idea that you should use your creativity to make money. Some examples:
Creativity isn't quashed by making content free. The potential for making money from being creative is reduced by making content free. There are millions of people who enjoy being creative for creativity's sake and not for money-making. Look at all the bands that have supported free downloading of their MP3s etc.
Huge big budget creative projects (e.g. War of the Worlds) couldn't afford to be produced with out profiting from ticket-sales etc....but free content doesn't prevent them from doing so -- it just reduces their potential profit (from DVD sales etc.).
So maybe, if the potential for profit from creative-works were reduced (e.g. by making content more free), then the Big Companies would butt-out a little bit and let people be creative for creativity's sake!
If I searched Google for a phrase or paragragh in a book, for research or a school assignment wouldn't that be similar to me going to the library? I can go to the library, search for the book, search for a specific passage or section and read it all free of charge, I don't even have to check out the book. Google (to me at least) just seems like it's making this processes easier and a lot more convenient. I can just get online, search and it's there, instead of getting in my car, driving for 30 minutes, getting to the library, and hoping they even have a copy in stock, writing down the information and driving back 30 minutes. Plus that wastes gas, and isn't the media saying try to be conservative on your gas? (I know that last sentance is slightly off-topic, but still slightly relevent)
Sure, if by "bastion of journalism" you mean "consistently expresses a left-of-center viewpoint".
Richard? Is that you?!
It seems people start to realize the hidden price tags of monopolies like Walmart and Microsoft. Why not for Google? Is it really to early to realize the risks of Google's market dominance? Is Google's PR motto "do no evil" still unquestioned? I think it is time to look for alternatives beyond Google that can generate a sustainable development and without the threads of monopolies. ...
Google Print and the Society
"Which is just a wonderful premise to start a quality newspaper on. Not."
Wow!!! I havn't heard someone use the "not" thing in a long while! Thanks, that brought back memories.
"Google wants to abolish copyright laws. Riiight. (sarcasm)"
I think anyone who couldn't figure out that was sarcasm should be lobotomized.
it should be perfectly legal for me to go to my local library and begin scanning all of their books to store on my computer! Or, go to their media section and rent DVDs, CDs, etc, and copy all of those to my computer as well. I think Google has no right to doing this as they do not own the content.
I'll spell this out even more clearly. I have written book X recently. They have an entire copy of my book sitting on their servers. (It may in fact be an index and hence a derivative work from which the complete original can be constructed, but that is still subject to copyright.) They are using their complete copy of X to make profit. I don't see a penny of this except maybe occasionally someone will buy my book X because Google mentioned it. And there's certain no law that compels me to accept free advertising in recompense for abuse of my copyright.
this is the Times not the Post.
Quite right, sorry for this confusion!
Behind all this rhetoric is actually the opposite of what Barr and Schroeder say. They are not afraid of Google scanning their content; the opt-out provision is trivial for big publishers to deal with. If Houghton-Mifflin doesn't want any of its books scanned, a single letter suffices.
No, what they are afraid of is that with an opt-out policy, Google will pick up lots of content that they don't control and that provides cheap or free alternatives to what they sell at inflated prices. They rightfully fear for the businesses they represent, they just fear for it not because of copyright violations, but because of all the competition that actually exists but that is still hard to find at this point.
The kind of transparent rhetoric that these Washington has-beens are using, like referring to Google's search index as a "free online library" and to Google's quite defensible fair use arguments as a "license to steal", is almost amusing at this point. That kind of talk only reveals that much more clearly how political and out of touch these people are. Fortunately, their efforts are ultimately for nothing: CNN and big publishing houses will hit their trees, too, no matter what rhetorical or political stunts their hired help tries to pull.
Ah. and sadly, that explains goatse.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Tabloid is a term of size, or physical format. It has nothing to do with content. Not having seen the paper in question, I can't say which it is, but, for instance, The New York Times is a broadsheet, and The New York Post is a tabloid.
...on their web site...
But who are we to say that for someone else's material?
It's very easy to take the public-spirited view in any intellectual property debate, be it on copyright or patents or whatever. Allowing anyone to control access to or use of information is (almost) always against the public interest in any isolated case and once the information has already been published. But you have to consider the bigger picture, which is why concepts like copyright exist in law.
Personally, I agree with the original reply that started this subthread: things like Google Cache and the Wayback Machine are on very dubious ground, both legally and ethically. It isn't a no-brainer that these caching systems are of benefit to the original creators of the material. I've enumerated some reasons that I believe this before, but probably the three most important are:
Caching/archival services disrupt all of these things, potentially damaging the interests of the content provider. Those interests are protected by copyright to encourage them to offer the content to the public in the first place, and thus I have a problem with violating the letter and/or spirit of copyright law to set up a cache. If you want to offer such a service, by all means do, but make it opt-in; "You can just disable it with robots.txt/by e-mailing us at.../by setting up a password" really isn't good enough.
Although commercial entities can be killed off by the unfortunate side effects of dubious caching, this isn't automatically a money issue, either. For example, I help to run a relatively large web site for a local club, and we rely on server logs to see which links visitors do and don't follow and which pages they want to get to from which other pages. We use this information to improve the links and menus on our site. We have no commercial stake here; this is a non-profit organisation, providing the site purely to help our members and anyone else with common interests. However, if everyone started seeing our site indirectly via Google Cache or whatever, we couldn't do this because our server logs would be empty, and therefore we couldn't continue to update our site to better provide for our visitors.
We also update our content regularly, sometimes even providing information in an afternoon that's relevant only to the same evening. Yes, we make mistakes occasionally too, and have to fix them. Having a cache that's out of date by even a couple of hours could spoil a whole evening for one of our members who missed a last-minute announcement or saw cached data that was copied while there was a mistake on the site that had since been fixed.
None of this is in either our interests or that of our members/random visitors interested in our stuff, and there's not a single financial consideration in any of the above problems. So no, Google Cache isn't automatically serving the interests of either the copyright holder or the general public, and more to the point, it's not up to them to decide what's in the best interests of others and whether it's OK to break the law on that basis.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is a funny thing about those libraries - They actually had to buy or have all of those books donated. That is one of the things the Carnegie institute does. It helps libraries purchase and keep there books up to date.
Another thing about libraries - Only ONE person can take a book out at a time or even use it to do the research. Now if a library has multiple copies of a book because it is popular then multiple people can do that.
Also as for copying, the libraries I have gone to always have those nice little signs that say photocopying a book is wrong and should not be done. Hmmmm I wonder why, maybe because they are protecthing themself from copyright lawsuits.
So please do not tell me that Google and the libraries are the same.
Ken
Who cares, as long as they are not distributing them?
As far as I'm concerned, they could make billions of copies, and schred them, or put them on servers where people can't read them anyway, and it wouldn't make any difference. Noone is losing any money on schredded or otherwise inaccessible copies.
No, this is about something different. It's about stopping the project, because if people get used to use google to search for books, books that aren't indexed might as well not exist, because people can't find it. So, opting out is not going to be an option, unless everyone else does it too, especially competing publishers and authors.
If the small publishers books get indexed, and not the big ones', guess which books are going to be found once people get used to entering a few keywords instead of manually looking through 50 books.
So, why do they want to get out of this in the first place? Because they know that the reason they sell more books aren't the quality of their books, it's their size. "Britney Spears syndrome". You won't find all the books from all the small publishers and authors in a book store - some may be in one book store, and others in a different one, but Harry Potter is in all of them. Now, imagine what happens when people start searching on Google Print, and find a book from a small publisher they like better than Harry Potter... Yep, people start buying it.
Two words: Competition. Control.
Google Print is going to get us more of the first, but the publishers want more of the second.
The Washington Times != The Washington Post. One is a bastion of DC journalism. The other is only slightly better than a tabloid.
Look, The Washington Post is so biased that they covered the historic democratic adoption of the Iraq constitution -- the most significant Middle East event since the Carter Administration -- on page A13, but you're still being a little too hard on them.
You suggest absolving the publisher in favor of letting all blame ride on the shoulders of the author.
We wouldn't be having this discussion if it weren't for the publisher. Who's responsible for making the author's words a matter of public discourse? Aren't they also fair game?
So, now how do I get paid for writing this post? I don't? All right, that's it! ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
The key shortcoming of the point of view expressed in the article is this: the writers assume that increasing the availability of so-called "content" reduces its value. Their attitude is solely based on the notion that intellectual products are commodities -- that communication and language are commodities, and that, as with other commodities, limiting access to them increases their value.
I disagree. I believe the value of a book *increases* as more people read it. Imagine if Hamlet was only known to a handful of people in universities or think tanks. Would it be of greater value? Of course not -- part of its currency lies in the fact that *everyone* knows the story. Anyone can quote it. Anyone can make allusions to it. And the fact is, people are still making tons of money off of it, in live performances as well as several major films (at least four in the last ten years).
What Google is doing is exactly what technology has always done -- increase the capacity for human communication.
It's ironic, really, that the authors can make this argument considering that we wouldn't be reading or discussing it were it not available for free online.
// This is not a sig.
The Washington Times was created to balance out the Washington Post. But it's because there used to be a newspaper on the right in Washington for a long time, the Washington Star. During the era of media consolidation, the Post bought out the Star, promising to represent both sides, and then manifestly not doing so. Thus the Moonies, for whatever lunatic reasons of their own, decided to fund the creation of the Washington Times to fill the void left by the Star. However, the WTimes has lost money every year since it was launched--it's more like a charitable venture than a newspaper proper.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
http://chunnibabu.blogspot.com/2005/11/google-anno unces-music-player-from.html
No honestly it really does. Bleed bleed bleed that's all my heart does does simply because they are unable to see beyond the bottom line.
It would seem that publishers are finally waking up to the fact that their dead tree editions aren't what everyone wants and aren't necessarly the best way to present the data. For a long while now you have been able to get scanned books but the effort of scanning them restricts the number. I can't wait for the day when we have properly searchable e-books in mass (along with a decent reader). I forsee that the effort and pain required to drag the publishing industry into the electronic age is going to be 1000 times greater than that required to drag the film and music industry into it.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Any newspaper whose editorial section contains apostrophe-plural errors clearly needs new editors. I thought this was a Slashdot typo, but it appears in the online article as well. If you can't see why the above text is in error, here's a handy guide to apostrophes.
It amazes me how many people here have posted about how you will be able to read the whole book online, or how it is like a library that lets you read the book for free. Google does not intend to let you view the entire book. Only a small section, a few lines of text or at most a page. If you want to read the whole book you will need to buy the book. In the end it will probably create more sales for books that people found where they would not have ever discovered the book before. It is the same issue that the RIAA/MPAA has! It has nothing to do with piracy or copyrite violations. It has to do with control. If you can search for the books you want to buy then you won't buy the books they want you to buy. They want to keep control of the method that people learn of book through, thus controlling the books that get purchased. It is about control, it is always about control!
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Gee, isn't this the same argument publishing cartels had about public libraries a few centuries ago?
"Hey, we'll only sell a copy of our book to the library, and everyone else will just go there and read it for free. No fair! Stop!"
Yet, amazingly, somehow content still got produced all these years.
Libraries and Archives have a very broad right to archive one copy of a work, so long as certain conditions are met. See http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#108 . Google is merely helping these libraries electronically archive their materials in a searchable format that anybody can access. The libraries aren't allowing multiple people to borrow more than one copy at a time. They are allowing mulitiple people to browse a very advanced card catalog system that contains small excerpts. At least, that is my take on it.
I do not see how, if Google's main objective was to make everything in the future free that would hurt creativity ? You would think that with access to all those reasources change and creativity would occur sooner rather then later. Michael
Linux: For those able to think out side of a window
IIRC, Google intends to scan and store the entirety of all books and promise to only display small parts of them. The publishers' objections are that once that data are compiled Google will forever have the publishing industry by the throat with the ability to change, without notice, the definition of small parts.
Having one's entire livelihood held hostage by a stranger who says "Trust me, I mean no evil" is a sword of Damocles that any sane person would want to avoid.
Is Google's plan popular with the general public? Sure, the same way Napster wildly popularized a new distribution mechanism (wholesale theft) of copyrighted music. I'm sure I would use it if it were available. Is it legal and ethical? Smells fishy to me if it is done over the objections of the owners of the material.
You use isle where you mean aisle and you leave in user's where you mean users.
Sharp
Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright law, it is also crushing creativity. If publishers and authors have to spend all their time policing Google for works they have already written, it is hard to create more. THAT is his argument as to how google crushes creativity. It is then hard to believe there is any creativity nowadays at all. You have to scan billions of sites to see if they have or have not published any of your works without your permission. I call bs.
The Dutch will inherit the earth. If not, we'll settle for a bit of ocean. Beta delenda est!
Google provides zero payment to the content creators. If their is no content to search for their is no advertising revenue at Google. Google's business model depends on the un-compensated work of others.
At the end of the day, Google is nothing more glamorous than a direct marketing firm. That alone is enough to classify them as Evil.
As a writer and content creator, I'm a rarity -- I hate copyright.
Why do we need it? I learned in business never to write or say anything proprietary that you don't want others to know.
Copyright is basically using the force of government to enact a monopoly on thought. I'm not sure the process of thought should be regulated or licensed.
The web's easy access to millions of commercial (ie, for profit) copyright works "for free" proves why copyright is outdated: people still buy content they could download freely.
Why do people buy versus download?
1. They appreciate the author's work and want to compensate them.
2. They want to support the author's future work.
3. The time-requirements or download quality is wors than buying the author's version.
4. They're afraid of government force.
I doubt the last is a big reason.
I'm 31. I buy content as its time-cheaper than downloading. For the youth, the reverse is true. The major pirates can't vote, can't sign a contract and can't get credit. 6 years of "piracy" can set up their preferences for 50 years of purchasing.
I say use the web to set up your future customers. Dump copyright.
These guys are getting worked up about something that was hashed out centuries ago. Even if Google offers completely scanned books online, how is that any different than a Library? People have access to free books in every city in the US, but Americans still buy books. Why? Because books are more convenient than even laptops. I say this while admitting that I am an electrical engineer who loves his technology. You just can't beat a good book. The only people that will NOT buy books are college students and rare, extremely frugal Americans. And they already have access to libraries anyway. The loss of revenue to authors and, more importantly to these two nimrods, loss to publishers will be negligible.
"Add to that the fact that it was explicitly created by Moon to create an 'alternative' to the Post that was more in line with his own opinions. Which is just a wonderful premise to start a quality newspaper on. Not."
... well, maybe you should be complaining that Slashdot is incredibly biased against Microsoft and for *nix. I mean, it was created to be more in line with its editors' opinions.
It's long been established in journalistic history that newspapers always reflect the thoughts, passions and leanings of their publishers. Hell, many of the great papers of the western world were formed for that very reason, and the Post is no exception, though I do believe it's far more of a house organ for the ruling class of D.C. than for any one political viewpoint.
Complaining that the Times is not a "quality newspaper" just because its publisher influences (or used to influence) its coverage
Mindy: "Well...desserts aren't always right." Homer: "But they're so sweet!"
Google news no longer carries articles from various French publications after a copyright lawsuit was decided against them. With the handwriting on the wall, Google Base is a legal remedy in that copyrighted content is given to Google for free. Google only has a problem when it has to pay for copyrighted material.
Just because the NY Times, CNN, the LA Times, and the Washington Post dare to print something other than Undying Praise for the Fatherland does not make them left-leaning. It makes them journalists doing their jobs. I think the non-U.S. news coverage of the same events is more aggressive, such as the CBC, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the BBC. I take the truth as an average of these sources, along with some help from FAIR and the Columbia Journalism Review.
If I want left-leaning, I can go to the Independent Media Center, the Alternative News Network, The Raw Story, or the Fifth Estate.
In the USA, we like stuff watered down, like beer, television, and freedom.
I am essentially sympathetic with Google, and find most of the Barr/Shroeder piece to be rubbish. But there is a point lurking in there that needs to be addressed: What is the value to Google of each copyrighted work it has indexed?
The value of each work, in the limit, is not zero. If each individual work added no value, then there wouldn't be any point in indexing that work; in the limit nothing would be indexed. So I've got to conclude Google does owe the copyright holder something, but it might be pretty small. It might be less than the value to a book-reviewer (for example) quoting a paragraph -- i.e. w/in monetary value limits of fair use.
So how do you figure the value? First, it is a monotonic increasing function of the size of the overall index. A user gets more value by getting a hit in a big index than a small one. Next, the value is a function of the frequency of work's being returned as a search result. A user gets no value from a work that is never a search result. More precisely, it is a function of the frequency f and size n of result list, of the work being returned in a result list of size n (searching for "the" will bring up lots of hits, but the value of each hit is small). So if your work is indexed in a huge index, and shows up lots of times in small result lists, you have given more to Google than if your work appears in a small index, and only shows up few times, in big result lists.
Google should be made to supply some real statistics on size of the index and hits per work; but my bet is that the monetary contribution of each work will be miniscule. Indexing does build on copyright holder's "value"; it's an empirical question whether it is fair use.
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Not critically speaking. The opinions belong to the authors. That's the other sort of reason we're having this discussion.
I was intimately involved with Microsoft from 1986 into the mid 90's. I see far too many parallels between the then young Microsoft and the past few years of Googles growth. Google is planning on nothing less that total world domination, just as Microsoft was at the time and later (more or less) achieved. Have the public learned nothing from the past 15 years of Microsoft dominance? Being dependent on a large corporation as a single source for too many things is a bad idea in general and a worse idea when it becomes a single source for information (and being a single source for the *location* of information is almost the same).
Yeah I need tinfoil hat, but late 80's or early 90's who thought Microsoft was going to become what they did?
Repeat after me: Google is not my friend.
> I think anyone who couldn't figure out that was sarcasm should be lobotomized.
Riiiight. lobotomized?? And what does having sex with my love robot have to do with anything?
I suppose I'm thinking that if you have a book of 10 thousand sentences and you have 10 thousand people each knowing and answering (having memorised their line) questions on that line you don't infringe but a single person who knows all 10 thousand lines that ansers questions does infringe?
Google is just emuling it while turning a buck through advertising. In our university library here, you are not allowed to photocopy entire books. That doesn't stop poor students from copying entire books and handing them out to classmates though. Maybe in the end, the easier access to books we've never even heard of before will increase book sales, just as other posters have noted. There is also gutenberg.org, which has thousands of books online for free--course, that doesn't include currently copyrighted material. And even with gutenberg.org around, people still buy those books for their home libraries. I dunno...
Couple of days back, I was searching for a topic called "Simulated annealing in VLSI". Ive searched in local libraries, but I couldn't find. "Simulated annealing" is a small topic and generally there won't be any seperate book for this. But the local library searches allow the search only by title, author etc. I searched for that in Google print and found many books, and I immediately bought two of those books. I don't know how book search can impact the authors, infact its the reverse. If it is illeagel, then lending books from the library should also be illeagel
Bob "voted out of office" Barr fits neatly into the "Republican shill for big business" category and Pat "Crocodile Tears" Schroeder fits neatly into the "Democratic shill for Hollywood interests" category.
This is nothing more than two people stumping for their natural constituencies and using the "opposite side of the aisle" ruse to make it seem that agreeing on an issue must somehow represent some kind of transcendent truth.
Under fair use, you are allowed to scan/reproduce material for personal/business use (but you can not share it outside). In fact, you can scan all of it.
Also, under fair use, you are allowed to create portions of it for any type of usage. Both of these were allowed for eons. The copy machine issue came up when somebody could copy a book, and then resell it. That is, that anybody could make money from it, if the copies cheap enough and the book expensive enough.
But in google's case, they reproduce the entire book, and then make an index of it. Further they do not make the entire contents available to a single user.
BTW, you can not be successfully sued over scanning a work, only by making it available , in full, for others. In fact, that is the premise of all the mp3 lawsuits. They are going after those that use p2p clients and are allowing uploading. If you do not upload (i.e. you leach), or do not know that it is occurring (you run Windows, and somebody put a virus in your system that uploads), then you are not liable.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Ummm.... what's the difference between me going to a bookstore and reading a few pages of a book before buying it, or going to Google Print, and reading a few pages of the same book before buying it online? Yes, with enough effort, I could just read the whole book on Google Print for free, but the last time I went to a bookstore, nobody cared when I sat down and read an entire book there without buying it.
So, should books be sold in boxes that cannot be opened until after you have bought the item? And should we shut down all libraries? If anything, Google Print saves people time, and allows them to evaluate books without having to drive down to the local bookstore or library.
You may argue that Google Print makes it easier to distribute electronic copies of a book... I guess one could take screenshots of all the pages, compress them, and distribute them as a "book". Well, I could do the same by buying a book from the bookstore, scanning it, and then returning it to get my money back.
Recently, I have been buying more books thanks to Google Print, because it helps me evaluate books easily. The only copyright holders that should be worried are the ones that don't have books worth reading.
Google has entire copies of web pages sitting on their servers as well. If indexing books is illegal, then so is indexing the web. So why aren't all search engines being sued in the same manner?
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What's the big deal about Google doing this? Isn't that what a library was used for at one point? I never had to pay for anything there.
Along the same lines, I heard about this device that allows people to listen to copyrighted music on broadcast frequencies for FREE! People get these devices called "radios" and can listen from inside their car. In fact, some of these carsThese devices are also widely available for home use where people can record the music from the radio onto small reel-to-reel "tapes". These tapes can be listened to in other devices with tape players. I can't believe that people aren't freaking out about this!
.....sound like Microsoft! Sorry Washington Times, but They don't rule the universe (yet).
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Very minor and (hopefully) humorous nitpick: when the original medium is reality and the end result is digital, I believe the appropriate word would be "digitizing" rather than "transcoding"... but that said, I might be open to the idea of expanding the use of "transcoding" for non-digital material. "Hey Bubba, I just transcoded Minnie May into hamburger by using dynamite!"
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
The thing that doesn't make sense to me is why there is all this talk about property rights all the time, and no talk about usefulness. Let's face it, the days of old for book publishing are or should be nearing their end in the same way the days of old for the music industry are. I personally find an indexed text of books more useful than having to search through books by hand or using blanket descriptions, many of which are misleading. Nobody ever looks at the evolution of technology for the evolution's sake. Instead they worry about making money before the chance for profit even exists. This is innovation people and in the end the money always works itself out. Google should probably pay a per-book fee in order to offer something in return, but it still remains that a digital catalog of the old paper books is a goal worth achieving. Instead of working against Google's idea, which in my opinion should be a common goal, they should get down to the brass tacks of what they need to make this work for all parties involved.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
i'm with you on your approach to taking various sources as a basis for an average. this has to be the only way of reading the news, i reckon, as long as you obviously take into account various 'slants' that they take and account for them.
:-)
as an aside, i have friends here in the UK that won't take the word of the BBC because they feel it has issues with the government on journalistic freedom, etc.
personally i'm with http://www.guardian.co.uk/ but hey, that's just my opinion.
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No, no, you see, that's the problem. This will make the books MUCH HARDER to burn.
Anyone recall the Pearls Before Swine cartoon, where Rat left the New York Times journalist position for a tabloid, and then quit that because the tabloid had scruples, and required multiple sources in order to justify an article?
Wouldn't it be nice if Google would allow you to browse Google Print? One of the best parts of going to the library is being able to find a random book and browse it. Or to see what other people are reading...
Two cents in:
The article mains concern seems to be that Google's making money off of this stuff. It handwaves that "snippets" aren't well defined, and suggests they could be as large as a whole book. I call BS on that.
The article completely bypasses the #1 thing Google is doing with this service...allowing people to FIND OUT what they're looking for in the first place. As long as they don't give away the whole shebang, I can't see why the authors find it so onerous.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
So basically, the Washington Times is a lot like slashdot...
More like a Slashdot where only the trolls are allowed to post...
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Perhaps Google is intending to invoke a legal battle over copyright law intentionally. There has been much discussion that unless someone with the resources and the determination to challenge bad copyright law (e.g., the DMCA) in court, such bad laws will never be over-turned. While this initiative produces some benefit to Google, it may ultimately be a public service as well.
Join Tor today!
Having played with it a little bit (they have it up here), a "snippet" appears to be a few pages in either direction of your search result. And they provide handy dandy links to purchase the book if you so desire. If I was a publisher, I would think this was a GREAT way to have people find my books... but then, I am NOT a publisher, so what do I know?
I can't believe these two are actually authors and former Congressmen:
Why the comma after "Google"? You don't separate a subject from its verb with a comma.
This is a run-on sentence. You can't join two independent clauses with a comma.
User's what? In English, we pluralize "user" by simply adding an s. That's not what apostrophes are for.
If this were a high school English composition, it would get a C- at best. Doesn't the Washington Times have editors?
Google wants to abolish copyright laws. Riiight. (sarcasm)
Ignoring the ad tabloidem, which bit of this doesn't make sense? Google doesn't need copyright laws, but they sure stand in its way. (Or not. The Google Cache blatantly flouts copyright law already and who's done anything about that?) I'd say rather than wanting to abolish the laws they simply want to continue ignoring them with impunity. This should not be allowed to continue.
"... a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit ..."
I didn't know a company could do that. I thought only legislators could do that.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Shee-it, from all the racket, you'd think Google was planning to release full scans of every book in the world. Except it's not. It's going to release snippets. Tiny, tiny snippets. Snippets which will, in no case whatsoever, function as a replacement for the book. People will not, repeat not, go to Google instead of buying the book. They are attacking a straw man. Whether or not Google's uses are fair will be decided by the courts, but this is in no way the wholesale copyright violation they claim it to be.
Bah, it's barely worth responding to this nonsense, except that people will believe it.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Or were you just using my post as a place to hang your ideas? In the later case, you should be more scrupulous about your misrepresentations or make it more clear that your post is *NOT* actually related to mine.
Alternately, if you simply could not understand what I wrote, then you could ask for clarification.
Since I feel you offered no new substance that was related to what I actually wrote, I now ignore your substance. I will only reiterate the main thrust of my post, which was that someone is going to use the Web to make more content available. If not now and not Google (probably Microsoft?) and not books, then later and someone else and other forms of content. The publishing industry as it exists now is doomed. Time does not run backwards, no matter how fervently the Busheviks pray for it to do so.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Google will develop a mind of it's own and probably launch a nuclear war soon.
"...this is about power and control. The people who own the copyrights (rarely the authors) want to be able to say no"
This is about power only as it relates to money. The people who control the copyrights aren't worried about "power" to say no, except as it relates to their ability to make money off the works they own. Having worked with publishers, I'd be pretty shocked if you found a publisher more interested in the power to say no than in the almighty dollar. In fact, I'd guess there is no such animal.
Now, whether Google's (or anyone else's) efforts to make copyrighted materials freely available over the Internet will help copyright owners make money, or reduce their ability to make money, is a point that is still being argued. This could go either way, but I find it troubling that the "do no evil" company is so willing to push the limit of legality. Of course, I like Goog, but I'm not a mindless sycophant. Wouldn't it have been more appropriate to start with copyright-free works?
Personally, I think that the answer to the money question is "a little from column A, a little from column B." In some cases, searchable texts will drive book sales. Even full texts can do so. In other cases, it could be that someone who might have purchased a work will decide not to based on free access to it. The Baen Free Library is a case in point, both ways. I have read some Sci-Fi books there that I now will not purchase (since I have already read them and found them only moderately worth-while). I have also purchased some books that are continuations of series that I started reading online.
But seeing that this is Slashdot, I expect most opinions to be of the all-or-nothing variety.
Dan
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
They didn't cry when seach engines began indexing and caching web sites.
They didn't cry when services like TurnItIn began to index and cache academic journals, libraries, papers, etc.
They didn't cry when the synopsis of their papers were included in journals and library indexes across the world.
But now they cry.
What is all the fuss about? This is a natural extension to what has been happening for years. If the above three things are not considered copyright infringement, then neither should Google's index of all of these works. Indexing and caching material is not copyright infringement, it is the merely automating a process that we expect of all of our librarians already. (Please find me a paper relevant to subject X; where did this quote come from?; A friend of mine read this book, about this guy, with a hat and a cane... I think it took place in England, or... maybe Pakistan. What was it called?)
Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright law, it is also crushing creativity
We must keep in mind that this is a bad thing because... erm... the media corporations own the patents on "The rewriting of IP laws". Yes, that must be the point of the argument.
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
That's a prescriptive definition, not a descriptive one. Descriptive definitions can best be defined as "what people are actually trying to say when they use a word." In everyday usage, "tabloid" has nothing to do with the physical dimensions or layout, and everything to do with sleazy, gossipy, unsubstantiated pseudo-news.
You knew this already. So either you're trying to defend the newspaper in a dishonest way, or you're muddying the conversation by showing off your knowledge of irrelevant trivia. Trivia, by the way, actually comes from the Latin meaning "three roads". Wherever forks in the Roman road system occurred, bulletin boards sprung up, where people could post interesting bits of news that might be helpful to travelers.
There you have it, your daily meta-trivia. Now, tell me, how does this knowledge help us distinguish the relative merits of the Washington Post and the Washington Times? It doesn't. Neither does your helpful information on tabloids. So next time, prepend your commentary with "irrelevant nitpick", and provide the wikipedia link. Don't pretend you're adding meaningfully to the conversation.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I was already a patron of libraries. I've been regularly snarfing copies of online books, as well. And *any* service to get more print in front of my eyeballs with more convenience has my support. Yes, I produce content as well (pictures, not print) and Google caches my site. And I'm *happy* about that, because the cache is a handy fallback for when my host goes down (just as it is here when a page gets Slashdotted). And people never use caches exclusively - they're an alternative (since a cache is never as up-to-date as the page itself).
Incidentally, here's some mud in the eye of the Microturfs who're always claiming that I think Microsoft is evil just because I "hate success" or whatever the nonsense line is. I'm 100% down with Google, because they just focus on DOING A GOOD JOB, instead of deliberately doing a shitty job and then trying to stop anybody else from doing anything at all!
Crushing creativity huh. Seems to be there are already about a zillion authors on the Internet who have never been paid a cent or seen a single page of their work sold as ink on paper, yet they continue to write and post. That's a starting point showing the garbage of the above contention.
Also, some people are going to buy books into the foreseeable future regardless of any other way that they can receive the same content. I don't expect books to die anytime soon.
So all this shouting "FIRE!" in the crowded theater about the end of creativity (yet once again folks) does not impress me in the least.
There are people who create the way the rest of us breathe -- naturally, without seeming effort, and regardless of whether or not they are getting paid for it. And many share freely on the Internet what they cannot sell otherwise. To claim that people will only create if they're given a complete monopoly over it essentially forever (the Disney Corporation argument for copyright extension) is ludicrous (not the rap thug), and I refuse to be panicked or stampeded by it into yet more restrictions on the Public Domain, which is hurting pretty badly of late anyway.
Besides, when was the last time a printed book installed a Rootkit onto your PC?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No, I challenged your initial premise, which was clearly stated (without further context) in your opening paragraph. Having undermined that point, much of the later content of your post becomes irrelevant. Exactly the same is true of your next post, and my comment here in reply to it.
If you feel that this was the wrong point to pick up on in your post, perhaps you could consider not opening future posts with an absolute statement that presents your personal opinion, without supporting reasoning or evidence, as fact.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ad hominem at its finest, ladies and gentlemen.
by two writers typically on opposing sides of the isle
I thought the expression was "on opposite sides of the aisle," unless you're thinking that these two writers usually spend their time on opposite shores of an island.
Whenever Democrats and Republicans agree on something, that's when you know the public interest is getting screwed. And it applies in this case too.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
---I think you're completely missing the boat here. When someone puts something on the Web, they have agreed to try to make it visible, and Google is serving their interests by making it more visible.---
When I wrote and published my book, I have agreed to try to make it visible, and Google is serving my interests by making it more visible. There's this weird notion floating around that authors don't want their books to be found, don't want their content to be read, but website authors do want these things. If that's the case, why write the book in the first place if you're trying to keep the content hidden and secret?
IANAL, but I don't see any difference between a set of copyrighted text that's on the web and a set of copyrighted text that's printed on a page. Both are sets of copyrighted text that fall under the same restrictions and limitation imposed by copyright laws. If you can scan, index and cache one, you can scan, index, and cache the other (and vice versa if Google loses this suit). Search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! are all opt out--you have to tell the search engines you don't want to be a part of their content, just like you have to opt out from Google Print.
Let's be clear here--this issue is not about allowing access to text online, or fears that it will hurt booksales--every publisher out there knows this will mean more booksales. It's about control of content, and the fact that Google will profit from using that content without compensating the copyright holders. If Google offered the publishers a percentage of profits, all this controversy would disappear in a second. The question that's being asked here, is how far does copyright extend, and is this fair use, not will this irreperably harm the book publishing industry (which it clearly won't).
Quote: "It isn't up to the broadcaster to track down someone profiting from their work, why should it be up to publishers and authors to do so?"
Um, wrong. It may be the broadcaster doesn't do it but the legions of attorneys they employ do! Otherwise you would be seeing all kinds of rebroadcasts of TV shows.
This is a very weak argument on both sides, both comparing re-use of TV shows as "fair use" by Google and by the authors here in attempting to refute Google's example.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Go take a look at the googleprint FAQs and stuff. Please: http://print.google.com/googleprint/publisher_libr ary.html
For those of you who don't go verify for yourself, here are the major points:-Googleprint does not provide all text though it is possible, albeit really time consuming, for someone to misappropriate the content and read an entire book.
-Publishers are allowed to opt out.
-Also included are links to buy the book from a variety of sources, or to search for a library with a copy.
-There are text ads placed demurely at the bottom.
Please do me one favor. Designate me as your foe, so I will more conveniently know to ignore any of your future posts that I stumble accross (though my settings make that rather unlikely once you have set the red dot in place).
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Here is what I got from the article: "We are dodgy old fools who feel that until the end of time a library MUST be a physical building where you must physically go to check out your media for free." Welcome to the 21st century all you close minded old codgers in the MPAA, RIAA, et. al. It is a beautiful place isn't it. The IP debate is really getting rediculous. Until the end of time must we always have access to physical media to use something? In the past 100 years we have invented cars, in the past 60 we have invented computers, and just this year I bought something that fits in my pocket that has more RAM and processing power then my full-sized computer from 1998. So, again why do these fools feel that we are going to be tied to these old distribution methods etc. forever? It does nothing but stifle innovation. My conclusion comes from the WoW forums; Cry more n00bs, its fine learn2play.
[Let me preface this comment by noting that I write many things, including music.]
If copyright was abandoned it would get rid of a lot of tripe out there in the marketplace. Wouldn't it be great if people wrote not for money but ideas, for a change, if there was genuine competition among ideas and artistic expression?
Idealism? Fantasy? Poppycock? I doubt as if those who have a burning desire to write would be stopped by poor remuneration for their efforts. (The practice of blogging demonstrates this point. Podcasting expands the idea to radio and video.) If the tripe written by those motivated mainly by money was allowed to whither, then eventually the field would be cleared to allow content written by those actually interested to surface and flourish. (Just removal of the advertising efforts to promote the latest schlock would see to that.)
Oh yes, I realize that those writing for money are interested in their subject, too. And yes, many important things wouldn't be written except for the remuneration. (Authors must live, etc.) But I for one can't see the situation getting worse by removing the profit motive from the publishing field. The current system of copyright may benefit works written through coporate collaboration, but is not a friend of the independent. And it is the independent who gave us the calculus, the Tesla coil, Linux, and cellular automata.
Far more work that is of crucial importance has been buried than ever benefited from the skewed book selling and promoting practices now rife in the publishing world. (Note that I refer not to my own work, by the way.)
In addition, most authors are required on their own dime to go out and hawk their work on a touring circuit. There are very few corporate advertising dollars being spent on authors; only a handful are darlings, and they get constant coverage and prominent product placement. Readers are reduced to consumers and it well-known that most markets are created, not discovered. In such contrived circumstances, the very purpose for a readily presentable media -- the content -- suffers.
These remarks apply to most anything able to be copyrighted, by the way.
There is a lot of debate surrounding the efforts of Google and Microsoft to scan the books of the world and make them available electronically. I say Scan Them All!
I say don't stop with what is sitting on the library shelves of the world, but start a World Wide Effort to get every scrap of information that resides on paper and make it electronic. Books, Magazines, Brochures, Handouts, Catalogues, and the entire output of every local copy shop on the planet. All those announcements about bake sales, rummage sales, and lost pet posters. I don't know if any of this will be significant, but I do know that if it is available, somebody a lot smarter than you or I will be able to see things that we don't.
Index and make it all searchable. Collate and store copies of everything on the Internet as well. Devote a ton of money to create electronic libraries to spider, update and back it all up. Create Root Servers to do nothing but collect and update this effort.
The debate surrounding this effort revolves around the Straightjacket of Copyright. We need to repeal current extensions and bring Copyright back to sanity. I am a proponent of 14 Years.
Owners and Holders
Copyright in it's original form, was a deal between the author, and the government that the author was a member of. Simply stated, You got a Limited Monopoly, in the case of the US, 14 years originally, to make your best deal with someone to create and market copies of your work. In return, at the end of this period, the work became Public Domain , forming a part of the intellectual capital of the society that granted you copyright.
Copyright originally covered the printed word, as the printing press was the first duplication device capable of making copies, that were for the sake of discussion, true copies. Ownership belonged to the creator. This has not changed, but the assignment of rights of duplication, the lunacy of copyright extensions, has transformed what was a simple bargain into an swirling vortex of intellectual capital kidnapping. Not only are the owners rights being trampled, but the ability of society to promote further growth of the Public Domain, our end of the bargain, which is yeast for future creators, to ferment new thought, ideas, to promote the intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth of our societies, is being held hostage by Copyright Holders, also known as Publishers.
In order to get 'published', you need to make a deal with a Publisher. Publishers are in the business of making copies of things to sell to make money. Fair enough, if it were a simple arrangement of sharing the risk of producing your work, in sufficient quantity to cover the costs of production, distribution, and enough sales to produce a profit which you would share.
This is not how it works.
It doesn't matter if it is a novel, text book, a song, play, map, photo, or motion picture, you have to assign your rights to the publisher, which gives them the power to control every aspect of your work. There are very few exceptions to this arrangement and the terms of these arrangement are never equitable to the creators.
The whole cycle of creation, publication and compensation has been one of the most inefficient business processes ever devised by mankind. As a creator, you have to search out a publisher, which puts you at a disadvantage in the first place, being put in the position of begging for attention from an industry whose primary focus is the largest quantity at the lowest possible cost. Your chances of publication, are so small as to make the lottery look much more attractive for making a living.
In addition to the gauntlet of submission, rejection, submission, review, and acceptance of your work for publication, is the hydra headed monster of subsid
That's a great idea. Maybe we can spread it a bit more widely. Let's see, given the venue, what other kinds of tags can we use? How about "uninformed speculation"? "Gratuitous insult"? "Right-wing nonsense"? "Reflexive Microsoft-bashing"?
This is Slashdot. I won't pretend to add meaningfully to the conversation if you don't pretend you're coming here for meaningful conversation, OK? And maybe start with the decaf tomorrow morning.
For starters, the way the law is written, copying appears to be protected privalege granted to the owner of the copyright. From Section 106 of the Copyright Act of 1976:
Note that the original Copyright Act of 1790, did not mention reproduction but rather just "publishing, printing, and vending."
Furthermore, all the articles that I've read that were actually written by lawyers familiar with copyright law, give me the impression that copying for personal, non-comercial use is legal only by way of various precidents, and not by statue. Furthermore, the exact boundries of personal-comercial use are still in flux. This view was held both by people who were in favor of increasing copyright protections, and by those who were in favor of increasing fair use. There was also a great deal of debate among lawyers over whether space-shifting (copying and coverting between formats for personal use) would be concidered fair-use, as no court cases had set a precident yet.
If copying was not restricted at all, then they would not be talking in this way. It would be clear that as long as it was not distributing then it was fine.
If you have any legal sources that back up the idea that copying is not illegal I would love to hear about them, but from everything I have seen, copying is illegal by default, but he most common cases have been ruled fair use, and others are simply overlooked.
Google hold copies of original works. They use these entire copies to serve up snippets to individual users. By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit.
Reviewers hold complete copies of books. They use these entire copies to serve up reviews to individual users (and often vast hordes of users at once). By serving up these reviews they are able to make sales of reviews to newspapers and magazines, as well as those magazines and newspapers selling advertising based partially on the presence of those reviews. Therefore reviewers are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit. This is the very epitome of "fair use."
This is so far from fair use it's not debatable.
You don't get to decide what's debatable, pal. Sorry to break that to you.
I can't spell it out more simply than that.
Well, I believe that is a true statement. The problem is not that you're not spelling it out simply enough. The problem is that you're wrong. What Google is doing is very analogous to the function of reviewers that we've accepted and depended on for decades.
The appropriate loop here is Think-Decide-Act, not Decide-Think-Act.
Right, so, the Washington Times is identical to slashdot. How many times do we need to repeat this?
Information IS free. It's always been free.
People create the barriers/lies/secrets/confusion that prevent you from getting to it. Google is only bypassing those barriers because the digital world we live in makes this inevitable consequence reachable.
It doesn't matter what their motive is.
DR.
How are we right thinking Americans supposed to get to our favorite op-ed page when all you commies are slowing the site down! Seriously though you have to allow authors to feed their families. It's not like they are rich Hollywood types. Google should get permission for publishing works. They would probably be suprised how many authors would freely release works!
My boy, my boy!
Pick up a good book of quotations.
You'll find a bunch of quotations - many from copyrighted works.
They are there in part so you can find something witty to say at parties (plagiarism in it's worst form) - or you can use them to find the book from which some famous quotation comes.
This seems to be no different from what Google is doing - except that they are able to produce even the most obscure quotations as well as the famous ones (that's just a much *better* dictionary of quotations - it's not logically different)...and Google has copied the books in their entierity in order to do that.
Copying those books is only illegal if:
1) The book is still in copyright...and...
2a) They don't own a copy of the book...or...
2b) They distribute copies of the book beyond what is allowed under fair use.
But Google aren't distributing copies - so as far as I can tell, so long as they buy copies of any copyrighted books they might index, they are on solid ground.
Dunno whether they do that or not.
www.sjbaker.org
The Washington Times has slightly more credibility than the Weekly World News.
To be fair, the publisher of that paper makes some of the best travel guides available. On many a road trip I have consulted "the Moonie Book" with great results. But I wouldn't consider the Washington Times to be more than an entertainment source, sort of a right wing "Onion" or "Daily Show".
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Book review magazines reproduce content for the express purpose of generating revenue (both ad-based and cover-price). We've been doing it for decades. Well covered by established fair use decisions in the courts.
Review magazines have other purposes as well, such as scholarship and research, helping consumers find content they want, etc. So does Google, scholarship and research, helping consumers find content they want, etc.
I'm pretty sure he must have meant the Post was little better than a tabloid. Of the two papers, I'd trust information from the Times long before the Post.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
First they'll scan and index books, and next thing you know they will be doing the same thing with the entire internet! Its evil I tell you, evil!
All you need to do is to break the book down into snippets, each a few lines long, and index each of those snippets seperately. Then, instead of searching the full text the way the main engine does, you can search through those snippet blocks and link back to the books Title/Author.
Since you never see the content of the next or previous snippet, it's impossible to recreate the entire book unless you already _have_ the text of the entire book.
If someone searches for the books title or author, simply show the first two or three snippets or a brief summary ('the blurb'?).
Boom, problem solved. NEXT.
It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own.
awww, shucks...
In related news: Walmart devalues mom-n-pop shops.
I consider this to be a bad trend, but I find it very annoying that those two folks are only screaming when it is their own toes that have been stepped on, and not when the toes of their neighbours are crushed. But I am not surprised.
Copyright addresses websites just fine. Viewing a webpage is well within your rights. Making a locally cached copy is very likely fair use. Displaying it publicly is a reserved right of the copyright holder, and so you can't do that.
And yes, an ISP caching my website is then redistributing my copyrighted work without my consent. That is obviously not allowed. However as the copyright holder, it is up to me to do something about it. So if I want to take the ISP to court and get a C&D filed to force them to stop distributing it I can. But who is dumb enough to do that? Why would I want to stop the ISP from doing that? I don't have to shutdown anyone violating my copyright if I don't want to.
I actually searched for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Heinlein. I was given a complete page of the book (as an image) with controls to turn to the next page. I was able to view about 5 pages before the controls were disabled. I did another search for the last line on the page I had finished and got another 5 pages. I think I got a total of 15 pages (from a 200 page book) before it said I could not have any more of that book. I tried again a day later and it still would not give me any more of the book.
From the OED: 3. a. A popular newspaper which presents its news and features in a concentrated, easily assimilable, and often sensational form, esp. one with smaller pages than those of a regular newspaper. if you're going to be obnoxious enough to correct the usage of a term with a widely understood popular meaning, at least be correct.
This is actually a question I've had for awhile, but I didn't feel like getting modded into oblivion. Everytime a thread starts on how to make money on OSS, people tend to suggest support or write books on the software.
Now, I can agree with the support, and that makes sense to me, but why shouldn't books be free and open as well? I mean, does it take any more effort to write a book than it does to write software? If the code is freely available shouldn't the book be as well?
I suppose so far as that goes, I see it only reasonable that google can release info from books that are free and open, and we simply encourage more authors to free up their work.
Aisle drink to that.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Just out of curiosity, how is this any different from what Lexis Nexis? The only difference is that the content is slightly different and the price is free?
Maybe I'm wrong, and I cetainly don't know what I'm talking about but these two services seem quite close in nature...
Discuss and attack the merits (or lack of merits) of her arguments. It's irrelevant if she's a paid shrill or not.
-Shaunak
> Google only makes available a limited selection of the book at a time. that is, you can see pages 1, 2, and 3 while I may actually see pages 100,101, and 102. If we are limited to how many pages can be seen, then clearly that is fair use.
Wrong!
A subset of pages in every book is unavailable to ALL users, period. Please read their FAQ. Anyhow, given how greedy copyright interests have upped the copyright term by about 1,000% in the last hundred years just because they wanted it, I don't have a problem taking a little back. Especially when this is the sort of progress copyright law was meant to fuel, not hinder! Using it to styme progress is contrary to the entire purpose of copyright law, and if it's going to be used that way, copyright law should be changed or abolished.
I live in the DC 'burbs, and have subscribed to -- and have been reading -- the Washington Post seven days a week for over 25 years -- since graduate school at UVa. I never thought much of the Times, largely for the reasons you cited. However, I recently was involved in a neighborhood protest against something the local government was doing, and this got reported both in the Post and the Times, along with a couple of other local papers. I have to say that I was astonished at how badly the Post slanted things. I was sitting next to a neighbor as he talked to the Post reporter on the phone for nearly an hour. The single quote that wound up in the story took one small sentence fragment out of a point that took my neighbor a paragraph to state. Stripped of all context, my neighbor's words appeared to say exactly the opposite of what he'd been saying for the entire interview -- the words were his understanding of what *other people* were saying about the issue. The distortions in that story were reprehensible, but the Post refused to carry a correction or a letter from my neighbor objecting to the article.
By contrast, the Times got it almost exactly right -- on both sides of the argument. And when they were told, by another neighbor, about a comparitively small error, the both printed a correction *and* a letter. This was enough to get me to buy a subscription to the Times and start seriously reading it for the first time. Yes, there is more of a conservative slant on things, especially in the opinions, columns, and story selection. But they also have *more* space for opinion than in the Post, and the opinions don't always agree with one another. The Times also is often intensely critical of the Bush administration.
I have no idea how much influence the moonies actually have in the operation of that paper. One friend that I trust had worked with them on some internal financial matters, and claims to have seen no evidence of it. But the more I read the paper, the more respect I have for them. In any event, we do need a paper to tell the side of the story that the Post is ignoring, or even actively distorting. Still, it *is* a shame shame that it has to come to us in a moonie-sponsered form.
Um... is there really much difference between DC journalism and the tabloids these days?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Doing anything like, oh... buying the book?
While O'Reilly Books are seriously cool people, they aren't publishing just for the fun of it. They're out to make some money (although they're not completely averse to having fun while doing it). They're also, judging by bookshelves in local geek circles and by the cover prices I've been paying, doing a decent job of it.
So why does O'Reilly Books have the entire (conventional) index of a HELL of a lot of their books available on the web? Free. No charge. Google searchable even. Why? Well, they might be trying to drum up interest in the Safari on-line library, but I don't think that's it. I think that, like Baen's Free Library, they "expect this to make us money by selling books".
I would also suggest you (and Schroeder and Barr) play with Google Scholar before sounding off. Google is already indexing copyrighted materials, many of which are in journals that cost a couple hundred bucks a year to subscribe to. However, they don't show the full text of the article in many cases (unless the publisher wants to). You will see the usual two lines worth of context, and there's usually a link to an abstract. If you search from a .edu IP address, your school may have a electronic subscription that Google will link to. Otherwise... get up off your lazy backside and get thee to a library. When Schroeder and Barr are wondering what Google may mean by "Snippets", this ought to give them a clue about what Google plans to do. Google's lawyers are not stupid; I'd be suprised if even full paragraphs show up on material not yet lasped to the public domain.
I'll also note that Google Scholar has a distinct lack of ads on it. The Google Library might not be ad-free, but it will probably be limited to ads trying to sell books or related materials. Gee, what might that do for the publishing industry?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
If this is the quality of the scanned documents then I don't think the publishers have much to be concerned about.
I think the commentators who authored this piece are confused about the purpose of Google. They say "Google envisions a world in which all content is free" -ie, Google's purpose is to make all the world's content free.
Google's mission statement says "Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
The goal is not to make all content free- the goal is to make all content able to be found.
I say Google is a glimpse of the future. Let's quantify the creative output of humanity, both cumulative and instantaneous. There is a trend. What I'm alluding to is the possibility of a pattern or set of predictive rules that can tell us how to compute the next output of the most useful creativity (while ignoring the junk). If the knowledge of humanity is computerized systematically - cue in Google - it can be combined to produce valuable opinions. Google Print is a technology that analyzes useful combinations of knowledge while Google cache is a vast receptacle of human knowledge.
Currently the technology is really basic but once the computerization reaches a certain level, the chains of reasoning and knowledge manipulation leading from raw ideas towards deeply creative works can be studied. This study can lead to a set of rules that suggest efficient or powerful combinations of ideas.
Will this lead to computer understanding or computer creativity? Creativity can be simulated but understanding is more difficult to evaluate. For one thing, if suggestions of computer creativity occur, a major effort in computer understanding will have to be done. A computer can behave as though it understands fundamental axioms of geometry and set theory, especially those axioms that are used in every day activities. Essentially a computer would enumerate small objects. A class in C++ is made of a data structure and a set of methods. If a computer can enumerate and evaluate small data structures along with short methods, it will basically sort objects according to any programmer-controlled criteria. Then the computer can use the most interesting classes, which lie at the extremes of the sort order, to manage inputs from the real world. The computer would exhibit a particular behavior, and if this behavior is constructive, it may be said to understand.
The other day I heard a name, Chindia. Who is this? Cynthia? No, it is the combined impacts of the economies China and India! The very symbolism of the third world being raised by technology to become an economic player. Now are people going to truck books into the hinterland or do they run cables? The cables will go in long before the books. My prediction is a system like Google Print will cause creativity, especially in the hyperactive developed countries, the likes of which have not often been seen. Chindia is capable of relegating more and more products into the dollar stores. What people have left to trade with is their creative output. Google Print enables Chindia to export their creativity too!!
I've been hearing other things, like "as it is above, so it is below." Human intelligence is being taxed to its limits for the sake of individual economic position while computer intelligence threatens to take over menial decision making. At the same time, the Internet will inhibit people from getting paid for their labors! What is the world coming to? Well, regardless of who should be paid, which is the distribution of scarce resources, there are some fundamentals.
The most worthy recipients of wealth could be judged by natural market forces to be those that create the most effective knowledge, that is, knowledge publically computed to be the greatest necessity of a class of good or service. Like the game Monopoly everyone may periodically receive an equal sum of money and stock in all economic arenas. It may be possible for anyone to simply survive on this income, but the fiercest competitors would as always get the most. How much will the arts be worth? Perhaps next to nothing. Algorithms will exist to generate art of any caliber and people won't know the difference between human generated and computer generated. One day it may be the most amazing art will be computer generated. Art = algorithm.
We expect Google to reflect our own handling of knowledge and information. What we want to do with knowledge should be done by Google. It's an inevitable output of our creativity and intelligence. Isn't that what we've been taught as children, to be human and achieve more than the average animal?
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
The parent poster is right. This issue was already decided in UMG vs. MP3.com, the case about whether My.MP3.com was legal or not. The judge decided that MP3.com was in violation of copyrights, and that its use was NOT fair, since it was copying entire works and doing so for commercial purposes. This is a pretty clear precedent. Using Google Print may be fair use, but operating Google Print is not: Google is copying entire works for commercial purposes.
Google's lawyers must be hitting the bong if they think they'll win any case brought against them. The precedent is clear.
I just tried out Google Print with a search for my last name of Cootey. There aren't many of us out there (The family left no trace of its past in Ireland), so I didn't expect to see much. Imagine my surprise when the first page was filled with books containing my last name. But each hit - specifically highlighting the word "Cootey" in the search results - actually linked to the word "Cooley" upon investigation.
Many authors may be throwing their hats into the "Google Print is EVIL!!!" ring, but many more will scream far louder when they discover that Google Print has such a sloppy search algorithm that their works can't be found. If Google Web returned as many false positives as Google Print does nobody could use it to find anything. In fact, Google Web would have been just as useless as all the other search engines in 1995 & 1996...
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
The point of copyright on books is to increase innovation and protect authors from being ripped off. There is nothing per se in full text indexing of all books and online access that makes it impossible for authors to get paid for their efforts or that in any way I see decreases innovation. What will happen soon, though not because of Google really, is that the publisher middlemen will be seen as obsolete in most respects. Authors would potentially get more readers and income if their works were preserved indefinitely and easily found by a simple search. While the details of the compensation model[s] need to be worked out the end result is a win for everyone except those with outmoded business models.
And of course Google is not even proposing anything this extreme. They are proposing simple indexing and excerpts. I fail to see how that is a threat to anyone.
Anyone know how to do a search on print.google.com and get public domain books? I haven't been able to find public domain Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde.....driving me batty trying...
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
"It would completely devalue everyone else's property and massively increase the value of its own."
This happens every day with real property (i.e. the stuff you live on.) Just the other day Phoenix rezoned a piece of property which had a building height limitation to allow for the building of a skyscrapper. The property is adjacent to a large number of one story individual homes. The property value of the homes will surely be devalued while the property on which the skyscrapper will be built will massively increase in value. Basically, the developer (Trump) effectively sucked the value out of the neighborhood surrounding the new skyscrapper and put into his pocket. The City of Phoenix declared this was okay since it brought "progress"(i.e. increase tax revenue). Even if one takes the authors comments on Google as true there is nothing new here. The only difference is they get to whine about it in the Post. Most other real property owners would not even get the time of day to whine about having their properties devalued.
---I think you are speaking without sufficient knowledge---
Really? Well, as an editor with a major publishing firm, and as an author of a textbook, this is a subject to which I've paid a great deal of attention. Let's take a look at your statements:
---Google is agreeing to compensate the publishers (based on a "percentage of profits", as you put it)---
No, they are not. Google is not offering compensation for the inclusion of material. Google is not offering the copyright holders any percentage of ad sale revenue.
---and is also agreeing to allow authors and publishers to opt out.---
Yes, and this is exactly the problem that the publishers are suing over. They feel it should be strictly opt in. Which is ironic, because (in the case of the Author's Guild), participation in their lawsuit is stricly opt out. Since search engines all function on an opt out basis, any ruling that says that opt in is required would affect them as well.
---The last discussion I read about it even said that Google was offering to exclude advertising from this project so that they would not be making any direct profits.---
There are two projects involved here, Google Library, and Google Print. Google Library will be done in conjunction with university libraries and will not feature ads. Google Print will feature ads.
---The people who are most upset by the coming changes are the ones who stand to lose the most, which is clearly the publishers in this case. They have an existing business model which has worked quite well, to the tune of billions of dollars.---
Clearly you do not understand the motivation behind these lawsuits. Take a look at this set of links, showing a nice balance of arguments on both sides, from people within the publishing industry. You'll note that every single one of them, including those arguing against Google, admit that the issue comes down to the use of content without compensation, not some fear that this will harm book sales. This is not about messing with the business model, this is about wanting a piece of the action, a cut of the money Google stands to make from ad sales. They all know that this service means higher book sales, but that's not enough for them.
--- If it was at all possible, they would like to stop the clock at the moment of maximum cash flow.---
If that was the case, they would have stopped things years and years ago, as book sales continue to plummet.
I wonder if the contention isn't over another kind of control, promotion. The book publishers not only want you to read their books, they also want you reading their latest books, and the ones by their famous authors. They don't want you to do a search and find that a book from the 1960's has better coverage of World War II than their latest one that was co-written by Stephen Hawkings. Some authors may only owe a cut of the profits for X amount of years. After X years, the publishing companies would frankly prefer that book to disappear from sight. Therefore, even if Google only allowed searches and didn't display the few lines of coverage, I could still see these book companies calling foul on them.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Each time a search was run on Gbooks, they'd send a researcher (or a pigeon) out into a public library to find the book, read it to find the section that closely matched what you wanted, and then return the excerpt to you.
It'd be the same as if you paid someone to do a literature review on a given subject for you.
The result to the end user would be the same, except that this would obviously take much longer. I'm not sure i see a huge difference how the end is reached, only that the result it the same.
After all, data isn't physical, and ownership is imaginary (an agreement between people at most), so don't expect an argument about copyright laws to be fruitful. The concern for /. lovers should be - are there any hacks for print.google?
Try the title: Camus, (my favorite author from the days when I used to read books) (To get very far you'll need to login with one of your Google accounts.)
Some pages have "restricted content"; they're not there, that is.
And rightclick is prohibited all over. I assume Google is trying to inhibit copy & paste. Of course I can save the page on my drive, but the main part, using div class="theimg" ,seems to be print_files/cleardot.gif (Clear Document Template, I imagine), and there's nothing to that. If I open what I stored on my HD with Dreamweaver MX 2004, the main section doesn't display anything but a blank. If I open the stored file with Firebox 1.5 beta, the main section displays.
I can save the page as an image via using the Print Screen key and then pasting into a graphics program, but that's as far as I've gotten.
Someone more knowledgeable can explain how Google's page replaces cleardot.gif with text. Or to rephrase the question, How would you copy the text part of one of these print.google pages?
(||) Nehmo (||)
--- The book publishers not only want you to read their books, they also want you reading their latest books, and the ones by their famous authors---
I'm not sure why you'd think that. For the famous authors, they're going to get better terms in their contracts with publishers than unknowns, which means less profit available for the publishers. I guess perhaps there's some economy of scale involved (large print run means lower costs per book means more profit).
But as far as new books versus back catalog, I don't really see much difference (and I work for a publisher). Each copy of any book sold means more profit, so either is good, no real differentiation between the two streams of money rolling in where one is preferred to the other.
Perhaps a better argument would be that the publishers don't want you to know about competing books. They figure they're doing a good job promoting their book on subject X, and without Google you might not find out about the other 10 books on the subject, and go ahead and buy their inferior book.
But those are all minor points when compared with the big one--Google will make billions of dollars off of this project, and the publishers and other various copyright holders want a cut. I personally think Google is within their fair use rights and doesn't owe them squat, but we'll have to wait and see what a court says.
Regardless of the actual definition, I think it's fairly well understand that "tabloid", as a slang term, means "newspaper full of trashy crap like alien babies and elvis sightings".
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
Copyright encourages monopolies and an economy of artificial scarcity. In a world filled with billions of creative minds, is that apparatus usefull? Does it not encourage advertising, lowest denominator, celebrity for the sake of celebrity?
Let's hope in the future and internet! Will it unleash or crush?
What a wonderful world you imagine. What's going to pay the bills?
How would those people who write for any type of press ever get paid?
<joke class="stupid">Maybe this is what they mean by the "semantic web".</joke>
Bah. <a_slashdot_first>You're right.</a_slashdot_first> <excessive_honesty>I don't come here for learned discourse. I come here to find people saying stuff I rabidly disagree with, then try to nail them.</excessive_honesty>
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
How is what Google is doing any different than Amazon's offering clips of an albums songs? Have any of these writers actually bothered to read Google's "help" about google print? See number seven! I quote:
I really need to see more of this book. What can I do?
Google Print helps you discover books, not read them online. To read the whole book, we encourage you to use the "Buy this book" link to purchase it online or the "Find this in a library" link to look for a local library that has it.
Is there a process for them to become established with a content license similar to that of a library? Libraries recieve book donations all the time and then index them (and provide a librarian!) so you can use your paid membership to borrow and read them. Not only are they enabling you to make copies, but they are providing you the content. How does the law work for libraries? If all else fails could they not simply purchase a copy of each book? Then there would not be much one could say about their fair use of the content that they own, since they are not redistributing it. People make profit from content they have purchased all the time, without reselling the content itself. They don't go back to the author of the book they used as the cornerstone of their research and give him half their Pulitzer prize money. I sure hope that the emphasis is on the content and their use of it, as opposed to what they are enabling others to do with it. I am really sick of the law getting involved in 'enabling technologies' and shutting them down, they hurt the world as a whole when they do this. Napster, torrents etc allow people to obtain illegal content. Guns allow people to put holes in other people. Shovels allow people to bury people with holes in them and get away scott free. Latex allows peopel to commit crimes without leaving finger prints. Get rid of that and prom's across America will instantly become less fun.
The amount of idiots posting here is truely amazing. Google is trying to make money off the backs of people who's work they will use without permission, and without renumeration. The author's lose money, google makes money, and even less people who can write well, will.
But hey! Who cares? Everyone here is just a lazy 16 year old who cracks, hacks, and otherwise refuses to pay for anything anymore! So what if all the creative people decide not to create anymore? You have your gameboy, your 'pron' and a tight grip...
Man you people are so freakin' dumb. Any of you ever make it thru the 6th grade? Study history? WORK?
Is it allright if I buy a DVD and daily put up 3 second clips from it online?
I just took your post and printed it on a t-shirt. MUAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
Anybody else notice that the majority of the facts in the article were BS? "Meanwhile Google will gain a huge new revenue stream by selling ad space on library search results. Selling ads on its search engine is how Google makes 99 percent of its billions. " Anybody else recall Google explicity stating that there would be no ads on book results? "The creators and owners of these copyrighted works will not be compensated, nor has Google defined what a "snippet" is: a paragraph? A page? A chapter? A whole book?" Didn't they state at some point that there would be at most 3 paragraphs? With limits on the number of pages one person would be able to view in a set period of time. " And have you ever tried to get a live person on the phone at an Internet company? " Not really sure what this has to do with anything... unless they've never been on google. I mean... a link like https://print.google.com/publisher/exclusion-signu p might ive some information about how to get a book removed without having to make somethin as draconian as a phone call...
The corner of a round room
I only consider an organisation a cult if they engage in aggressive intimidation of their members. And it has to verge on physical violence because otherwise we should just include almost all religions since in most cases members tend to shun those who leave the fold, and that is a form of intimidation.
Did you even read what you wrote? Let's look at this.
/on/ the subject matter, not a regurgitation of it.
...but it is that 'regurgitation' that is fair use, not your flawed-in-so-many-ways argument.
A reviewer then creates original thought
You seem to be saying that the original thought is the protected use,
They may well use snippets of quotes from the original material in producing the review,
But then you admit that the regurgitation is the fair use, not the original thought,
Way to kick yourself in the nuts, there. I agree, it is the 'regurgitation' that is protected. That regurgitation is exactly what Google is offering. The structure of your sentence implies that you think I was saying that my "flawed-in-so-many-ways argument" was fair use, rather than the regurgitation on which we concur. My argument is not a fair use, it's an argument about a fair use. (I like the "flawed-in-so-many-ways" insult but it would have been better if it had been in a coherently composed sentence.)
Seriously, what were you smoking when you set up this paper house 'justification'?
I wasn't smoking anything, I don't smoke. I was thinking objectively. You should try it, it's amazingly powerful. I see you called my argument a paper house justification. I also note that you were so busy trying to be clever that you didn't really point out any flaw in my argument, apparently because you do not understand the concepts involved. You actually agreed with me before you tried to insult me.
You shouldn't be too hard on yourself, though. Keep trying, you'll get it. I am sure that the image I have of you in my head is not accurate.
...looked at the service in question? It's up in beta now, at http://print.google.com/
s t&btnG=Search+Print&hl=en)
When you search for a phrase, you see, at the most, something like three pages. Oh, and theres also the table of contents. It's like flipping though a book at Borders. Helpful for deciding if you need to look into getting a copy, not helpful if you want to sit there and read the whole thing. Plus, you need to sign in with an account, so they can track how many pages you've seen.
Also, I think Google needs to look at what stuff is *out* of copyright. Try looking up Oliver Twist.(http://print.google.com/print?q=oliver+twi
Even though the book is out of copyright and you can read the whole thing on Project Gutenburg, they have a "Penguin Classics" version up. In this edition, you can only browse though the table of contents, even though the full thing is out of copyright. Hello? Google needs to stop with this nonsense and put up the PG version (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/730) instead.
We've been working on this problem since Amazon released Search Inside the Book; we brought together experts from both ends of the copyright spectrum, and have developed a solution, called the COCOA (Copyright Owners' Control of Access) standard.
See http://www.copyrightaccess.com/ for details (and if you support it, please sign our petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/cocoa/petition.html) .
Some notes-- COCOA does not inhibit indexing, searching, or displaying text snippet search results.
On the contrary, COCOA will result in far more books and more pages being available, legally.
Please read how COCOA works at the site, read the FAQ, and by all means ask via the comment form on the site if you have questions. There have unfortunately been a number of misconceptions of what COCOA is or how it works. So, if COCOA somehow doesn't look good to you, please ask for clarification since COCOA was specifically designed to satisfy just about everyone regardless where they stand on copyright matters.
Thanks for having a look (and signing the petition and spreading the word, if you're so inclined),
--Dr. Andrew Burt,
Chair, The COCOA Association