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.

Comments

Indexing or Caching?

[sbaker]

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.

Re:Indexing or Caching?

[scolby]

There is a HUGE difference between indexing a web site and indexing a printed work.
Indexing a web site leads people to that actual web site, encouraging the user to do the things that will make money for that web site. In this case, Google makes money helping others make money.
Indexing a printed work in no leads to the user actually doing anything that will make money for the person(s) responsible for that work. Although Google makes money in this scenario, the owners of that content do not. This is what we call exploitation.
And I wholeheartedly agree with your opinion of the cache.

Re:Indexing or Caching?

[WindBourne]

You have already said that indiexing is fair use. In order to index, they need the whole book.

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.

Now, the argument is that I can piece the book together via the google mechanism. Yes, that is true. It is work on my part, but it can occur. Of course, I can also scan it myself. The very nature of doing that, though, indicates that I am the one breaking the copyright. In both cases, I had to work at breaking the copyright mechanism.

So no, Google is not breaching copyright.

Re:Indexing or Caching?

[div_2n]

The Internet is an entirely new medium for which copyright laws as they were written prior to its creation do not adequately address its operation and functionality. For example, I can view a web page by which the content is literally copied to my computer in order for me to read it. I COULD leave that web page up indefinitely on my machine. Just for fun, I could load up a page on a public terminal and leave it for all who walk by to view. Heck, even some of the images may be cached on my machine locally. Maybe I run an ISP and I have a proxy in place that caches most of the entire web page. By your definition and that of copyright law, the use of a caching proxy server is copyright violation.

It seems to me that if a content provider of a web page doesn't want their pages cached either by my machine, my proxy or even Google that they should employ a robots.txt file AND password protect the site to keep Google out. Otherwise the Internet is basically no different than putting stacks of fliers (web pages) everywhere and being upset if someone takes (types in a URL) more than one (caching) to give to their friends (serving cached pages).

Intellectual Property FUD

[It doesn't come easy]

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).

Re:Intellectual Property FUD

[EpsCylonB]

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.

But what if the law is wrong ?. Copyright was originally supposed to be a contract between an artist and soceity, the deal is that your work will be protected for a period of time in order to encourage you to make further cultural contributions. How many of these books that google is scanning are over 30 years old ?, has the author not had enough time to profit from his work ?.

Copyright in the US (and also in the UK shamefully) is now effectively infinite. Copyright is a anti capitalist monopoly that rewards people for the work of others and puts a price on our culture. Imagine if shaespeare's plays were under copyright today.

One of the great ironies of this copyright law is that Disney, one of the main proponents of extensions, would have been unable to rip off the all those fairy tales had todays copyright laws existed a 100 years ago.

Libraries are terrible, terrible institutions.

[Jerk City Troll]

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!

You can take the politician out of politics......

[carlos_benj]

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.....

You are confusing two issues

[Darius Jedburgh]

There are two issues here: whether or not Google is breaching fair use, and whether or not they are enabling Google users to breach fair use. By providing only snippets Google are encouraging end users to make fair use of texts. But the question of whether or not Google is breaching copyright does not hinge on what their end users do. The fact is: in order to make available snippets to end users they hold entire copies of the original works. So let me spell this out clearly: 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. This is so far from fair use it's not debatable. So Google are clearly in breach of copyright even though the end users aren't. I can't spell it out more simply than that. The only reason Google have survived this far is that they have encouraged confusion, in the eyes of onlookers, between the notion of fair use by the end user and the notion of fair use by themselves.

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.

Re:You are confusing two issues

[mikehdow]

I agree. It seems that many people are missing the point that Google would now be making money off books when the writers of the books should be. If Google would like to provide this service -- and it would be a great service to its users -- they need to pay royalties. I wish people would see the middle ground -- that Google pay royalties. Instead, many are taking the extreme and saying that those who are seeking to protect authors are effectively preventing a great service to the world's population from being made available. The fact that Google wants to provide this type of service is great; however, they need to share the wealth with those whose content they are using.

Re:You are confusing two issues

[bitingduck]

By serving up snippets they are able to make sales of advertising. Therefore Google are using entire copies of copyrighted material for commercial benefit. This is so far from fair use it's not debatable.

Yes, it is debatable. They aren't republishing the entire book.

If their potentially infringing use decreases the value of the original (i.e. makes a user of gBooks not want to get a copy of the original) then it's probably infringing. If their use increases the likelihood that someone will want to get the original, then it's probably not infringing.

Book reviews depend on this-- they excerpt things all the time without needing permission. The whole point of book reviews is to help evaluate whether you want to get a book or not. They also make a profit from republishing snippets, but it's certainly not infringing. Authors don't see a penny of that unless it encourages someone to go out and buy the book.

What Google is doing is providing customized excerpts based on what you're looking for. In all probability it will increase sales for books that it indexes-- there are plenty of times that I haven't bought a book online because I couldn't tell if it included what I wanted. Then I check it out in person at a bookstore if it's available. If it's not, then I just don't buy it.

And as a side note, bookstores already provide a service that allows you to do what people are afraid Google will enable, and possibly for less effort. If you're a reasonably quick reader it's not hard to read an entire book (or at least as much as you want) in a single bookstore visit. There are plenty of books that I've read in the bookstore that I didn't buy.

Making full copies may be irrelevant- libraries routinely make full copies of damaged books that are out of print in order to preserve their content.

Copyright wasn't intended to give authors absolute control over the ability to profit from their content. It strikes a balance (at least it used to) between protecting authors' ability to profit and the benefit to society of having things made publicly available.

I'll spell this out even more clearly. I have written book X recently...[lots of stuff cut out for space]... And there's certain no law that compels me to accept free advertising in recompense for abuse of my copyright.

Ok, so suppose your Book X is on the shelf at the library and I decide to read it there and write a review of it. I pull out a couple of excerpts and include them in the review. I sell this review to some book of reviews, who then publish it with ads. They and I have both profited from your book, and you don't see a penny (except from the single sale to the library). That's free advertising for your book, and there's nothing you can say or do about it- it falls under fair use. I can even say your book sucks in the review, and it's still fair use.

In fact, I just did something like that in this post-- if you read "The Fine Print" at the top of all the replies, all your comments belong to you. I just excerpted your copyrighted material (I could even have fairly included the whole thing, but it would have been annoying for other readers) to write a negative review of it, and Slashdot profits from it.

Re:You are confusing two issues

[robertjw]

In neither of these cases are there copies made. Google is making copies!!! If you fail to see that difference you really amazes me. It is the creation of those copies that are the copyright infringement.

Actually, I do see the difference. The the parent's example the publishers lost a sale because a consumer purchased the book in a secondary market. Google does NOT intend to redistribute content. They are making ONE copy of each book for their own used, not to resell. Now they are going to use that content to enhance their searches, but I don't know if that's against fair use.

The publishers are just pissed that Google's making money and they aren't, it has nothing to do with copyright or fair use. If it's such an issue, why don't they just encourage all of their authors to opt-out and setup their own search index to compete. That's not what they want at all, they just want a bigger piece of the pie than they are already going to get from purchases of searched books. Don't assign altruistic values to the publishing companies, they are just greedy like everyone else.

Is it always in the interest of content providers?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

When someone puts something on the Web, they have agreed to try to make it visible,

...on their web site...

and Google is serving their interests by making it more visible.

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:

• potential financial damage (for example, not seeing ads on the original site)
• potential disruption of feedback (not getting an accurate idea of numbers of page impressions, click-throughs, referrers, etc.)
• presenting out of date or incorrect information that's been removed from the real site.

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.

R.I.P. Copyright

[dada21]

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.