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Ruling May Impact Google Book Search Case
jsherman256 wrote to mention an NYT article discussing another possible problem on Google's legal front. A court decision in another case may spell trouble for their 'book search' technology. "In the recent case, Judge A. Howard Matz of United States District Court for the Central District of California, said Google's use of thumbnail-sized reproductions in its image search program violated the copyright of Perfect 10, a publisher of X-rated magazines and Web sites, because it undermined that company's ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users ... 'I think it takes the wind out of their sails,' Jan Constantine, the general counsel for the Authors Guild, said of the Perfect 10 decision. The guild and the Association of American Publishers brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Google over its Book Search program."
No, they're planning to sell individual sentences, just like Google Book Search displays.
At just 10 cents a sentence, reading books on your mobile phone is going to be even more popular than getting the latest ringtones!
Whether the images were pirated or not is not Google's problem. They should inform Google (who would doubtless take down the images) and go after the pirates. Google has no way of knowing who in the slimy world of online porn is the copyright owner, who is licensed, who is using stuff under fair use, and who is a "pirate".
The judge made a mistake. Google's thumbnails were not the same thumbnails. They were a different expression of the same idea. Sleazy, but not illegal.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Why doesn't Google just super-impose "Copyrighted" on the thumbnail images? That way people really wouldn't want to use them for cell phones since they are distorted.
I somehow doubt that the original conceivers of copyright law intended for most of the world's works to be locked up in 'corporate vaults' never to see the light of day again because the estimated potential profits off of those works were considered too small to be worth it. But publishers, especially bigger ones, only seem to care about the most profitable mass-market stuff. Why don't they team up with Google to sell electronic versions of those books that are OOP? They could surely make a killing ... but perhaps those companies tend to be too conservative and risk-averse.
There's missing a key point:
Perfect 10 blocked Google from indexing the site.
Third party copied the content and put it on their own site.
Google indexed that third parties site (not perfect 10's) compounding a existing copyright violation.
Whereas the book publishers can simply tell Google which books they don't want scanned and so they've given implicit permission by refusing to list those books.
Since fair use is a value judgement made by a judge interpreting a vague law, he sided with Perfect 10, but the same situation doesn't with the book publishers.
Book publishers have the means to exclude electronic searching as well, and have used this for as long as I know. (does that show my age?)
It's in the disclaimer, which almost all books I know have somewhere on the first few pages. Relevnt part of it reads (approximately):
"No part of this publication may be reproduced, either in part or in full, either photographically, electronically, or by any other means, without express permission of the publisher."
There you have it, the dead-tree equivalent of 'robots.txt'.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
There's no question that Google will benefit financially from Google Book Search. Google's program is commercial; it will make money selling ads on its search pages. There's no question that Google Book Search will infringe copyright. The question is whether Google's infringement is fair use. Part of the determination of whether copyright infringement is fair use goes to the potential of that infringement to cause economic harm to the copyright holder. If Google can index the complete text of a book without paying the author, the author can't sell that right to another party.
In the Perfect 10 case, Perfect 10 claimed Google's thumbnails interfere with its ability to sell its own thumbnails to cellphone companies. It's not clear to me that the Authors' Guild will be able to point to so specific an instance of economic harm. OTOH, the courts are generally reluctant to try to anticipate the market. Who's to say book search indexes that will pay authors for the right to include their texts won't spring up? I think the AG can probably make a compelling argument that Google's infringement chokes off the potential for authors to make money directly from selling this right, even if no one is putting money on the table right now. But that argument might not be compelling enough for things to go the authors' way.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
"If I were Google, I would just drop perfect 10 from their search results entirely. I bet this would lose them more sales than thumbnails ever would."
Yeah sure, that would work. I'm sure Google going, "you mess with us, you're off the grid" is just the news that the ever-increasing number of people wary of Google's growing clout are just waiting for.
What next? Google removing Reporters without Borders from their index because they complained about their China policies?