Google Book Search Settlement Receiving Criticism

waderoush writes "While James Gleick, Lawrence Lessig, and other pundits have reacted positively to this week's proposed settlement of the publishing industry's lawsuit against Google over the Google Book Search project, a deeper study of the agreement turns up some worrisome provisions that could make online access to books much more costly and difficult than it needs to be. Harvard University's libraries, for example, declined to endorse the settlement over concerns that it provides no mechanism for keeping the cost of access to books reasonable. And while the parties to the settlement have made much of the clause providing public libraries with free full-text access to Google's database of over 7 million out-of-print books, Xconomy has a post pointing out that this access is restricted to exactly one Google terminal per library. So, you can read books for free — as long as you're the first person to get to your public library's computer room in the morning."

Comments

Worse than that!

[Dan East]

"So, you can read books for free â" as long as you're the first person to get to your public library's computer room in the morning."

It's much worse than that. If you were to read those same books electronically from the comfort and convenience of your own home, then your eyeballs would explode and your body would spontaneously combust, possibly killing your entire family and burning down your house. At least that's the only reasonable explanation I can think of for why I would have to sit in front of a computer in the library to access an online resource instead of using my own computer.

Ah, well... RMS seems to have been right again.

[Forty Two Tenfold]

The right to read.

Re:Library, n. 1) A place to keep books.

[Sen.NullProcPntr]

Or, y'know, if you... check out a copy of the book. 'cause that's what libraries are for.

I think the point is that the books are out of print so probably the library doesn't have a hard copy.

Massive parallelization of libraries?

[pfbram]

Well, maybe libraries need to build a string of tiny booths outdoors, each with a little consecutively numbered sign: Library 0, Library 1...Library N and one terminal, comfortable chair and window in each of them. It would seem to meet the letter of the agreement. ;-)

Common sense revolts

[mcgrew]

I've been reading Lessig's Free Culture (available online somewhere; I have a local copy). From the preface:

On December 17, 1903, on a windy North Carolina beach for just shy of one hundred seconds, the Wright brothers demonstrated that a heavier-than-air, self-propelled vehicle could fly. The moment was electric and its importance widely understood. Almost immediately, there was an explosion of interest in this newfound technology of manned flight, and a gaggle of innovators began to build upon it.

At the time the Wright brothers invented the airplane, American law held that a property owner presumptively owned not just the surface of his land, but all the land below, down to the center of the earth, and all the space above, to "an indefinite extent, upwards."1 For many years, scholars had puzzled about how best to interpret the idea that rights in land ran to the heavens. Did that mean that you owned the stars? Could you prosecute geese for their willful and regular trespass?

Then came airplanes, and for the first time, this principle of American law--deep within the foundations of our tradition, and acknowledged by the most important legal thinkers of our past--mattered. If my land reaches to the heavens, what happens when United flies over my field? Do I have the right to banish it from my property? Am I allowed to enter into an exclusive license with Delta Airlines? Could we set up an auction to decide how much these rights are worth?

In 1945, these questions became a federal case. When North Carolina farmers Thomas Lee and Tinie Causby started losing chickens because of low-flying military aircraft (the terrified chickens apparently flew into the barn walls and died), the Causbys filed a lawsuit saying that the government was trespassing on their land. The airplanes, of course, never touched the surface of the Causbys' land. But if, as Blackstone, Kent, and Coke had said, their land reached to "an indefinite extent, upwards," then the government was trespassing on their property, and the Causbys wanted it to stop.

The Supreme Court agreed to hear the Causbys' case. Congress had declared the airways public, but if one's property really extended to the heavens, then Congress's declaration could well have been an unconstitutional "taking" of property without compensation. The Court acknowledged that "it is ancient doctrine that common law ownership of the land extended to the periphery of the universe." But Justice Douglas had no patience for ancient doctrine. In a single paragraph, hundreds of years of property law were erased. As he wrote for the Court,

[The] doctrine has no place in the modern world. The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea. To recognize such private claims to the airspace would clog these highways, seriously interfere with their control and development in the public interest, and transfer into private ownership that to which only the public has a just claim.2

"Common sense revolts at the idea."

He's no Isaac Asimov; the book isn't exactly gripping, but what he has to say is incredibly important.

Ironically, searching Google Books for Lessig's freely available book yields this: "This is a preview. The total pages displayed will be limited."

You can read/download it here at. Here is a PDF version.

Re:Inter-Library Loan

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing says "great" like forcing cash-starved public institutions to ship wood pulp back and forth to get those words to me, to preserve the vanishingly small chance a publisher may decide to start printing those words again someday.

Re:First lender.

[morgan_greywolf]

Many libraries either have the CDROMs mounted on a disc changer, or the content served out from a network share. They have special licensing terms for libraries to allow them to do this. Some like ProQuest or EBSCO provide that licensing at reduced cost or sometimes even no charge for certain libraries, in the name of being 'good corporate citizens'.

(I have two friends who are both librarians)

Re:Library, n. 1) A place to keep books.

[rezalas]

'out of print' by definition means they aren't making any more money on this book... which means they don't deserve money from a settlement. "We don't find value in printing this book anymore" should mean it defaults to public domain and becomes free access. Anything else sounds like just another abuse of copyright in my opinion.

OUT OF PRINT

[sexconker]

Why do people keep thinking out of print means impossible to find, not being sold, etc?

OUT OF PRINT means it's NOT BEING PRINTED.

Current copies can be sold.
If those are gone (VERY rarely does a book actually sell out. Even rarer is a book selling out, and a publisher not immediately printing more.), the used market kicks in.
Libraries are just that - LIBRARIES. They collect books, and they just happen to let you check them out for a while.

Books go out of print and are reprinted later all the time. They are printed for different countries. They are collected into compilations or collections, which are printed when finished. They are updated by the author, and a new revision is printed. They are reprinted when the author writes a new book or a sequel, wins an award, dies, the book is turned into a movie, etc.

Out of print means just that.
There is currently not a printing press making new copies of the book. Copies are often hard to acquire from a store, and maybe even a library. But all you nerds have this thing called the internet where you can get together and buy and trade things.

I seem to recall a certain website named after a certain river/rain forest/tribe of warrior women getting it's fucking start by making is vastly easier to access books in general.

Re:Library, n. 1) A place to keep books.

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting as AC because I modded this thread)

I think you are the one who is guilty of being an idiot. By your logic anything in the public domain should still rightfully be protected by copyright, because someone somewhere may still make a profit from it.

Good luck telling your grandchildren why they can't read any of the Grimm fairy tales because every edition since before the first world war is still under copyright but out of print.

Everyone should pay more attention to where our copyright laws are going, because it has all been foretold by RMS.

Re:Library, n. 1) A place to keep books.

[sexconker]

Wrong.
Information doesn't want anything.
Certain people want information to be free.

Re:Library, n. 1) A place to keep books.

[sexconker]

No, they anthropomorphize information as wanting to be free, so that they can disassociate themselves from their desire for information to be free, and thus claim it as an accepted truth.

In this way, they seek to paint themselves in a positive light as defenders of information and champions for its freedom. In reality, they're almost always deriding copyright and censorship, and often supporting piracy.

I often hate copyright law. I hate all censorship. I may or may not yarr on occasion. But I'm up front about it. I don't hide behind useless catch phrases that make claims of playing "backups" of games or movies look plausible.

I believe you're the one missing the point.

Re:Library, n. 1) A place to keep books.

[Maguscrowley]

Some people need it spelled out to them.

The 'wants' in the sentence "Information wants to be free" is a metaphor for natural tendency. Hence the following sentence water 'wants' to run down hill. Your misinterpretation of the anthropomorphizing of the nouns 'information' and 'water' are stemming from a misunderstanding of the literary devices here.

Sexconker and the like should feel free to argue over the natural tendency of information being free but they, supposing they passed the 5th grade, should know better then to ascribe a their own meaning to the phrase and then attack our ideals through a false proxy.

This mistake is known as a certain subfallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi (Red Herring) known as a strawman argument.