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Google's Plan For Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged
Death Metal writes to tell us that a growing tide of complaints are being piled at Google's feet in response to a far-reaching settlement that some feel will grant the giant too much power over the "orphan books" they have been scanning into digital format. The settlement could give Google near-exclusivity with respect to the copyright of orphan works — books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found. "Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database. The settlement, 'takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,' said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. 'Google will be a monopoly.'"
The settlement, 'takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,' said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. 'Google will be a monopoly.'
Why is it that books -- of all things -- should be the last thing to be digitized?
... I'm not even going to get into the jump they
see in sales when their books are digitized.
Your resistance is futile. It perplexes me that you -- a university librarian -- cannot see what is so obvious to me but I will spoon feed it to you. We live in a capitalistic society where supply rises to meet demand. I am a ravenous consumer of books and for sometime have desired an all-encompassing repository of books. You, the writers guilds, the publishers, the industry as a whole have failed to meet this demand for sometime now. Unfortunately for you, the early bird gets the worm. The early bird being Google, the worm being my rewarding eyeballs and possibly pocketbook. I may have been the minority of your consumers but that has changed and it is no longer you against a few nerds. It's you against the world. You will lose. Your industry has successfully prevented this. Why, I'm not quite sure. Greed? Stupidity? There are so many good words to pick from.
You will have to forgive me when I lack sympathy for your position on the books your archaic publishing system fails to make available to me. Oh no, no one will ever be able to publish them now! Alas, woe is me. Instead of being permanently unavailable to me, they will soon be available to everyone
If Google's inevitable monopoly is nigh, why don't you draw up your own business plan to garner venture capital and get all the universities to back you on it? Google's taking a risk and in the end, it's going to be good for the end consumer.
Either shit or get off the toilet. You had your chance, you squandered it. This should have been started almost a decade ago and completed five years ago. I'm sick and tired of the greed factor inhibiting such a useful tool for mankind. As head of an ivy league university library, I would have guessed support for what could well be the modern digital version of Alexandria before it was burned. I'm shocked a librarian would take this stance.
My work here is dung.
Honestly, this seems like Google-bashing for its own sake. Who else is making a serious effort to get a hold of these orphan books and put them out there? Last I checked, absolutely no one.
If the choice is a monopoly over the digitized copy of these books, or letting them fade into obscurity un-digitized, do we really want to choose option B?
If these books are truly orphaned, it would be vastly preferable if Google were able to find it in themselves to donate some of their vast resources to putting the works up on Project Gutenberg.
That would go a long way towards telling the world that their intentions are honest.
While the creation of such a database would be a good thing, in my mind, I do not think it anyone should have sole control of the works contained there in; at least not for very long. I admire and respect the financial burden such a system will cost to create and maintain, particularity during the starting phases.
However I feel that if Google are to be given any rights over works as the ones mentioned then it should be for a limited time only. Perhaps as a reward for taking the initiate and as way for them to profit from their endeavour. But as I said, only for, say 5-10 years, after that the rights to any such material should be freely available to everyone.
In any regards I would consider any sort of long-term or permanent rights given to Google would be a very bad thing.
The Long Now Foundation
I would say that a monopoly of one is better than a monopoly of zero...
I fail to see the problem. It is not as if Google is taking away the card catalogs or the inter-library loan system or anything else. It is simply adding to the existing access abilities. The libraries are afraid that Google will charge too much for access? Libraries do not buy the access and can continue to use what they have today.
It's not quite that easy. The original work goes into the public domain, but only the original work. Republications obtain a new copyright on the version of the work. So if Google scanned in a bunch of public domain books and distributed in their own format, they'd probably have a copyright on those digital files.
I say *probably* because a direct scan is likely to be Yet Another Legal Gray Area(TM). The courts might decide that the digital container is sufficient transformation of the work to warrant a new copyright. Or they might decide that it's merely space shifted and deny copyright protection.
For legal advice, please contact a real lawyer. (I just play on on Slashdot. Which is much more interesting than TV. :-P)
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Your rant may well be spot on in terms of the general attitude of librarians. But please note what the man actually said:
The settlement, 'takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,' said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. 'Google will be a monopoly
Given that specific bit you quote, the man is concerned about Google being the exclusive source of access to these books; he's not expressing fear that his industry is going away, but that what's replacing it will have less freedom of access. You can debate if that's the case or not, but at least address what the man's talking about.
The settlement, 'takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,
Funny. It sounds like Google is going to steal the soul of these book and jail them in their databases. Hehe. There is no logic in this argument. The books are still available at the respective libraries. What is the problem in making them available at other place?
Instead of bashing someone who decides to spend the money to implement a solution, why don't you just compete with them. Scan these books yourself and offer them online.
Oh, you don't have the financial resources to pull that off and you cannot get any backers? Well, I guess you really have nothing to say then.
Nothing to see here...move along.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
What's preventing others from scanning those same books again? Yes, it's a pain in the butt, but that's exactly why Google should be allowed to ask for whatever the market is willing to bear.
The only problem I can see if various ideas for the copyright protection of databases come to pass. Then Google could indeed have a perpetual monopoly for their list of orphaned copies.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Libraries often compete with one another on collections. They strive to be the foremost collection on some topic, maybe it's 17th century farming techniques, or modern optics. They compete and they gather rich alumni at major universities to donate private works and give them money to expand their very special collections.
Now along comes Google. Scanning books and keeping copyright on works that have been long abandoned. Some Universities were happy to take Google's money to be part of the scanning project, but now some want to turn and bite that hand.
If I can find a long since out of print book that no library has, or at least that no library would dare loan me, online and in a reproducible format - explain to me how that is different from assembling a rare collection in a library? Explain how the term monopoly is used in this context, because I do not think that word means what Senor Darnton from Hahh-vahhd thinks it means.
Google is adding to the diversity of publications in the world, and giving it to mankind. What they are doing, IN ACTUALITY, is removing the monopoly that university libraries once had. So I can see why they might be upset about it.
It also helps to highlight one of the major issues with the long length of copyright in the United States. Given that information is owned by the Public once it is produced and We the Public actually limit our own rights to reproduce a work for a limited period of time in the form of copyright, isn't someone witholding the work or getting this effort tangled up actually a violation of the spirit of the agreement between the creator and the Public?
In that sense, I think what google is doing is Right. In the interest of the Public their actions will do more to promote mankind than the perversion that copyright has become in the United States.
When it comes to Google's right to reproduce such works for profit, I become hesitant, but my level of fear from this sort of action only rises to a level I might call 'slight concern'. I HOPE that Google's effort succeeds. If they end up being able to charge a reasonable (w/ respect to cost) amount for the imaging, processing, storing, and production of this database, I think that would be more than fair.
Our Government should have done this years ago.
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There are books that no one is printing anymore, we all know this, and most of us have probably wanted one at some time or another. Here is Google putting together a solution, and people are bitching? I understand the general complain of 'monopoly', but as other people have stated they aren't destroying the other books out there. If it's in a library and you don't want to pay Google, go look it up in the library.
As for the other people who are complaining, again, go start a business and start digitizing them yourself. At face value I don't see a problem with this, they have the means to fill a niche that no one else wants/can. Why aren't publishers already doing all this? I should be able to go to a publisher's website and purchase/download any book they have rights to, but they don't, so let Google step in and attempt to create a new market.
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The phrase you are looking for is per se, it's latin.
Google will be able to provide access to the material, that almost no one else can (since the books are out of print). They are free to sell access to, or to publish, those works (since no one will make a copyright claim against them for these orphaned works).
However, Googoe does NOT have copyright on these works. Anyone else may publish them as well, and Google has no recourse against them, since copyright did not pass to Google.
This is all fine.
Someone could actually copypaste from Google, and publish on their own, and Google would have no legal recourse regarding copyright. However, Google might have recourse based upon their contract with the person who copied from Google... the license contract between Google and the User to access the content might(!) specifically forbid republication, in which case the User could be liable.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
So, is Google asserting copyright on the scans of the books whose copyright Google doesn't own? Could I just copy and redistribute Google's scan of the book? After all, I have as much claim to the book as Google, and the scan itself is not a creative work.
"So if Google scanned in a bunch of public domain books and distributed in their own format, they'd probably have a copyright on those digital files."
I don't think simply scanning something is enough to secure copyright - there has to be a creative artistic component before someone can secure copyright. I think the bar is set quite low, but it has to be there.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
No, the implication is that Google has an exclusive right to these books now. And they don't, depending on how you turn the phrase. In the sense that nobody else is ever allowed to get a license, no, it's not exclusive. In the sense that nobody else DOES have one, then yes, it's exclusive. There is something stopping another entity from creating their own anthology: The fact that Google has a license now, and nobody else does. ;) Google threw a lot of lawyers and money at the publishers to get this settlement package. Not everybody can do that to a team of large corporations.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Those books are not yours. That's the fundamental thing. THAT PROPERTY IS NOT YOURS. If I am Joe author of a book, and Google scans it, I have every right to demand Google yank it back out. Convenience is not an excuse to violate civil rights.
This is my sig.
What a load of FUD!
- Google isn't charging for access.
- Universities do charge for access (or membership).
- Why wouldn't libraries find their own copies of orphaned books and include them in their catalog?
What is really in danger here is the university library business model: charge a premium for things that should be open to the public.
Far too many establishments seek to control access to information / and thus knowledge. I for one hope Google scans as many books/papers as possible. At least we'd be able to find them.
"no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create"
Um, why not? If something is *out* of copyright entirely (not merely out of print, but actually in the public domain because the copyright term has expired) what exactly is stopping competitors from copying the same book and putting it on the web? I've seen plenty of examples of 19th-century books done that way -- people interested in those works sitting down with a scanner and laboriously scanning each page, then putting them on the web. Google a monopoly? Hardly, when every shmoe with a copy of the book and a scanner can duplicate it.
Oh, and university libraries are the *last* people that should be complaining about this, given that they're the ones with huge collections and they COULD HAVE DONE THE SAME THING decades ago, and still could now, if they wanted to serve their customers better. Years ago they should have gotten off their lazy posteriors and scanned *everything* in their library that is out of copyright. EVERYTHING. It means they could put the books in long-term storage (save money on shelf space), preserve the books better (no broken brittle paper or book bindings from further handling), and deliver copies of these old and rare works via interlibrary loan at far less expense and time (and wear-and-tear) than running them through a photocopier over and over again. At the very least they should be doing this only once, and then saving the copy digitally. It's freaking obvious.
Now they want to complain because google is doing their job for them? Sure, there's an important legal difference between "orphan works" and "copyright expired", but, really, why couldn't libraries have pushed for more flexibility with "orphan works" a long time ago? Some kind of broad, general license could have been negotiated. And why haven't they generally made all expired works available electronically, and let google walk into the market unchallenged?
There's hardly grounds for complaining about something they should have been doing a long time ago.
At the time the publishers and authors complained and sued Google, there were warnings about this happening. But the publishers and authors, who regard our pocketbooks as their property, were satisfied with the bribe... er... settlment Google offered. And only NOW, after the Big G fought alone on this front, are they complaining.
Just curious, is the tale of the Little Red Hen, who could find no help with planting, cultivating and harvesting the corn that everybody who hadn't helped wanted to eat when the work was done, in the public domain? Send a copy to the complainers and require reciting it verbatim from memory as a requirement for filing any complaints.
Just because you and I believe something to be true doesn't mean that a judge will agree. There will likely be quite a few factors that would play into a judge's decision. e.g. Was the scanning process completely automated or where there manual steps? Were any changes made to the layout or format of the text? Were images and/or the cover remade? Does the digital technology count as creativity added to the work?
These questions and many others would likely play a role in any court case. How the judge decides might very well depend on the judge, the phase of the moon, and which way the wind is blowing. Thus unless you're looking to go to court, you must assume that the work is copyrighted. At least until someone is gutsy enough to prove otherwise.
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"Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian"
.. But what does raise an eyebrow is the source of New York Law's funding on this matter: Microsoft. The chief investigator of the New York Law School project is James Grimmelmann. In an earlier career phase, associate law professor Grimmelmann worked as a programmer for Microsoft'
Where in the text of the settlement is ownership transferred exclusively to Google?
"Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information"
Where in this settlement does it forbid anyone else creating an online archive of orphan works, Project Gutenberg for instance. Would one source of this spontaneous concern be out of Redmond?
'at least one party nudging its way into the settlement is an Internet-issues oriented group from New York Law School
davecb5620@gmail.com
While the registry's agreement with Google is not exclusive, the registry will be allowed to license to others only the books whose authors and publishers have explicitly authorized it. Since no such authorization is possible for orphan works, only Google would have access to them, so only Google could assemble a truly comprehensive book database.
"No other company can realistically get an equivalent license," said Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.
Her analysis of Sony V. Universal is required reading. Other articles can be found here
Actually, judges have already agreed, at least with regard to art: Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.. While you are correct that a new court would have to apply precedent to see if scanning books counts as the same thing, everything I know about this field of law says that they don't have a chance in hell of getting a new copyright.
From a practical perspective, there is some danger, because the threat of litigation from a big company can be enough to shut down a small entity just because of the cost of going to court, even where the company doesn't have much of a chance of success. However, I think this is pretty clear-cut.
BTW, I am a law student, but I am not your lawyer. I'm not even your law student.
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Oxford education as phrased by the wolves.
If this doesn't cause all large publishers to steal the idea and add digitized, "out of print books" to a section of thier websites, then they deserve what they get. Publishers were just handed a fantastic business plan to expand thier companies. I'll bet that they don't do anything but hire lawyers.
On the Media, a weekly NPR show, had an interview with Robert Darnton last week.
Some people are clearly worried that Google is getting so big. I doubt we'll see too many companies even attempt to do the massive book scan that Google is. If/when Google tries to abuse its digital monopoly power over these books, antitrust regulators will almost certainly step in and force Google to license the data to competitors. Worrying about their potential monopoly power is hardly good reason to try to stop them at this point; some access through Google is certainly better than none.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
So they have the power to grant Google access to orphan books whos publishers and authors haven't explicitly authorized it?
How does that work? 'we can grant google this power even though we don't have it, but we can't grant it to anyone else because we don't have it!'
That argument doesn't appear to make a whole lot of sense to me.
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Project Gutenberg clears works under "Rule 6"; some works which appear to be orphaned, published before 1963, are in fact in the public domain, but it takes a significant amount of legwork to prove this.
They've also advocated for reform on orphan works, so they have been active on this.
Distributed Proofreaders harvests a lot of data from Google Book Search, already, as well.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
So they have the power to grant Google access to orphan books whos publishers and authors haven't explicitly authorized it?
How does that work? 'we can grant google this power even though we don't have it, but we can't grant it to anyone else because we don't have it!'
That argument doesn't appear to make a whole lot of sense to me.
This is a basic consequence of class action law suits. When a class action is certified, the representatives who brought the action are assumed (legally speaking) to speak for all members of the class (in this case everyone who holds copyright or publication rights in a book) with respect to the specific court case, and in settlements relating to that case. It's a legal fiction, but a generally accepted one.
In this case, it means that the Writers Guild represents all appropriate rights holders in negotiations with google. They don't represent those rights holders in any other case, so cannot negotiate similar terms with anybody except google; they could only do so in the event that a court certified that it would be in the interests of the class as a whole for them to do so (as happened in the Google case).
If you don't like it, you need to campaign to your representatives for a change in the law regarding class actions.
What the Google Class Action suit basically does is give Google DEFAULT permission to do something that is otherwise forbidden for everyone else. This puts Google in a relatively unique position regarding copyright of orphaned works. One cannot legally get to the same position that Google is in without doing something illegal and compelling similar terms.
This being said, I support the Google suit, and hope that it is the starting point of a dialog regarding how we address orphaned works. I hope the outcome is a compulsatory licensing regime. The only thing I am concerned about is that this sort of deal removes Google's interest in seeing comulsatory licensing for orphaned works made law since they got this through the courts.
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