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Internet Archive Seeks Same Online Book Rights As Google
Miracle Jones writes "Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive has jumped on Google's 'Authors Guild' settlement and asked to be included as a party defendant, claiming that they ought to get the same rights and protections from liability that Google will receive when the settlement is approved by federal court. From the Internet Archive's letter to Judge Denny Chin: 'The Archive's text archive would greatly benefit from the same limitation of potential copyright liability that the proposed settlement provides Google. Without such a limitation, the Archive would be unable to provide some of these same services due to the uncertain legal issues surrounding orphan books.'"
But then the world's economy will collapse completely.
I'm all for it. Everybody wins.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
This needs to be an "open to all" arrangement, or the judge should reject the settlement.
Even if it is "open to all comers" it still should be scrutinized before a judge signs off on it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is great news, but why is it that there appears to be no link to download the PDF of the document. On the linked site, that is annoying enough, but on the Open Content Alliance website, it seems purely hypocritical. How can the "Open" Content Alliance link to a proprietary, display only website? Where is the text? How annoying.
Because of the mentioned annoyance, I did not read the brief, but if it was not included in there, I think they should have asked for the protection to extended to all libraries globally, as well. I see no reason why such a database of orphaned works should not be available to the general public. In fact, it is really hard to imagine why they do not void the copyrights for all authorless works. It is bad enough that society has to pay for author's monopolies. Do we have to support the monopolies of phantasms as well?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
What about the Gutenberg Project, and similar collections?
Ultimately, the issue of Orphan works will have to be attacked generically, rather than outfit by outfit.
Given the length of copyright term and the ever decreasing costs of storage, there are works, and will continue to be works that are within the term of copyright, but which have no (knows) extant owner. This is an issue.
Without an extant owner, it isn't even possible to ask for licensing permission, so the work will necessarily go unused (bootlegging excepted). Unless one considers absolutist copyright maximalism to be a virtue for its own sake, enforcing copyright on such works is insane.
The trick is, you don't want to make it too easy for a work to be declared orphaned. "Oh, Mr. Fungus, our statutory-search-for-author-notice ran for an entire month in the East Arkansas Hog Breeder Gazette and intelligencer and the North Anglian Lady's Christian Temperance Quarterly! What more reasonable a search could you possibly expect?"
While I am not a lawyer, www.archive.org (and variously named predecessors) is "prior art" when it comes to storing huge amounts of electronic data, as, I am sure we will see very soon, many many many other parties.
Your analogy ignores the fact that the court system, in this case, is recognizing the Authors' Guild as the default representative of all authors, regardless if these authors actually have any formal relationship to it. Because of the court is granting this special right to the Authors' Guild, it might very well be the case that the court has the ability, or even an obligation, to regulate how the Authors' Guild does business.
A better analogy would be to compare the Authors' Guild to a local telecom monopoly (but the monopoly of the Authors' Guild is less strong, it only monopolizes the representation of authors who choose to not represent themselves).
Personally, I think the agreement and the lawsuit should be thrown out. As per boingboing (http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/17/google-book-search-s-1.html), this settlement potentially, baring something unforeseen, gives google a near monopoly on search and distribution on the majority of all the books ever published. While that alone is a pretty good argument for the settlement to be voided, the fact that an organization which only represents roughly 8000 writers out of all the writers in the world is claiming to be able to give away a right for writers who aren't part of it's membership. Now I'm not sure just how many writers there are in the world, past and present, but with a population of roughly 6.77 billion people on the planet, I'm pretty sure it's a huge amount more than 8000 and the writers guild shouldn't have the ability to give those rights away. For it's members, sure, but not for all the other writers in the world.
"Hey! No fair suing Google and not us. We want to be sued to! SUE US DAMMIT!"
www.archive.org (and variously named predecessors) is "prior art" when it comes to storing huge amounts of electronic data.
Isn't the phrase "prior art" only used in patent law?
So, if archive.org is indeed prior art, this only means that no one should be able to patent the business method of archiving the Internet.
(Maybe except archive.org, but they have probably been practicing that business method for so long that the patenting window of opportunity has expired.)
I'm not sure why you bring this up in a discussion of copyright.
Why I brought this up? Because, if Google will get this through, so should a whole bunch of others, too!
Why should Google be special.
I'm not a class action law expert and ongoing changes to the law may mean this is no longer true, but at one time class actions could be brought where the defendants were a class.
Right now it's Author's Guild et al vs. Google, with the Author's Guild and other named plaintiffs representing authors and publishers.
If the judge turned it into "Author's Guild et al. vs. Google et al" with Google representing all parties who may wish to publish such works in the future, then it would, in effect, force the settlement to be applicable to everyone. I'm not sure if the judge can create a class on his own motion or if one of the parties has to make such a motion.
As a matter of public policy - and make no mistake, the results of this case will create a de facto public policy - this is looking more and more like something that should be settled by elected representatives i.e. Congress, not the courts. The judge may simply decline to accept the settlement on the grounds that such a sweeping arrangement that affects so many people who aren't part of the class should be negotiated in Congress not the courts.
Irony of the day: My captcha is "litigant."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why does either Google or Brewster deserve more rights than the rest of us?
The Real issue is the very wrong way in which copyrights and patents have been extended far beyon the original omtent. Both need to expire after 5 years. Period. No extensions for any rason. After 5 years everything should be in the public domain. And patents on software and business models etc...need to be outlawed worlwide. To be granted a pattent, you should have to actually to actually have a product, and market that product. No more patent trolls!
Of course such things will never be allowed to happen. The Mega-Corporations who own and control the worlds governments will never permit such things to happen.
This may piss off the country or countries we signed the treaty with, but that's just too bad.
Many a peace treaty has been signed and enforced at the barrel of a gun, even though the treaty violated the constitution of the country that signed it.
It's not the case here, but sooner or later, we will sign a treaty with another country, our courts will overturn it, and they will say "change your constitution, or we'll replace it."
Only through international goodwill or by having one of the strongest military capacities in the world will we keep this from happening. I prefer the former but the latter is a good backup plan.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I believe The Public Domain Enhancement Act does a good job of addressing orphaned works: it requires a $1 fee be paid no earlier than 50 years after the work was published and it creates a searchable database of works and copyright holders. Legislators should be pushed to champion this bill again (and again) to get it through Congress. One-time trying doesn't do the job (as we've all seen the corporate copyright holders show us). I concur with proponents of the PDEA that most copyright holders will not find it important enough to send in the $1 fee to extend their copyright past 50 years (plus the grace period described in the proposed bill).
Digital Citizen
Hopefully the judge will do the sensible thing, which is to give Internet Archive or whoever else wants the right to publish orphans and pay royalties for it, the right to do so. The Fiction Circus blog posting is truly silly. The Author's Guild was not set up by Google, that's for sure. Google just wanted to index all the books and provide links to where you could buy them. The Author's Guild (a long standing and very backward looking organization) sued, claiming that indexing was a violation of copyright. In other words, it was an effort to prevent Google from making their books more accessible on the web. Now you have people like this Fiction Circus clown saying, Google should be able to sell orphan books in electronic form, because others aren't alos doing it. So, we're better off with no one republishing orphan works. Great logic! That is, if you're against people having access to books. I haven't heard that Google opposes anyone else doing this. But, you have to have a committed, well run organization to pull it off. Microsoft, for example, gave a try at offering a book search service, but gave up after scanning a few libraries, it was too hard and not enough short-term profit, apparently. Now we find "libertarians" saying, Google shouldn't do it either, because, well, nobody else is doing it, and, let's keep it that way!