Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Internet Archive Seeks Same Online Book Rights As Google

Posted by timothy on from the from-a-to-z-and-back-again dept.

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.'"

8 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. A more general issue... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?"

    1. Re:A more general issue... by johannesg · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unless one considers absolutist copyright maximalism to be a virtue for its own sake, enforcing copyright on such works is insane.

      Say you are a really large copyright organisation. Not only are you competing with other, similar organisations, but you are also competing with the public domain. Getting rid of that competition means getting rid of the public domain, which is what they are doing.

      So yes, I imagine they are really all in favor of enforcing that absolutist copyright maximalism.

    2. Re:A more general issue... by sFurbo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      How does that work for authors who are not US citizens? If they need to send it to the Library of Congress, why can't every other national library demand the same? If you have to take it to the national library of your own country, a full search of all national libraries are needed to determin the orphan-staus of a work. Of course, they could make a collaboration to make the search easier, but if you can't get them all to have the same terms, it is going to be a mess.

    3. Re:A more general issue... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      1) What about stuff that's published on the Internet?
      2) What about stuff that's published under, say, a CC licence?

      I'm particularly concerned about things like art - photography, web comics, drawings, and so on. It's unreasonable IMO to expect people to submit notifications that yes, they would like for their copyright to remain every year for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of items, and this is doubly true for those who already publish under CC licences and don't even intend to sell things for a profit.

      Copyright identifiers are also informative, not normative - they're not even necessary, in fact. Would you want to change that so that works lacking one are considered to be in the public domain? What if somebody takes, say, a story I wrote and removes it, and then passes it on to others - can those others in good faith rely on it being in the PD then? What if they do - how does that interact with my rights?

      What about the legal problems associated with harmonizing legislation worldwide? For that matter, what about countries that, unlike the USA, recognise authors' moral rights and don't even allow you to put works into the public domain?

      What about the right to publish things pseudonymously?

      All this is a very bad idea once you actually start looking at it in depth.

  2. Re:At a minimum, this should be open to all comers by LuYu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Should I get half your house just because you and your wife split it?

    If you are the general public -- the We the People of the Constitution -- and I and my wife acquired the house by fraud, yes.

    I call creating anti-Constitutional international treaties and tricking Congress into implementing them in violation of the Bill of Rights fraud. If you do not, you should seriously consider getting a new dictionary. "Harmonization" is always anti-Constitutional, and the Berne Convention is anti-Free Speech.

    With "orphaned" works, you should also consider that they are the worst of both worlds. Copyrights for these works protect no authors, but they still harm society in the same way as all other copyrights: They limit Free Speech, impose monopolies, suppress free expression, and create unnecessary legal action. All of these things harm society and the Progress that copyright was intended to support. It is, quite frankly, absurd that these works are protected at all, and the Author's Guild are a band of brigands for attempting to hold hostage the public's intellectual environment for their personal enrichment through the collection of monopoly rents (suppressing competition by limiting distribution of unprofitable "orphaned" works allows publishers to keep prices high).

    Google is equally culpable in seeking to completely monopolise this information for their sole profit.

    --
    All data is speech. All speech is Free.
  3. possible monopoly to google by dargon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:It should be open! by martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Technically, all works are public domain eventually (even if right now this can mean 150 years or more after publication). This implies that the author's guild (and anybody else who claims copyright) is only a caretaker of the work for up to the next 150 years or so. If the work is no longer available (in existence) in 150 years, then Gutenberg will not be able to digitize it then. If that happens, then the caretaker should be held responsible, but probably the caretaker will be long gone.

    Thus Gutenberg should definitely worry about getting the ability to digitize orphaned works as soon as possible. 150 years is a long time. In the last 150 years, there was civil war in the US and many in other places, and two huge world wars, including one famous for book burning.

  5. Re:Great News by Keeper+Of+Keys · · Score: 2, Insightful

    While you may be technically correct, scribd is a *very* annoying site that I have removed from my Google results. Hmm, let's wrap the text up in a fancy thingamajiggy that takes ages to load and can't be easily scrolled or resized.