Slashdot Mirror
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
You mean that it should be a Reasonable and Non Discriminatory License?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The going theory is that the Authors Guild is a Google sockpuppet.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
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?"
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.
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.
That may be so, but they only speak for themselves. Not the whole world. It's not exactly a great message your people are sending. Some judge in the US gets to decide on things that actually affect me, on the other side of the world. You want your copyright enforced in my country, but you don't much care about my copyrights. I don't get it?
How can the "Open" Content Alliance link to a proprietary, display only website? Where is the text? How annoying.
Err... what's "view only" about it? Click the download button above the scribd viewer and you're presented options to download in pdf or plain text.
"Hey! No fair suing Google and not us. We want to be sued to! SUE US DAMMIT!"
They limit Free Speech, impose monopolies, suppress free expression, and create unnecessary legal action.
How on earth does this limit "free speach" or "free expression"? In no way does it stop anyone going out and saying what they want. Furthermore, monopolies are generally awarded for innovation - something that Google has done here. No other project did anything about securing orphan works, and now that Google has their license they are all jumping on the band wagon like a pack of lions. Maybe, if archive.org or simillar went at it first, they would have the rights and this argument might not be happening at all. Finally, your suggestion that orphan works create legal action is absurd - it's the people who want the books who do that.
It does, if what they want to express happens to be a derived work based on an orphaned work.
See The Wind Done Gone as a case in point where copyright was used in an attempt to limit artistic (and political) expression.
It obviously doesn't limit expression of pure ideas, per se. Was that what you meant?
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.
If the settlement only covered Author's Guild authors, that would be true. It doesn't. It covers ALL copyright holders. A sues B and the settlement extinguishes C,D, and Es claims (past, present or future) as well.
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
Sounds to me like you've got it precisely. If you want to consider international IP law, ask India about patents of Neem Tree Oil.
These laws aren't about justice. They aren't about fair recompense. They're about letting powerful corporations steal more stuff and then force you to pay for it. Ask Indonesia why it won't share it's recent strains of flu? They know that if they do, they're likely to be left to die when the next epidemic strikes. So they want to bargain for something they can count on while they still have leverage. It's to my disadvantage, but I can sure understand their point of view. History is on their side. You can't count on the law when you don't have the power. The lesson is repeated over and over in scenario after scenario. And not just internationally. And it isn't racially biased either. Ask Joe Hill about the justice of law. It's about who has power.
Now to limit that argument, let me say they sometimes you can't buy justice no matter how powerful and rich you are. Being rich and powerful is no guarantee that the abusive forces of law won't be turned against you. It's just that this will only happen when someone else who is at least almost as rich and powerful as you instigates (even if covertly). A recent example was the suit against IBM by SCOx.pk apparently funded, in part, by Microsoft. SCOx had no case, and hasn't been able to demonstrate that it had a reasonable belief that it might have a case. But IBM has been cost millions of dollars that it will never be able to recover. Sometimes justice isn't available for sale because they're out of stock.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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!