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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
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.
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?
The AG-Google agreement wouldn't affect Gutenberg at all. The Gutenberg Project only deals with works that are either public domain or works where the author gave permission for GP to use the works.
The reason the Author's Guild got upset with Google and eventually reached a settlement with them was because Google was dealing with "orphaned" works. These were books that, while restricted in distribution by copyright laws, were out of print for one reason or another. While Google saw this as part of their mission to increase the availiblity of information, the AG saw this as an encroachment on the rights of their members.
"Hey! No fair suing Google and not us. We want to be sued to! SUE US DAMMIT!"
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?
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.