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Opting Out of the Google Books Settlement, Pro & Con
Here are diametrically opposing view on what authors should do about the upcoming deadline to opt out of the Google Books settlement. Miracle Jones writes "The William Morris Agency has come out strongly against the Google Books settlement for its clients, citing the fact that the settlement creates a non-competitive marketplace for a whole new product (orphan books), in addition to containing provisions that will make it impossible for writers to remove books from the database after 27 months have passed: 'We believe that the license being given to Google to publish and display with impunity out-of-print "orphan" works (where the rights owner is unknown and estimated by the Financial Times to be between 2.8 and 5 million books out of 32 million books protected by copyright in the United States) will open the door to establishing Google as the most comprehensive database, potentially a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power.'" On the other side of the debate, James Gleick writes "With the deadline approaching for 'opting out' of the Google Books settlement, the Authors Guild has posted an aggressive explanation of who it thinks should do that: no one. Not a single author in the world, it argues, stands to benefit from removing himself or herself from the class. This comes as part of a new set of 'Answers' meant to push back against what the authors group thinks is widespread confusion about the settlement; they also address questions about just what kind of money we might be talking about, and what kind of control authors will have over Google's use of their work."
Maybe I'm not reading this right, if there is a deadline to opt out, and I write my first book after that deadline, can I still opt out?
With the deadline approaching for 'opting out' of the Google Books settlement, the Authors Guild has posted an aggressive explanation of who it thinks should do that: no one.
Actually what they said specifically is:
Opting out of the settlement is for authors who want to preserve their right to sue Google themselves. We donâ(TM)t think there are any such authors.
Oh how they doubt the litigious desire of some people that believe their works turn the paper they're printed on to gold.
My work here is dung.
These fucks are too lazy to scan the books for themselves and are bitter that Google is investing the man-power to do so.
Could someone explain how the authors lost their rights? Were they sold to publishers that went under? Maybe I'm not understanding things correctly. If a book is out of print and they don't know who owns the rights, why doesn't the original author retain all rights?
Or they may lack the resources to digitize their works in a form that they would prefer.
The truth of the matter is that Google isn't what it used to be and despite the constant repeating of the mantra "Don't be evil" the way it's currently viewed certainly isn't as positive as it was just a few years ago. Having a uni-polar world where google is king is in staunch opposition to the spirit of the free market and, despite what anyone says, is dangerous ground to tread.
From useless to possibly useful. This reminds me of adverse possession laws were if real property is not being used ownership can be transfered to someone who will actually make some positive use of the property.
Good ruling that is taking books sitting as orphans outside of a users/readers reach and making them freely accessible.
I think the objection is that this settlement only allows Google to do this. Anyone else has to not only scan the books in, but also get sued by the Authors Guild and then make the same class-action settlement.
Remind me why monopoly is bad, again?
I thought the whole point was that monopoly is bad for the consumer who gets stuck with shitty product because no one can compete fairly and bring better products in the game. So here we are, with a gazillion books sitting there with no one to bring them to the people the way Google is trying to, while everyone else bitches and moans about one thing or the other. Pardon my antipathy to the reasons like being lazy or not being resourceful enough, but at the end of the day I would really like it if those books were easily accessible to me and to everyone else.
Here's a thought: Let Google become a monopoly here. We get a nice new service. Once the service is there others would like to compete. *Then* we can bring the anti-monopoly whip out and beat Google senseless. In the meantime either get off your asses and get something similar done, or stop whining about why Google doing this or that is bad because no one else will be able to do it once Google has a monopoly. We will cross that bridge when we get there.
If a book is out of print, what's the point in indexing it?
I mean, from the users point of view, they can search an out of print book, and even see _some_ of the pages, but they cannot buy the book. Seems kinda pointless.
Its not that they are too lazy to scan the books - its that they are too lazy to tell anyone that they own the rights to them.
If this settlement doesn't pass, the legal fees will probably bankrupt it forever, causing [the Authors Guild] to disappear for good in a puff of ink-stained smoke.
Well now the Authors Guild's stance makes a lot more sense. This settlement is more self preservation then in the interest of the authors.
We believe that giving Google special treatment does not appear to be the way to foster a competitive market place to the benefit of you, our authors.
If it is only orphaned books then what market is that. Its not like they are trying to sell them to consumers now. They might as well release it to the public domain, but no author would go for that. They figure the little money they make licensing it is worth it.
Once Google has an established monopoly there is nothing stopping them charging for access. They become the gate keepers to millions of books. Meanwhile their rivals a non profit making Project Gutenburg will be out of business because they used to scan orphaned works, and this deal prevents them from continuing.
This is not about laziness, Google just did this without bothering with permission, and then sent lawyers only billionares can afford in to steam roller an insane settlement, that no one else will ever be able to pull off.
Monopolies stop innovation and stop competition and in this case treat the talent like crap. It's a bad thing.
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --Albert Einstein
Reminds me of when people claimed gmail was a monopoly and I had to beat them with a stick while repeating "Being good enough that everyone prefers your free service to other competing free services is NOT A MONOPOLY".
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I think publishers would be nothing short of deranged to not want to have their books on Google Books. I have bought all my textbooks based on what I saw on Google Books, since it appeared. That's right, all of them. We're talking (sadly) expensive textbooks on nanotechnology, microfulidics and silicon microtechnology (as well as some materials science). Google Books is by far the BEST marketing tool that a publisher could imagine.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
i recommend giving a read to James Gleick's Chaos.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The publisher's side is written as if Google is publishing the whole work, instead of merely providing a search engine. After finding the work you'll still have to locate a copy on the used books market, or public libraries.
Or even, if enough people are looking for the same book, it might be possible to do a new printing.
Don't forget about second hand book sellers and public libraries.
Three Words: "Follow the money."
mod parent up. One of the few posts making sense in this discussion.
Sounds to me like a bunch of lawsuits just waiting to happen. Last I checked, the law doesn't give any rights to anyone to take a work that isn't theirs. If Google takes a work, and the author misses the deadline, what's stopping that author from suing?
Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. Some crazy agreement with a guild that probably has nothing to do with the author in the first place? Yeah, right. That'll hold up in court the same way as if I sold my neighbor's car while he was on vacation. 'I've got a contract!' doesn't mean anything if what you're doing is illegal.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"Being good enough that everyone prefers your free service to other competing free services is NOT A MONOPOLY".
I usually explain this as: "gmail is as much a monopoly as the democraticly elected president is a dictator".
Yes, not only the obvious part is analogous.
I'm an author (and an anonymous coward) and got one of these notices. The first thing I thought was, "I don't want to sue Google or be in a class that is suing Google." As an academic, I want my stuff distributed (if people cite my work, I can use that in the promotion process).
I wonder how many authors feel the same way?
A few quotes on the subject by Adam Smith:
... is a great enemy to good management.
Monopoly
The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got.
Clearly things have changed in the last two hundred years, but the basic precepts of sociology and human behavior remain mostly the same in this regard.
I certainly don't disagree that the service is wonderful boon to the average person -- I use it rather often and am thankful that it's there -- but one still ought to make one wary; as the behemoth that it is becoming, the amount of information/power that they are concentrating, it would be to all our benefits to view them as objectively and unemotionally as possible.
robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Or if they're not, maybe they should be. To wit:
"orphan works where the rights owner is unknown"
and
"a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power."
Bargaining with unknown persons? I would think that if one thought they had this ability, they wouldn't need any sort of agreement set, as they could as easily bargain about and/or form a monopoly over unknown books. WTF is William Morris Agency doing by pretending to speak on behalf of unknown writers anyway? You have to be more than moderately known just to talk to them. As stated, it is speaking to its clients, so speaking about the effects on anything else as an argument intended for its clients carries about as much logical force as the unknown books statement above. I smell little glass pipes, or the little green pictures of dead guys equivalent.
Figure: William Morris Agency makes its money by getting a cut of royalites from writers it represents. It wants to see its slice of every single penny possible, right now. It is speaking on its own behalf about its own interests, and the interests of those who put ink to paper in order to generate revenue -- the publishers.
Then figure: The Authors Guild is authors representing and advising authors (including William Morris Agency clients) on all issues of interest to writers -- royalties, professional development, legal issues of all sorts, and above all, more writing. They are speaking on all their own shared interests, in order to not to have to depend on decisions being made by those others who make money off the authors' work (including William Morris Agency).
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If you're upset about this settlement whine and moan to the publishers.
THEY are the villans here.
They're just like the music labels. They're mindlessly greedy and stupid
and willing to hand over a monopoly on a silver platter to avoid the
slightest bit of offense to their sense of artistic megalomania.
The publishers are creating the Frankenstein here.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sure there is an "evil/bad" monopoly here but it's not the one you think.
Google's "dreaded monopoly" here is simply an extension of the powers
granted to the relevant publishers and authors through copyright.
Without that underlying state sanction, The Publishers Guild would be
in no position to dictate terms to Google or otherwise frighten off
small time competitors.
It's not Google that needs to be reigned in here, it's copyright.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Project Gutenberg out of business ? This deal doesn't prevent anyone to do something they could do before since noone had the right to do it.
So, you are with this Guild of bad faith, or you really want these orphaned works to be accessible ? In the latter case, isn't that an advancement that finally someone is able to hold on against the angry publishers whining and suing threats ?
The way I understand it, you've got to exempt yourself, through the mechanism to do that here in the US.
If you're an author in another country, you register your copyright THERE, and as long as your country has ratified the same copyright convention as most other western countries, you're done.
Google isn't the next Microsoft - Google is trying to Wal-mart information and IT. Enjoy what's left when they're done.
It has nothing to do with scanning books.
Google gets sued and comes up with a settlement agreement to pay off those suing.
Little company X does the same thing and gets sued, but can't fight the suit and can't afford to pay off a settlement.
Because the grounds for suing are completely bogus, Google is essentially buying a monopoly with their settlement. They are now establishing that anyone who wants to do what they are doing will have to pay hush money to avoid a lawsuit.
Big expensive hush money for fair use.
Please tell me how the hell does a lawsuit in USA prevent Project Gutenberg Australia from digitizing works in the public domain?
While we like to think we're the center of the universe, we aren't. As for orphaned works I don't think Project Gutenberg USA has any official stance on them, at least when I search them the only orphaned works item that comes up is an ebook published in 2008.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
Having a uni-polar world where google is king is in staunch opposition to the spirit of the free market
Copyrighted works have nothing to do with a free market; any and all 'monopoly' power that Google obtains here is directly derived from copyright.
In a free market anyone would be free to scan and publish anything, any way they like. If there was social desire to fund authors beyond the free market, the easiest and probably most efficient way to be to slap a per-revenue levy off sales/copies/whatever going directly to the authors in question.
If Google's entire business were Gmail then offering it's service for free is fine. But if Google makes money in other areas and then uses that money to prop up a free email service that kills any other company trying to do business in email, that might not be fine. And if Google gains power from it's free (as in beer) email service that strengthens its position in the business area where it already has a monopoly, then things really start smelling rotten.
I love Google and I don't think they have a monopoly anywhere yet. But giving something away for free does not disprove the existence of a monopoly. Often, it's a blink tag on exactly that point.
'We believe that the license being given to Google to publish and display with impunity out-of-print "orphan" works [...] will open the door to establishing Google as the most comprehensive database, potentially a monopoly, with unfair bargaining power.'
Translation: it's no fair that Google got off their butts and created a market we weren't interested in, and now we want in on it!
Seriously, someone please explain to me why I should feel any sympathy for the ex-publishers of abandonware? If it was so dang valuable to them, why'd they walk away from it in the first place?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Remind me why monopoly is bad, again?
It's not. You guys are missing something key here: It's not illegal to have a monopoly. Natural monopolies exist all the time. If I invent a new WhizBang Gizmo Ultimate, and there's nothing else on the market that does what it does, and I've patented by WhizBang Gizmo Ultimate, then I have a monopoly on WhizBang Gizmo Ultimates. Even if this WhizBang Gizmo Ultimate becomes something very, very important to society.
When Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released VisiCalc in 1979, they had a monopoly on spreadsheet programs, at least until SuperCalc and Microsoft's MultiPlan (both VisiCalc clones) hit the scene 1 and 3 years later, respectively, and really since MultiPlan and SuperCalc were never very popular, it wasn't until Lotus 1-2-3 hit the scene almost 4 years later. (1-2-3 beat the pants off of everyone else by doing graphing and an awesome macro language) (Bricklin and Frankston never got a patent on VisiCalc because no software had ever been granted a patent at that time.)
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Google just needs to promise that they won't eventually charge for access to the works online. In that case, they are just making something available that would be otherwise forgotten. They also should not be claiming exclusive rights to put it online. If others want to scan/post it, good for them. If an author later come forward, can prove they have the rights, and wants the material offline, it would be their responsibility to issue takedown notices to the sites.
Once the service is there others would like to compete. *Then* we can bring the anti-monopoly whip out and beat Google senseless.
Except that Google has nothing to do with it. There's nothing anti-competitive about their contract with the publishers. The only anti-competitive move would be the publishers refusing to write the same contract for everyone else who wants to scan and display orphaned works.
It's not Google that needs to be reigned in here, it's copyright.
Your right, and copyright reform isn't nearly as hard as one might think. The problem is pushing companies like Disney and Time/Warner (these companies because they are some of the largest lobbyists for copyright "protections" being increased) into accepting that copyright reform is actually good for their businesses.
Those are strong words: where do you infer this from?
IANAL but legal settlements set a standard that is later applied with other companies. So you just ask the Author's Guild for a Google-like settlement and offer a competing product. The Guild would jump on this, since the more companies offer services for them, the less chance of someone turning the whole deal against them.
I was stuck in a class action catch-22 about a decade ago. A service provider had altered the nature of the service without providing notice (as required by their own contract). After nearly 2 years of legal BS, they finally made a settlement offer. They would buy back the equipment of dissatisfied customers. Pro-rated, of course, bottoming out at 25% for equipment more than 2 years old. By this time, they'd altered the description of their service and the vast majority of the members of the class had equipment far older than 2 years. And, by the time the settlement went through, the court system the entire class would be over 2 years in. There would be no refund for service provided under false pretenses. There would be no restoration of service to match what we were sold. Just basically a big kick in the nuts.
Here's the catch-22. The court was scheduled to consider the settlement offer AFTER the opt-out date. If people opted out and the settlement was rejected, those people could not rejoin the class. If people stayed in and the offer was accepted, it would be too late to opt out. Additionally, there was no way to formally object to the settlement if you opted out. Only members of the class could object. The whole thing was a joke.
If you look at the context, I wasn't replying to "Google *is* a monopoly" but rather to "Google *will be* a monopoly".
I'm not so sure about that. Once the ground has been trod by Google, the Authors Guild should be looking at anyone else who wants to do this as "extra cash", that should make it easier to get a follow up deal with them. It'd be expensive, but they should be willing to skip the lawsuit part.
Essentially, once it's been done once and deemed "legal" then there's nothing preventing them from cutting similar deals with anyone else who wants to do it to. After all why settle for one giant pile of cash when you can have seven?
Fanatically anti-fanatical
A lot of people aren't understanding this bit. You have to opt out of class action lawsuits. It may not seem fair, but it's a compromise. Class-actions are one of the more pro-little-guy elements of civil law we have in the US, giving lawyers huge heaping incentives to punish abusive large entities that we wouldn't be able to attack on our own.
Here's the relevant section from the wikipedia article:
Due process requires in most cases that notice describing the class action be sent, published, or broadcast to class members. As part of this notice procedure, there may have to be several notices, first a notice giving class members the opportunity to opt out of the class, i.e. if individuals wish to proceed with their own litigation they are entitled to do so, only to the extent that they give timely notice to the class counsel or the court that they are opting out. Second, if there is a settlement proposal, the court will usually direct the class counsel to send a settlement notice to all the members of the certified class, informing them of the details of the proposed settlement.
I know there's a lot of details and legal wrangling and worse...but let me just speak for a few million people:
Fuck your stupid copyrights, nobody cares about anything you wrote or it would not be orphaned and out of print. The free market you cherish so much has betrayed you and left you for dead. The world would sooner let your works rot into nothing than pay you a penny for your tripe or recognize you for your efforts.
You stupid greedy money-grubbing whores! I hope you choke on your wishful copyright dreams! History will judge you unkindly!
Have a nice day :-)
But it isn't up to the Authors Guild. Some are saying that this is possible because a court is sanctioning it as a settlement to a class action lawsuit, but even that is a stretch, without the fig-leaf of a class action, there's no way the Authors Guild (who are only one party to the class action) has the right to make deals like this.
According to Lawrence Lessig (6 min 30 in), some 75% of all books are orphaned. It's legally impossible to do anything with those works, because the copyright holder can't be reached for permission.
I think you're suggesting that that should be no problem, because if the copyright owner can't be found, who's going to sue you for using their work? The problem is that you don't know they're not going to suddenly appear and sue you afterward, and for this reason no right-minded company will publish/broadcast/produce your work unless you have secured all related rights.
So, to answer your question, these works are an issue because otherwise some 75% of creative works are just lost: out of print and inaccessible.
I should buy some cement.
The Author's Guild can't make the same deal with people; the deal is only possible via a class-action settlement, because that's the only means by which a deal affecting the right to sue over a potential claim can be put into place where the unknown individual affected parties have to opt out to be excluded, rather than opt in to be included.
I am not a lawyer and I am not (too ) published.
Frankly what ever the number of years a copyright is now should be good enough. After that the book should become public domain. Now there might be some small exceptions (like how to build a hydrogen bomb in you bath tub as an example). Technology is changing just to fast. Even lets say you had a BIG best seller. The copyright law allows you to collect money for (I think 28 years). Lets say something like the BIBLE (or some "new" book) the people are giving away copies of the Bible, who should get the money from that (if you allow copy writes to live forever). Our best guess says it was a group of people from say 2000 years ago) again are you going to give the money to the Catholics? to the Lutherans? To the Mormons? All the(western) religions will be claiming rights and we will end up in a holy war at Fort Knox. Do we really want the europeans coming over here and making a mess out of the US like they have done to the med East? NO>>>>>>>>>>>>
Is a de-facto monopoly still "evil" if it is providing a good or service which previously wasn't available? It's not like Google swooped in and used their wealth and market dominance to crush smaller competitors in the digital book search industry. In addition, everyone is still free to visit libraries, use inter-library loan services, etc. so Google didn't do anything to undermine the "competing" services which were already available. Isn't this type of innovation exactly in line with the spirit of a free market?