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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."
These fucks are too lazy to scan the books for themselves and are bitter that Google is investing the man-power to do so.
The settlement is for a bogus lawsuit.
The problem is this: Google has the ability to pay their way out of this nuisance lawsuit. Others do not. Thus Google ends up with a defacto monopoly.
From the author's perspective, however, there is no ability to pursue a bogus lawsuit to a conclusion more favorable than free money they shouldn't be getting in the first place.
Of course William Morris is against it. The settlement is bad for them and bad for our society. It's bad for authors, even. But the only thing worse for authors is opting out of the settlement.
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.
If the original author died without any children or a spouse it becomes even more difficult to determine who should have the rights. Personally I think if no-one can say for sure who owns the work, then the world should be in the public domain.
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.
Why do people always have to opt out of something they don't understand or want to be in? what's the problem with opting in? with that at least you have a choice...
It's Google performing a mass indexing of something (it's what they do). Could you imagine what the web would be like if every site had to have opted in to Google's index initially? Not saying it's right or wrong, but just presenting the situation from another perspective.
This guy's the limit!
Because these are orphan works. If no one really claims them anymore, the opt-in rate would be very low.
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 don't think Google can obtain exclusive rights to public domain works through this maneuver.
They can't. Bringing up Gutenberg is a complete red herring.
"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.
You missed the point. Google have a deal with publishers, you, Joe Nobody, would not even be able to make an appointment to see an individual publisher's secretary's dog, let alone try and do a deal with an entire industry.
This move is going to get google into the DoJ monopoly spotlight. Perhaps if all the books were public domain and copyright laws changed to have sane limits, we'd be in a different position, but that clearly isn't going to happen.
Seriously, what is the chance that someone with no money will get Congress to change copyright law purely to benefit the public? You say they have been campaigning for years, to which I say they could campaign for a thousand years without getting anywhere. Copyright law is controlled by the behemoths. In this case, the behemoth is concerned with something other than restricting the public access for a change.
I am perfectly happy with Gutenburg rather than Google getting these rights. But I know it would never happen.
You missed the point. Google have a deal with publishers, you, Joe Nobody, would not even be able to make an appointment to see an individual publisher's secretary's dog, let alone try and do a deal with an entire industry.
That's correct. However, the OP's comment is also correct. This opens the door for competition specifically because it's monopolistic. That is, Google knows full well that they can't be allowed to be the only player with access to this material, and that the next guy (Bing?) to come along can just say, "dear publisher, please write me a contract granting me access to your books on the same terms as Google or I will follow up my lawsuit with a trip to the DoJ, explaining the nature of your anti-competitive practices."
The publishers know this, and aren't interested in granting exclusive access to just one company anyway, so I imagine that they're warming up their contract-printing services as we speak.
Remember that Google is just the first company to have cracked this nut. There will most certainly be others.