Slashdot Mirror
Amazon, MS, and Yahoo Against Google's Library
anonymousNR writes "From the BBC, 'Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library. Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works. "Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle said.'"
1. Competitor is kicking your ass at X
2. Form Open X Alliance
3. Profit!
Personally I don't care if BigCorpG or BigCorpM does it. I mean, all we really want is books to be available to anyone that wants to read, study and enjoy books. Imagine a world of an endless alway-open library system, free and available to anything that can connect to the web if it wants to borrow something new. The scanning effort Google is doing will never come in time for some books, but on the other hand they did hype it. Form an alliance be against Google, but at least show you can do it better.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
Their wealth abandoned and forgotten until the last copy is lost. Each was once a treasure, each contains something unique that once lost is gone forever. Who knows what nuggets of wisdom once enshrined in print might enlighten, inform, inspire or entertain a new generation? Nobody knows. We do know from dangling references in works of historical importance that a great deal has always been lost. Amazon knows that if people continue to have access to old books, they won't buy as many new ones. Microsoft knows that they must fight the Google on every front from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Yahoo, well, we all know why they're following Microsoft in this. And so this vile crew set their goal not to do it better but to prevent this service to mankind.
Google's effort fights the loss. It struggles to retain as much as possible against the inevitable creep of time. It's great, in my mind, that this goal even occurred to them. If some others want to compete in this worthy cause they should do so. But to fight against it is evil: not potential evil, but actual and active evil.
Count me with the people who don't see the Internet Archive's angle in this. It's basically taking their "archive everything" web idea and applying it to dead tree based data. If preserving the drunken mumblings of every blogger is important, surely preventing the loss of the writings of Arnold J. Toynbee and the host of others like him must be more so. Not everything worth preserving has been published on the Internet. Yet.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're the second person to post some variation on the 'knowledge is power, and some people want to control that power' theme, and I just wanted to add that there's some real, specific reasons this applies at the present time to out of print books, for those who may think the meme is a little paranoid.
A few weeks ago, I read a book on higher dimensional geometry (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension - by Rudolph v. B. Rucker). It was published in 1977 in a cheap Dover paperback edition. In the back, there's references to a large number of books and papers on Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and abstract math, by some of the most famous names of 20th century physics (Einstein, Wheeler, Hawking, Everett, Minkowski, etc.) A tremendous number of these turn out to be out of print and unavailable through Amazon or other common sources. In one case, I was offered a copy of one work for over 300 dollars.
There are also a lot of books on the 'occult' side of higher dimensions in the references. Rucker isn't pushing an esoteric knowledge angle - He quotes from several of these, but he's often very critical of the misinterpretations of science found in them, and while he sees some interesting features in the works of people like P. D. Ouspensky or J. W. Dunne, he comes down rather harder on Carlos Castaneda. A little checking on these found a surprising number of them were in print or available online at low costs, and most of the rest were being offered free online from various occult groups websites.
What all this implies is left as an exercise for the astute reader. One example does not, by itself, make much of a trend, but it would be interesting if other such cases exist.
.
Who is John Cabal?
The Internet Archive has been fighting this, but not to prevent access to out of print books. They want get the same deal as Google - the right to redistribute out of print books unless the author/publisher opts out. What they object to is that the current deal is structured to give Google essentially exclusive rights to charge for access to out of print books. Libraries get one (1) terminal allowed to access the books for free; everything else goes behind a Google paywall.
This is really a legal scheme to make copyright opt-in again, instead of opt-out. Before various revisions to US copyright law, you had to register copyrights and renew them to keep them in force. So out of print stuff slipped easily into the public domain. Under current law, most material is locked up by copyright, even if nobody cares.
In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement--more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.
The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry's future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.
I think Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo should shut up until they've done as much for readers as Project Gutenberg and Google have.
Commit wholesale copyright infringement and hope that they can get favourable terms from a settlement? Yes, I too wish Microsoft had done this. Given the recent awards for sharing a couple of dozen music tracks, I think, as a member of the class involved in the Google lawsuit, I would have been happy to simply not settle with Microsoft, charge them the minimum statutory damages rate for wilful infringement, bankrupt the company and never have to work again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News