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DoJ Recommends NY Court Reject Google Book Deal
eldavojohn writes "The BBC and others are reporting on the US Department of Justice's recommendation to a New York court that they reject the Google book deal. The deal has received considerable attention, but for the most part it has been negative."
Lets just reform copyright law and eliminate this problem altogether.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Summary: OMG searchable books! Think of the copyright holders!
This is only a good thing if it leads to a better arrangement. The google book deal is not ideal, but at least it gets the books out there. If as a result of this deal being struck down we have copyright reform (not likely, since at the moment people dying of lack of health care is a significantly bigger issue), then it is good. If as a result of this deal being struck down, a better deal is negotiated with Google (which is possible), then it will still not be ideal. If as a result of this deal being struck down, nothing ends up happening, which is possible, it would be worse for the world.
Qxe4
If the settlement was "any other company may also have the same rights under the same terms", it would be a VERY good deal.
But with the exclusivity, it is very bad. Without the exclusivity, someone else could take the time to do the scanning, and the sales. EG, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, or even a new startup.
But with the exclusivity, you give Google a monopoly over out-of-print books.
Test your net with Netalyzr
In other words, they're terrified of the prospect that Google is extending the doctrine of squatters' rights to intellectual property.
That hasn't kept anyone from posting. The articles don't go into detail what exactly the deal is, either.
Under the deal - the product of a legal suit - Google would establish a $125m (£77m) fund to compensate those whose works it published online.
It would establish a Book Rights Registry so that authors whose work it digitised were paid when their material was viewed online.
There already exists a open source download tool with which you can fetch 95% -- as much as Google offers/digitized -- of any book, so the fear is understandable.
I guess flatrate for authors or making it a just a preview to find out if this is the right book might be options that the authors will agree on.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Well, that depends. How long have you been dead and your work out of print?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
So you think it's OK for Google to co-opt my rights as an author to control my work - for profit - without either my permission or compensation?
So you think it's OK for you to maintain control of your out-of-print and otherwise unavailable work ad-infinitum?
What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
Money. Because you're no longer making any off of the out-of-print books that the Google book deal covers.
I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
There must always be some large, slow-moving body (like a Mammoth, but preferably evil like a corporation or government) which We The People assault to prove our virtue if not virility.
Yesterday, Microsoft and George W. Bush; today, Google and Nancy Pelosi. So it goes.
Futurist Traditionalism
What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
Ego? Contribution to humanity? Bragging rights? The sales of books caused by Googles advertisement of them? It's not as if human creativity suddenly popped into existence when copyright laws started.
On the other hand, this settlement seems pretty deeply wrong. It's pretty clear that the authors understood one form of the copyright law when they wrote their books. A change should involve serious debate and democratic processes. On the other hand, nobody but a big corporation could have pushed something like this. Try just declaring that your little volunteer organisation has the right to share books online; I think you'll find yourself declared "pirates" PDQ.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If money is your only motivation for writing books, don't.
If you can't write a book in the age of the internet purely for the joy that other people might read and appreciate it, or use a searchable database of books to market yours, go get a real job. I cannot help you.
Erm... Isn't part of the deal to set-up the Book Rights Registry, which pays authors when their books are viewed online? If you do get royalties then I don't see how express permission is necessary. Otherwise, how is what they're doing any worse than what a library does?
mysql> SELECT * FROM `places` WHERE `place` LIKE 'home`; Empty set (0.00 sec)
Isn't the judiciary branch supposed to be independent of executive?
Is this the same DOJ that has been packed with "ex" Microsoft lawyers? The same Microsoft that's run by some Mussolini-lookalike who's supposed to have said, "I'm gonna fucking kill Google!"
If you want your life to be different, live it differently.
I already am. I'm not responsible for marketing at work, and my fun projects are Open Source.
I've been doing some writing myself, and it's purely for the enjoyment of the writing itself.
I'll not claim to be a great writer by any stretch, but it's relaxing, and a good way to pass the time when gaming just doesn't cut it.
Some writers do, however, make it a full time job. They have to if they want to meet the demand for their works, or to meet a publishing obligation.
Now, all things considered, I still think the suit against Google is not good. If they're working with out of print and PD works, then I say more power to them.
For out of print works, telling them to "Suck it up, sweetcheeks" isn't going to help you sell your book, and will probably hurt sales of future works. Fighting your fans doesn't work, just ask Metallica.
As for works in the public domain, there's no copyright issues there, so why the hostility toward making them available online?
Just my random 2 cents worth here. Change available at the counter.
In the case of authors I know, they are neither dead nor are there works out of print. But as their works were in print outside of the U.S. (though orderable online, that is how the works got into the libraries to be scanned), the Google settlement treated them as out of print, so Google was going to treat their books as orphaned works. I can understand the enthusiasm inside the U.S. for the deal (we can take everything published elsewhere in the world and take control of it), but the DOJ has to respect the copyright of other countries, as per the Berne convention. I wouldn't be surprised if a final result is based off the Google Partners program, which is the existing Google book search system where Google actually asks the authors permission. Asking people's permission solves all kinds of problems, and isn't normally considered evil. While it would still leave the genuinely orphaned works a problem, that is a problem created by stupid copyright extensions, and is ultimately solvable only by copyright reform.
> The Google book deal has received considerable attention but
> for the most part it has been negative.
Surely most of the general public has viewed this Google project as a positive thing. Only large multinational corporations such as the large publishing houses, the RIAA [sic], Sony, and Microsoft (with their copyright and DRM interests) are the ones squeeling about Google making a fair-use amount of a book available for a reader to peruse.
Lets face it, MP3s make it easy for listeners to decide in a fair-use way if an album is worth buying (much like walking into a shop and asking to listen to the album). Fair-use viewing of a book is much the same as standing in the store and flipping through the book.
Because it's simple:
Copyright law is an agreement between "the people" (aka the government) and you. The first part of the agreement is that you enjoy protection and exclusive rights to copy and distribute. The second part of the agreement, that copyright holders often forget about, ignore or otherwise disregard, is that in exchange for said protection, the works would be released into the public domain upon expiry of the term of protection.
Here's the problem. The agreement is now lasting longer than the media it is distributed upon. This makes the works for which the people offered you copyright protection, unavailable to the people by the time the agreement expires thereby depriving the people of their public domain works and in fact the cultural and historical value of the works.
By having it available in digital archives, there is an increased chance that the works will still be available whenever the term of the copyright protection agreement has ended.
Yes,
Searching books is useful.
You should not have strict control over who sees your work if you publish it.
Searching books costs you nothing (even in opportunity cost)
each copyright holder implementing their own search is useless (the sum is more than the parts).
The only authors I can see concerned are either plagiarists, embarrassed by their work, or control freaks.
Unless your argument is that your profit scheme for your books was to license them for use in a gigantic book search database I don't see how this impacts motivation at all.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Because you sold that book to me. It is mine now. How dare you to command me what I can do with book I bought? Wouldn't you like to tell me what i am allowed to do with my car? or camera? or refrigerator?
You dismissed his argument then supported it. Please think before posting. (how many hands have you got ?)
If google have online publishing rights, what happened to your rights as the author ? Or the rest of us as members of the public domain ? Shouldn't these rights be the property of the state, i.e. the US, not a corporation ?
Maybe I'm misled, and it is perfectly legal for me to publish out of print books once this thing is settled, but I have a sneaking suspicion that only google have the rights now.
Last time I checked, most software written is never sold, it's developed in-house as a custom solution. Thus copyright has almost no bearing on it, more likely would fall under trade secrets. See recent case of Goldman-Sachs coder getting arrested by FBI for example.
They can make deals with publishers, that is not a problem.
The problem is the case of "orphaned" (I'm not sure how strictly they are defining orphaned but other posts here imply it's not particularly strict) works, some body has through a class action sued Google on behalf of them. In a class action settlement the lawyers who brought the case essentially get to negotiate on behalf of the class and are trying to use this power to grant Google a settlement that lets them reproduce orphaned works.
The problem is that without a proper judgement on this lawsuit anyone else who wants to enter the market is in a bind. They could go down the same route Google has gone and hope for a friendly plaintiff but there is no guarantee that a friendly plaintiff will get there before some group who plans to see the case through to the end. If the new scanner than loses that case then it would likely set a precedent and Google really would be left with a monopoly on orphaned works.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Doesn't the public hold the rights to the underlying language?
What if we just rescind your license to the words?
Oh, and the society you got your ideas and education from would like their cultural memes back as well.
You didn't create your work out of a void. Without the supporting culture, you would be little more than a quick witted animal. Certainly, with no one educating you, you would not have produced anything. Where is your payment back to the thousands of people who influenced you?
The very culture that produced you granted you a reasonable amount of time to control your cultural contribution. They did this to encourage you to contribute back to that culture. Unless you have a cure for cancer, face it, your contribution likely amounts to very little. The culture can probably do without it.
Copyright is not some sort of natural or God-given right. It;'s a right granted by "the people" for *their* immediate benefit. Not yours. "The people" want to encourage people to share. The operative work: "SHARE". This is how a culture progresses.
The contract is: you make it public, eventually it will be public domain.
The founding fathers give you a limited time to control it, and the moment you created it, you accepted the contract. If you don't want people copying it, keep it locked up. Otherwise, it will eventually be public domain and you get no say in the matter. Don't like it? Move to another country.
Also, in case you want to whine some more, it was originally ~20 years. So you're getting more than was intended already.
Besides, the real problem here is when someone moves on and doesn't care what happens to it, or just dies without cleaning up all of their business. The author would have to explicitly terminate the copyright, but an abandoned/orphan work just sits around for an entire lifetime after the author dies.
There is no one to ask, no one to lift the copyright, no one to pay, no one to buy it from. It's stuck, because the copyright system is not opt-in, it's required and once you stop caring about your work it doesn't magically get freed.
So, you write something and no one buys it, or people stop buying it. It's making you no money, you forget you even created it. It's not in your will, your heirs have no idea it's yours. You die. Now someone reads your obituary and looks into your stuff. Fascinating, where can I buy this work? You can't, it's not in print. Heirs? They know nothing about it, or aren't in the business, couldn't care less, never return phone calls, whatever. If you are against Google on this one, you're saying it shouldn't even be in search results. No one can find it in the back of a library and scan it, to make it available and searchable.
I can't type in a quote that I remember reading when I was a child, and find that book, because you were selfish enough to die and not leave instructions on its care.
The law dares to command you to not abuse the book. If the book costs $200,000 to $1 million to publish (adding up author royalties, and other publishing and marketing costs), the $20 pittance you paid does not give you the right to reproduce and sell it or give it away for free.
The contract is: you make it public, eventually it will be public domain. The founding fathers give you a limited time to control it, and the moment you created it, you accepted the contract. If you don't want people copying it, keep it locked up. Otherwise, it will eventually be public domain and you get no say in the matter. Don't like it? Move to another country.
The Google Agreement also covers books where Google can't seem to find the copyright holder. That Google can't find them doesn't mean that the holder's rights disappear. This is all just a big land grab by Google, and you know perfectly well that if it had been Microsoft, the cries here would be deafening.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
Or just rethink "work" in general:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
Also:
"Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator: Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain"
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
Regarding: "what reason would the guy have to make the music in the first place? Sure, there's the love of music, but some people ... have to put food on the table."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What then is my motivation to produce for distribution future works?
If you're worth a damn as a writer, you don't have to ask that question.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
But with the exclusivity, you give Google a monopoly over out-of-print books.
We're talking about works that the publishers had decided to let die. The copyrights are still in force, but there are not enough sales to justify printing another copy. As a result, they are not currently available at any price.
The damage to both the consumers and authors took place when the books were taken off the market. As long as they are both out of print and still protected by copyright, without an agreement such as this, we would be forced to wait 100 years or more before the works to fall into public domain and be available again.
Google may get a monopoly on them, but the bottom line is that the authors will start getting paid again while they are still alive, something which no one else was apparently offering to do. And the copyright owners can let anyone collectively manage their individual monopolies (copyrights) in any way they see fit.
Just because the agreement with Google didn't say that "any other company may also have the same rights under the same terms" does not constitute exclusivity. It would have to say that someone like Amazon (or your other examples) could not negotiate a similar deal. Exclusivity cannot be implied from what the agreement does not say.
Since they got on it first, I wouldn't think it out of line if Google did receive exclusivity for a certain number of years before the publishers opened it up to competition. This would let some sort of standard be worked out before people like Microsoft get in and start trying to bastardize it.
Overall, this is a good deal for consumers (who get access to "lost" works) and authors (the intended beneficiaries of copyright law). The DOJ is against it because it's filled with RIAA lawyers and the concept of paying the authors is foreign to them.
As long as Google makes a good faith effort to ascertain the owners of any copyright interest in its works, I have no problem with it opening the barn door to readers.
I have a book whose copyright is registered in the USA, and I object to this deal. Not so much because people can download my book illegally - google for the title and the first hit is a site where you can do that - but because it gives Google an unfair competitive advantage that they obtained by breaking the law. I would have no objections if the settlement provided nondiscriminatory licensing, but Google wilfully violated copyright law and now gets to benefit from a monopoly on distributing a large number of works, and that seems wrong. If there is a consensus that these works should be made available[1], then they should be made available to everyone under the same terms. They should not only be made available to the company that tried distributing them illegally.
Really, though, this shouldn't be something that the judiciary decides. The legislature should be addressing copyright reform (and I don't mean the DMCA), restoring the balance between the authors' rights and the public's rights.
[1] I happen to believe that, but I don't get to make laws in the USA.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There are probably only a handfull of corporations with the resources to accomplish this on the scale that it's being done, and Google is the only one that has expressed enthusiasm for doing it. Instead of breaking the deal up, in which case everyone loses and noone wins, they should broker a more favorable deal with Google.
I think we can all agree that changes to the system that allow out of print books to again be produced and distributed is not a bad thing. What is a bad thing is creating a situation in which Google becomes the sole party responsible for the distribution of these books. I would feel much better if it wasn't Google, but rather a consortium of interests; corporate, academic, libraries, archivists, etc. Then one would feel that this wasn't simply a monopoly being handily delivered into Google's hands.
Or to put it another way, I don't trust Google, Amazon, Microsoft or anyone else, so let's do this the right way.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The answer was to add some trivial content to the old story, sex it up, and present it live in a comfy theatre where people would go be seen viewing it because it was cool. His marketing team was awesome.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
For 5000 years the deal has been that if you stuff was worth listening to, people would pay to hear you play it. After a while, if you did well, the song became part of the culture.
It's only since the invention of eternal copyright that an artist expected residuals. And even that is a trap... The old must be forever deprecated for the new, so your art that might become an eternal theme must be abolished for the latest pop tart. This can't be done if copyright is rational.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It should not be up to Google to decide that they can publish a work that is still protected by copyright just because they can't determine who the copyright owner is whether they've made a good faith effort or not. Instead, Copyright law should be updated to take into account orphaned works and what one can and can't do with them.
I can suggest three possibilities for handling orphaned works:
In my mind the solution is to reduce copyright terms to something more reasonable. Hardly any works earn money for their copyright holders after the first few years, and practically zero after a couple of decades. So set the copy period to be 20 years. Then there wouldn't be many orphaned works and society would be richer from all the public domain material.
No; I dismissed his argument (he deserves our charity because he's an author or else nobody will produce books) and supported his conclusion (the google settlement is crap and badly thought out). Maybe you should learn to read before posting?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();