Slashdot Mirror
Delay, Renegotiation Sought For Google Books Settlement
Miracle Jones writes "The Google Books settlement has been removed from consideration by Google and the Authors Guild after the DoJ made it crystal clear that the settlement would not be ratified 'as is' due to foreign rights, privacy, and antitrust reasons. The October 7th 'fairness hearing' has been canceled, and the next step is a November 6th 'status hearing' where the plaintiffs will reveal changes to the new settlement, such as how they plan to make it more fair, legal, and inclusive, and whether or not they will need to notify all the members of the class action lawsuit (7 million writers or so) yet again as a result of the changes. Some people are very happy about this."
Google tried a fast one, the global publishing equivalent of tightly packaging a web browser with an OS, and got caught. The only "negotiations" up to this point had been akin to the conversation the kid has with the candy jar. Now, perhaps, a genuine dialogue can begin.
Hopefully whatever comes of this will help out groups like IMSLP that are working on books and other media outside the text-centric Google mold. Orphaned copyright, and excessive copyright terms in general, are too large a problem to let an almost "good enough" solution like Google Books carry the day.
This is like when airplanes were invented. Before that if you owned land, you owned it all the way up to the sky. Imagine if every airline and hobby pilot had to get permission from each individual owner of the land they would fly over. Well, it was decided that property rights would have to yield to progress. There are of course limitations, such as how low you can fly, noise and other things that actually affect the land owner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_rights
donate their questionable results to the Library of Congress and get a tax deduction for their expenses.
It's just an ugly mess that arose from well, doing things without taking the consequences into account first.
"The Justice Department told U.S. District Judge Denny Chin in a brief filed last week that the agreement threatens to give Google the power to increase book prices and discourage competition,"
Wait, how is offering out-of-print books discouraging competition? I thought part of being an out-of-print book is that there is no competition because there is nobody printing the book anymore...
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Class action lawsuits shouldn't be allowed to absolve future infringement against an entire class just because a few people agreed to the terms. This settlement should have dealt solely with liability for past infringement, and terms of further distribution should be handled in an opt-in manner, or by changing the law (which does need to be changed to better handle abandoned works).
I clicked on the last link of the summary, which brought me to a page that has several pictures of stock car drivers in victory poses.
Are we to suppose this website got the rights from NASCAR and other related property holders to use these images?
Just a thought, since they seem to be a group championing "digital rights".
I don't understand what Google is doing wrong. Can somebody please explain it what it is that so many people and corporations object to? I've read a bunch of articles but none have explained what the actual underlying problem is.
The closest thing I've heard that makes sense is that a book (unlike a web page) was never written with the understanding that it would be read and indexed by a machine. But really, I have a hard time seeing how this would hurt authors or publishers or anybody. The benefits seem great.
-ec
> primarily because of the actions of a single corporation.
"Single"? How exactly does your post jive with the reality of the Kindle's DRM? Or am I missing something?
And with regard to the main point of your post, I hate to tell you, but in most of the better futures we could have, dead-tree books are eventually going to be "quaint collector's items", no matter what your personal opinion about is. And yes, this may take a generation, or two....
The win situation would be that everyone would have got easy access to orphaned books. Having the ability to search them would be very beneficial for any researcher in the world. Especially if work was put to scanning old books held in small amounts by collectors and institutions.
The only win i can see is lobbyism from a few parties that felt left out and couldnt tag along on googles settlement money. I hope Google just drop this and let someone else foot the bill and then make the same demand for equal access as Microsoft makes now.
HTTP/1.1 400
Personally, I understand your position, but I lean more to preferring a half-bad workaround to the current bad law, as opposed to waiting for it to be changed for the better, when the direction of recent changes are all in the opposite direction.
Frankly, I'd have been OK for the DoJ to have come out with a few recommended changes which remove Google from a monopoly position, while maintaining the orphaned works workaround.
> Are we to suppose this website got the rights from NASCAR and other related property holders to use these images?
Are we to suppose guilt without proof now, just because it has to do with crimes which are easy to commit, even unintentionally?
Just a thought, that maybe we all should be trying to champion "constitutional rights"? (Instead of jumping down each other's throats for no good reason whatsoever? You're going to tell me that you've never forwarded an email you got from someone else to a third party, without proper licensing from the author of the message, for example?)
What Google are doing wrong depends largely on your viewpoint.
Why don't the individual authors sue Google for a few million dollars each?
An illegally copied book is worth as much as an illegally copied record album.
And then each individual author offers to settle for $6000 cash.
That is from Lawrence Lessig's Creative Commons. The book is available at bookstores, the public library, and for free from his web site. It's a good read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this debate.
Free Martian Whores!
2 examples....
1) I went to visit my grad student mother 5 years ago in New Hampshire. On a whim, I went to the U library and looked at the computers. I looked up a relatively obscure 18th century figure I'm interested on the library catalog. There, on the catalog system were digitized copies of small run monographs that were only really available in a few british libraries. At the time I was floored.
2) In the context of something totally different, I became fascinated by the role of Mark Twain as blurring what "honesty" means. About 15 minutes of googling came up with a Google books reference i would likely have never found otherwise that spoke in a rich and direct way to my thoughts. I ended up buying a used copy of the book. It was an academic book, and I would not have been a likely candidate for purchasing it (I couldn't justify the $60 it would have cost to buy new).
I love books. I grew up with books. Kindle may be getting there, but books are a great form factor. That said, books are still just a medium. The message is what really counts. Putting culture online has many wonderful and far-reaching effects. It also is, and will continue to create a sea-change which will undoubtedly hurt people.
> The technology is no where near that.
But eventually it will get there (barring global disasters, etc., which is why I qualified it as only perhaps in the better futures). We, however, might not live long enough to see it, so I don't think you should really worry about it on a personal level.
do this.
ANYONE who can negotiate a deal with the authors can do exactly what they want with these works, just like Google did.
If the authors guild doesn't want this done by anyone other than Google, then this is the authors guild fault, enabled by copyright, which is a monopoly grant by intent.
Nothing to do with Google.