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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."
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...
I think book publishers are afraid that you won't buy their latest offerings, preferring instead to download some out-of-print book you can get for free from Google. It seems unlikely, especially since you can currently download many of the classics (ie, the best-of-breed out of print books) for free from sites like Project Gutenberg.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
This is nothing like indexing. The terms of the settlement (which are actually broader than what google was doing before it was sued) are more like google going through the WSJ subscription only archives and posting preview copies of the works on it's own site. Then google will sell you the full copy, and pay the WSJ what they decide to pay, whether the WSJ agreed to any of this or not. It's not hard to see why the WSJ would take issue with this.
I thought Project Gutenberg was doing this only with public domain works. That would be the big difference, no?
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
perhaps I'm wrong about this, but using dead trees isn't really a problem in terms of carbon consumption. It may have other environmental factors (the types of trees grown on tree farms for use in paper mills do tend to grow quickly, sap the ground until it is effectively dead, and replace native species. The issue with paper made from trees is one of resource management related to other fields than carbon trapping. When we turn it into a book, the carbon in the tree is still trapped, not released into the atmosphere (unless you are a fan of burning books, in which case, some might become atmospheric depending on the level of your burn and whether or not you included steinbeck's works in your affair).
Limited edition runs would still be valuable since google's print is not an original. Ontop of that authors defending their copyright can opt out.
Some clauses on orphaned works,
That's one of the big ones right there, since the way Google's deal was set up the first time around, "orphaned works" weren't always "orphaned works". They basically equated "orphaned works" to "not for sale in the USA, but quite likely still in print and under copyright in their countries of origin however we don't care."
There are some other issues relating to copyright material distributed under GFDL and some CC licenses. Redistribution is allowed, but certain nonfinancial conditions are attached, applying to the distributor and/or to the recipient. A financial settlement, which is meaningless in the context of GFDL or CC material, cannot absolve the distributor from the nonfinancial duties associated with distribution.
General GFDL conditions for distribution can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFDL#Conditions. Additionally, if anyone distributes GFDL documents in quantity, they are obliged to make available also the associated document source (such as LaTeX), and if it is a program manual for a GPL program, they must also make the program source code available. There are analogous issues for the several variants on CC licenses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons#Types_of_Creative_Commons_licenses.
Even the FSF is against the Google settlement...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
With other copyrighted works, if a work isn't available and you can't find the creator, you're allowed to go to the government and say "hey, I can't find this guy to negotiate, decide a fee for him and I'll pay it".
Some works, you don't even have to try to find the creator, just send the copyright office a letter 30 days before you start distribution.
This is the same deal.