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India Objects To Google Book Settlement
angry tapir writes "About 15 Indian authors and publishers, and two Indian organizations, have submitted their objections to Google's plan to scan and sell books online. Google's proposed settlement of a US lawsuit turns copyright law on its head, according to Siddharth Arya, legal counsel for the Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation, which licenses reproduction rights to books and other publications."
God forbid Google should try to catalog, preserve, and make available out-of-print specialty books that are never going to get another run on the presses. I'm a specialist in a discipline (classical philology = ancient Greek/Roman literary studies) that depends heavily on this type of book, and I can't tell you the number of times I've discovered an old (like ca. 1960 or earlier) but important volume in a bibliography that my library doesn't have. I would kill to just be able to dial those books up on Google, but of course I can't because of bloodsuckers like these guys.
Eventually rare but important books are just going to start disappearing, and by the time the problem gets big enough that the right people are aware of it we won't be able to do anything. Thanks a lot, publishers, for destroying untold amounts of information. I hope it was worth it.
Google's proposed settlement of a US lawsuit turns copyright law on its head
Good. Copyright law has been quite ridiculous for some time now.
Thanks for letting us know that you are A Good Person (TM).
Some people might object of a megacorp using their creations for profit without even giving them notice.
fuck im retarded
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
crore=10 million
I guess my indian citizenship, excessive body hair, and profound scent will be revoked.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
Having read the article, it seems like a rather large whinge.
If you're receiving a royalty cheque for your books, then have whomever is paying you your royalty cheque opt-opt of google if you so desire.
Is it such a technical hurdle for a publishing company to indicate to Google that Books X, Y & Z are opt-out, or even that ALL books that they publish are to be opt-out?
Because if you're not receiving money for your books - why would you have any objections to it being available to all ?
Whom deserves the greater inconvenience? Those who actively publish books or those who can't find the authors (dead, recluse, one name among millions) to get permission. Which one of those two is doing it for a living and has the ability to do so? Imho we can't trust publishers to provide information/contacts for authors and books so permission can be sought, when it's a task that won't earn them money. It seems that slating it as an opt-out forces those who want to maintain their control must actively do so, and no amount of spin is going to make the complaint about having to do more as part of publishing seem anything more than a whinge.
As a side effect of the same process that lets our legal system grant you copyright over your work. Namely, it's our legal system, in our country, and we can do what we like with it.
If China wanted to remove all copyright from anyone who isn't a Chinese citizen, they would be legally allowed to do so, largely by virtue of the fact that they are beholden to no-one. Legally speaking, this is the same situation.
(You can make a moral argument about it, of course. That's different entirely.)
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The real problem is that this is a huge change to how copyright law has previously worked, and it's being implemented by private enterprise and a trade association and their associated lawyers without any actual involvement of an elected legislature or executive.
I'm all for the creation of a right to scan, archive, and make available orphaned works. I'm happy for Google to do the work and take whatever profit they can obtain from the market for orphaned works. (In fact, I think that if a copyright holder fails to make their copyrighted works available on Reasonable And Non Discriminatory terms, their copyright protection on those works should automatically cease. It should *never* be possible to use copyright to keep culture and knowledge away from public access). However, I think that right should be created by proper modification to copyright law, not by using class-action law to make an end run around the legislative system to create a monopoly on Google's behalf.
As long s the "a reasonable amount" is set by the Copyright Holder. They own the rights, and should be free to set the price.
No, they do not own the rights - at best they are leasing them from the Public.
Since it is the Public who Grants the copyright in the first place, then the Public should have a say in the pricing too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
But Google should have gone for opt-in for living authors, or if the author can't be found, a statement saying they would like to get in touch with him/her so they can ask him/her to opt-in.
Which would have the effect of making no significant change to the current situation, and the current situation must change for their to be any significant progress.
Make no mistake about it - the problem of orphaned works is huge and intractable under anything like, "opt in." For example, posting a statement saying they would like to get in touch with the copyright holder of an out-of-print work (the author doesn't mean squat under current law, only the copyright holder) will result in nearly zero responses because in many cases no one knows who the holder is, including the holder him/it-self because over the course of events like bankruptcies, mergers, buyouts, etc the details of the individual contracts for out of print works get lost really easily because there is no money in keeping track of OOP copyright ownership details. Even when the records have been diligently filed away, no one with access to those records is going to check if Google's request applies to them because there is no money in it. The records will just sit there moldering away until the records owner thinks they might be able to make money with some of the information in them.
FWIW, if I were trying to fix the current situation I would prefer to establish a global/centralized "opt-out" database, let google maintain it if they want to, and then anyone - not just google - can freely distribute anything that has not been opted-out. I'd also end automatic copyright assignment and go back to the previous system of requiring registration.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Since when do 15 authors constitute "India"?
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Make no mistake about it - the problem of orphaned works is huge and intractable
It's huge, but not intractable. The cause is the insanely long terms of copyrights. If copyrights lasted a maximum of twenty or thirty years (originally it was only 14 years), you would have no orphaned works. Change copyright law so that lengths are reasonable instead of insane and the problem is solved.
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