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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."
My people will not stand for this, there are over 1000 crore of us!
Seriously though, despite not RTFAing, I believe that googles bookscanning should be an opt in and not opt out process.
Thank you come again
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
I wonder what it would be like to have to decide whether to sell your book or information for a slight profit or have your information available for many individuals who could use it for their own purposes.
I personally would prefer to share information for the good of humanity and yet I know that their are those that are in it for the money alone.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
I used to get called every evening several times by unscrupulous companies trying to part me from my money. They expanded from just calling my home to calling me at the office, then calling my family. What started as a polite brief conversation in which I rejected their offer and asked them to stop calling me became a vicious conversation with yelling on each end of the phone. Hanging up had no effect since they simply called me back. Somehow my phone number was marked as Active and I was harassed incessantly by these goons.
But then I found out about opting out and did just that. Now when I get a call from these telemarketing agencies I make sure I get their name and then report them to the local BBB. It's nice to have recourse when I get called now.
So when an author with a handful of books and articles needs to write a single note to Google to tell them to leave them alone, it's not a terribly huge burden. For a bunch of people who make their living *writing*, what's the big deal in saying, "Hey Goog, don't upload my books. Thanks, Chief Breaks Like The Wind"?
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.
I've seen dozens of stories about this, and never got the impression that Google was going to sell the books it's scanning. I thought it was purely free searching and browsing, with google profiting maybe from contextual advertising.
Are they planning selling print-on-demand copies? For cost, or to turn a profit?
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.
The reason it's opt-out is that there's a huge number of orphaned works out there whose copyrights are still valid but that can't be bought legally because they're out of print. The authors are probably dead, and the publishers aren't interested in communicating with anyone about the works, because the amount of money they could get out of it wouldn't be worth their time. Therefore it can't be opt-in. The copyright regime is having the effect of making these books permanently unavailable, which isn't doing the authors (or their heirs or their readers) any good. If copyright terms were more reasonable, it wouldn't be such a big problem, but congress has basically decided to keep extending copyrights so that they never expire. That's what's created this huge class of orphaned works. The only way to deal with the problem is to make it opt-out.
Some authors are complaining, after the class-action suit is all over, that it's unfair and they weren't consulted. Well, sorry, but that's how a class-action suit works. They have to make a certain legal effort to notify you as a member of the class, but if you don't see a notification, you're out of luck, and the settlement applies to you just like everyone else. Boo hoo. Go ahead and opt out.
Find free books.
That's exactly my thoughts on reading TFA. Especially this:
I was thinking how great it would be if that was how it worked. If copyright owners basically had to contact the users and distributers of works and say "Oi, that's mine, either throw us some money (a reasonable amount) or cease, desist and delete."
I don't therefore I'm not.
In fact, I support google . He just want to give more use-full information to people on the internet. But he has some trouble, not only in Indian ,Also in my own county,China.
Good luck ! google !
this is amusing as india is one of the largest producers of copyright protected books, without license, in the world.
Objects in India are going to Google a book settlement? What kind of objects? And why can't they use Bing?
Microsoft and Yahoo are the next largest global players after Google. After that are hundreds of smaller competitors who inhabit various niches. Ultimate Max Burn
So how would opt in work? Would the author who is dead and has no relatives or recipients of the copyrights mail google and tell them the book is OK to scan?
Maybe they would email the entire world and wait until everyone in the world has answered "no, I don't own the copyrights" before scanning?
Don't be silly, there aren't that many.
He must have been counting their arms.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When Google does a huge scale for profit copyright infringement, they'll make a profit sharing deal. When a student shares 1 song to his friend non-commercially, he gets a $100 000 fine. That's justice in modern world. Corporations are above the law.
Since when do 15 authors constitute "India"?
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And how is this different from opt-out?
Because it is opt-in to copyright. If an author fails to opt-in, or if the copyright holder fails to continually renew their opt-in, the work enters the public domain.
True, if Google wanted to scan a copyrighted work, they'd still need to find an applicable exception to copyright, such as fair use, or get permission from the author. But this would massively reduce the number of works still under copyright, because most authors wouldn't care to copyright their works at all, or to maintain the copyright. And for those works that were copyrighted, there would be contact information for the copyright holder that was much more likely to be up to date, allowing Google to more easily contact them if it sought permission.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Having bought many an "international edition" of a textbook from this country this seems to be a case of the black hole calling the kettle black.
Won't fly; sounds too much like common sense, and in this day and age anything "common" is equated to plebeian.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"