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."

Comments

Communism!

[schmidt349]

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.

Re:Communism!

[LordLucless]

Your problem isn't with people like this guy. It's with politicians who have pushed copyright into the realms of insanity. If works expired in 14 years, they would probably survive to enter the public domain.

Re:Communism!

[cpt kangarooski]

The solution of course, is registration and renewal.

To get a copyright, an author must opt-in by registering with the various national copyright offices in the countries in which he seeks protection. If he fails to do this within a modest period of time (say, 1 year after the first publication of the work, anywhere in the world, where publication is taken very broadly, or 5 years after creation of the work if unpublished), the work falls into the public domain. For copyrighted works, the copyright term is very short (say, 1 year from registration), but can be extended for another term if the copyright holder renews the copyright before the current term expires; if he fails to do this, the work falls into the public domain. And the number of renewals is limited depending on the class of work (e.g. software might have a maximum copyright length of 5 years, while a movie might have a maximum length of 20 years), letting the work fall into the public domain when it can no longer be renewed and the last term expires.

The forms for registration and renewal would always require the applicant to provide up-to-date contact information. This would be further strengthened by strengthening and enlarging the notice formality, using unique IDs for works, similar to how patents are handled and patented goods are marked. Not only would third parties have a good idea who held the copyright at any given time, but they'd also have a good idea of which copyrights were involved to aid in finding the right records to begin with.

This is by no means difficult for authors. In the US, registration and renewal, by various means, were standard features of our copyright system for nearly two centuries, and we managed okay. The paperwork is roughly about as difficult as a change of address form filed with the Post Office, and in any case, authors encounter plenty of forms in their daily lives just like the rest of us, whether it's taxes, registering to vote, getting a driver's license, filling out an intake form at the doctor's office, etc. They're not children, and don't need to be coddled. There might be fees, but they should be kept to a minimum, merely to avoid having people abuse the system, rather than to raise revenue, or make the system self-supporting, or to tax authors. I'd be perfectly happy with a token $1 fee per registration or renewal.

Your tone suggests it's a bad thing...

[peipas]

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.

For whom the inconvenient bell tolls....

[Onetus]

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

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:the reason it's opt-out

[sapphire wyvern]

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.