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Once Again, US DoJ Opposes Google Book Search
angry tapir and several other readers passed along the news that the US Department of Justice has come out against the revised agreement to settle copyright lawsuits brought against Google by authors and publishers. This is a major blow to Google's efforts to build a massive digital-books marketplace and library. From the DoJ filing (PDF): "...the [Amended Settlement Agreement] suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation. As a consequence, the ASA purports to grant legal rights that are difficult to square with the core principle of the Copyright Act that copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright. Those rights, in turn, confer significant and possibly anticompetitive advantages on a single entity — Google."
Its inevitable that google charges for other peoples still-under-copyright work without their permission?
"His name was James Damore."
The inevitable future being what? That of one where anyone can circumvent copyright (or indeed any other property law by extension) by making an agreement with a body that purports to represent an entire industry, but has no agreement with most of those supposedly represented?
The inevitable future where most if not all major (and likely minor) written works are available digitally.
The book industry is acting just like the music industry was in the early 2000's. Publishers should try to work with google instead of against them. It's in their (and the public's) best interest.
Living With a Nerd
Opt out is evil. It's evil when spammers do it and it's evil when google does it.
If I create a work and hold the copyright on that work, google has no right to provide copies of that work without my permission, and they cannot say, "you can opt out!". That's backwards according to long established law.
This applies to much of what google does - online books, news stories copied from the organizations which create them, and providing cached versions of web pages.
Copyright law does not magically no longer matter if you add "on the internet" to it.
I agree with Google's aim: Prevent orphaned works from disappearing.
I disagree with the way they are trying to do it because it tramples all over the law to do so, -and- guarantees a monopoly while it's doing it. I think the DOJ is saying the same.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The right solution is to fix the brokenness of copyright law, not to write in a special exemption for a particular company.
For starters, we should have an orphan works provision, and the duration of copyright should be cut back down to reasonable levels.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Property laws and Copyright laws are mutually exclusive. We could completely nullify all copyrights without having any effect on property laws whatsoever.
There is no need for intellectual property anymore. Information is moving and changing to fast. If you lock something up in a patent or have it copyrighted derivative works are set back half a generation or more. Intellectual property laws need a full overhaul to address the change in technology and how information is spread. Personally I don't believe we need any intellectual property restrictions at all; I believe they do more harm than good. I believe that people could fully share all knowledge with each other and that there would still be a market for using that knowledge as a service or to produce a good. I think we should still cite the original creators of the knowledge, but that it should be free to all. We should give credit to the authors of knowledge, but at the same time they shouldn't be able to horde and monopolize knowledge.
I agree with the government's position on this one. What started out as a lawsuit over the scanning of books (to make them searchable, which I consider fair use) has now become an attempt by Google to gain rights they wouldn't have enjoyed without a contract with copyright holders. The idea of a class action lawsuit is to compensate plaintiffs for an alleged wrong, not to grant defendants new rights that could otherwise only be obtained through contract or legislation. In my opinion, the Author's Guild has sold out the class and acted against its best interests. Indeed, the proposed settlement affects even those authors who aren't members of the Author's Guild and does so in a way that is not in their best interests.
If Google wants access to people's copyrighted works beyond what's allowed by the fair use doctrine, let them negotiate with authors or else let them petition the government for sensible laws on orphaned works. The courts are not the way to secure such broad rights as Google has attempted to do through its settlement with the Author's Guild.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
This is Slashdot, IP is "phony" property - unless it's someone violating the GPL, then IP is a good thing.
If an author could opt-in for orphaned works, it would not be an orphaned work. I fail to see how requiring orphaned works to sit in the dark until copyright expires benefits anybody. The problem people have with this is that Google is attempting to use what is essentially an unused, untapped resource.
Why is it that the copyright maximalists always have to resort to LYING to make a point?
Companies engage in this nonsense all the time. All anyone ever asks of them is that they
comply with the license as soon as someone steps up and tells them to. These companies
don't just use "orphan" works, they use works very well knowning that they are actively
maintained and "belong to someone else".
Yet the all the community at large ever asks of them is to come into compliance.
So from the GPL compliance point of view, there's nothing out of the ordinary with what Google's doing.
Even from the point of view of "orphaned" works, the only entity that ever has standing to persue a
GPL enforcement suit is the "actual owner" or author of the work. This is why the GPL asks for
assignment over to them. Otherwise, they may be no one around that can legally complain when a GPL
work is violated.
On the one hand, Google could end up stealing a few pennies from someone that
can't be bothered to keep their work available. On the other hand, Google is
ensuring that the relevant work is kept around.
What do friends and defenders of literature value more: a few pennies or the actual work?
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> copyright owners generally control whether and how to exploit their works during the term of copyright
Which would be much more reasonable if copyright wasn't permanent (by any reasonable measure) now.
Copyright has been changed. As such, the rules governing it need to adjust to maintain the benefit of having it for society.
--- Mercutio was right.
So the inevitable future is that Google gets certain rights which no one else has?
Say someone (be it Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, or some startup company) wants to become a competitor to Google books. He can't. He doesn't have the special rights Google would be given by this agreement. He would still have to hunt down every single copyright owner and get his permission for every single book, while Google can just publish it unless the copyright owner explicitly told them not to. That's a huge competitive advantage for Google, and it's an unfair and anti-competitive one.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Yeah, bits of text, seems to me like excerpts. It's like google is generating an admittedly badly organized ( what do you want from ai? ) essay in response to a query. That essay is the search results and text excerpts. These are clearly referenced as being quoted and like you said, more than a bibliography is given, frikken links to buy the stuff is given. It would seem to me to clearly fall under fair use.
...
Wrong. Google is just abiding by it's Golden Rule:
Make all of the world's data publicly available and searchable.
Most people still haven't fully considered the implications of this; or just how single minded Google is going to be about this goal.
May the Maths Be with you!
Who said these rights must be exclusive to Google? Aside from the Slashdot community having a general pro-Google bias, I believe it doesn't matter whose company's name is in the story, it's about the freedom of information.
Substitute "Napster" for "Google" in your statement to see how wrong it is.
OK. Here it is.
The music industry should try to work with Napster instead of against them. It's in their (and the public's) best interest.
...you do realize that the music industry did everything in their power to get Napster shut down, and now sells music THROUGH Napster, yes?
So, if anything, substituting "Napster" for "Google" just makes my statement more right.
Living With a Nerd
These fuckers are not only corrupt, but shamelessly corrupt.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
copyright law is BLOCKING the long tail and therefore blocking profit making for authors via ancillary means
So your argument boils down to this: There is money to be made, so fuck the rights of everyone involved and hand that gigantic wad of cash as an exclusive deal to one of the richest corporations in the world?
Here's one for you: Just because you want something, even if you want it badly, doesn't give you a right to it.
it gets to a point where copyright law is simply gets in the way of technological, social, and cultural progress
Bold words coming from a guy who hasn't figured out punctuation or capitalization. How's that cultural progress working for you?
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
First of all the Napster of now and the Napster of old have nothing to do with each other other than the name. Secondly, why should Google be rewarded with exclusive rights to books, which the authors has to opt-out of Google getting, after blatantly ignoring other people's copyrights? This isn't even getting into the fact that not even all the authors that Google will be making money off of will get anything out of this.
If your problem is orphaned works then there are two fair solutions I can see to fix the problems:
Pretty funny that the only reason why you could post that here, and the only reason I was able to read it, and check what was the context by searching in Google, is because, well, the copyright on it expired?
There, fixed that for you.