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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 department continues to believe that a properly structured settlement agreement in this case offers the potential for important societal benefits. The department stated that it is committed to continuing to work with the parties and other stakeholders to help develop solutions through which copyright holders could allow for digital use of their works by Google and others, whether through legislative or market-based activities.
Seemed to me they weren't happy with Google 'ownership' of orphaned works and the fact that it's "opt out" not "opt in" for authors. I guess you could see that as opposition but basically the amended contract failed to satisfy them. That's why they're having a hearing on Feb. 18, 2010.
A deal this big is bound to have lengthy negotiations and investigations as it's truly game changing for everyone involved and the world at large.
My work here is dung.
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
If Google wants to strike a deal with me, then why are they litigating with other people?
No, Google does not want to strike a deal over my rights with me. Google wants to strike a deal over my rights with those other people.
This is slashdot. We think that copyright terms are way too long and so forth. This isnt the solution.
"His name was James Damore."
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.
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.
The problem is there are lots of books out there where it is not reasonably practical to get in touch with the copyright holder. Hell with some of them the copyright holder probablly doesn't even know they own it (BTW does anyone what happens legally to a copyright a company owns but doesn't know they own when said company goes bankrupt?).
IIRC Google decided to make such books available anyway claiming that doing so was fair-use (a somewhat tenuous claim) and someone sued them over it, got the case made a class action and tried to settle the case in a very pro-Google way.
I really wonder if they initiated the class action deliberately to let them get things settled in Googles' favour, if they did then it's a blatant abuse of the class action system.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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."
It could be my ignorance of the way the industry works (which is most likely), but what I'm getting at is this could be used as another avenue for income. What Google did was wrong, yes...but there is still money to be made (not to mention the public gaining even more access to information.)
I'm just curious why people want to shut it down instead of shaping it to work to their advantage. Right now, no one is benefiting...but everyone could be.
Living With a Nerd
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.
Somewhere along the way Google forgot one of its own rules. Their subtle yet ever encroaching methods of "helping" the world seem more of an attempt to ensure that google is firmly entrenched in every aspect of our daily lives. IMHO their approach is just wrong. We have lived for thousands of years without street level photos online of our homes and without navagable photos of the insides of public buildings and retail spaces, do we really need them? Many see them as an invasion of privacy.
I'm already concerned about google wanting to control the storage and distribution of medical records, financial records and other areas they seem determined to control.
It took being bitten by the hand that fed them to finally come out againt their own willingness to censor in China, but still show a willingness to cowtow to political and well connected interests.
Their gmail, adsense, and cookie policies are well lets just say less than privacy friendly.
As for books and other media, this should be a opt in system rather than an opt out. If spam was opt out many more would be protesting but its violation is the same. Many argue its to protect media that would be lost in the future, but the proper fix for that is to change laws not skirt around them because your some big coporation.
I just dont see how "do no evil" and a great desire to become big brother can peacefully co-exist.
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.
...
Why can't these guys introduce some required opt-in copyright for works older than say 25 years? Make the renewal 20 years long and put a US$5 price on it.
Lawrence Lessig has been arguing for something like this for years... it would solve the orphaned works problem, and Disney probably wouldn't care, so they actually might let it happen.
for the vast majority of author's we're not talking about jk rowling: they're obscure. and their works are, frankly, unknown, out of print, forgotten. such that putting the artificial boundary of negotiating with thousands of random yahoos and working out arcane legal arrangements with all of them is completely unwieldy, unworkable, and monetarily not worth the effort
instead, dump all their work in one big database for free, and these authors, because of much greater ease in accessing their works, see an IMPROVEMENT in their accessibility, marketability, and prominence. imagine fucking that
it gets to a point where copyright law is simply gets in the way of technological, social, and cultural progress
there are numerous examples of people wanting to use obscure works, and finding it daunting and impossible to contact anyone to get the rights. the perverse result being that exposure, and therefore money to be made, is denied to these obscure works. copyright law is BLOCKING the long tail and therefore blocking profit making for authors via ancillary means
i'm so sick of copyright law. it needs to be actively destroyed, not simply ignored. luckily, the internet makes copyright's uselessness easily demonstrated. it's easy to circumvent copyright on the internet. meanwhile, enforcing copyright on the internet is a fool's errand. go at it teenagers, bring this ridiculous house of cards from a dead technological era crashing down. copyright is absurd, a farce, it's dead
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
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.
Substitute "Napster" for "Google" in your statement to see how wrong it is.
Everyone on both sides know the digital transmogrification of the book publishing industry is inevitable. But Google has been the Barbarian at the Tea Party, acting like submission to Mountain View was the best and only route authors and publishers could take. In walks Jobs, looking all natty with his turtleneck and iPad, with whispered promises of doing for the publishing industry with his blend of sleek device and e-commerce what he did for music. Then there's Amazon and Sony, both with vested interests in not killing the golden e-goose of digital book retailing. Google doesn't want this to play out, they're looking to brute-force their way in. Too fuckin' bad, sez me.
As a writer and a reader, I've got no problem with the iTunes-ification of publishing. As a consumer and a citizen, Google scares the hell out of me.
I am interested particularly and especially in the part of the bill which concerns my trade. I like that extension of copyright life to the author's life and fifty years afterward. I think that would satisfy any reasonable author, because it would take care of his children. Let the grand-children take care of themselves. That would take care of my daughters, and after that I am not particular. I shall then have long been out of this struggle, independent of it, indifferent to it. It isn't objectionable to me that all the trades and professions in the United States are protected by the bill. I like that. They are all important and worthy, and if we can take care of them under the Copyright law I should like to see it done. I should like to see oyster culture added, and anything else. I am aware that copyright must have a limit, because that is required by the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier Constitution, which we call the decalogue. The decalogue says you shall not take away from any man his profit. I don't like to be obliged to use the harsh term. What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shalt not steal," but I am trying to use more polite language. The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one class, the people who create the literature of the land. They always talk handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great, monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it. I know we must have a limit, but forty-two years is too much of a limit. I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit at all to the possession of the product of a man's labor. There is no limit to real estate. Doctor Hale has suggested that a man might just as well, after discovering a coal-mine and working it forty-two years, have the Government step in and take it away. What is the excuse? It is that the author who produced that book has had the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes a profit which does not belong to it and generously gives it to the 88,000,000 of people. But it doesn't do anything of the kind. It merely takes the author's property, takes his children's bread, and gives the publisher double profit. He goes on publishing the book and as many of his confederates as choose to go into the conspiracy do so, and they rear families in affluence.
These fuckers are not only corrupt, but shamelessly corrupt.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
The objection that the DoJ and other companies have is that Google is being granted a wide license by way of a class action settlement. Normally a company can't make a licensing agreement with all copyright owners without contacting each and every one of them. But since this is a class action settlement, all members of the class are automatically opted in to the agreement. Interestingly, all the publishers who sued Google in the first place have opted out of this particular arrangement (they negotiated better deals with Google). So this settlement is being agreed to by a group of publishers who have nothing to lose.
The only way a competitor could get a similar agreement is by being sued and hoping that a similar settlement is the end result.
The proper way for something like this to occur is for Congress to modify copyright law to allow any company to set up a similar service (potentially with a single entity in charge of distributing royalties and managing any opt-in/opt-out process).
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?
Copyright doesn't give you the right to limit how others may quote you. Even if an author hates the KKK, the KKK can quote something they wrote in order make their case.
...
The NIH has a not-insubstantial annual budget of ~$30 billion.
Pfizer, by itself, had revenues of $48 billion last year.
Academic medical research is good at lots of things - developing new marketable drugs isn't one of them - nor is the government prepared to spend that kind of money.
We can't get the government to provide universal healthcare, what in the world makes you think that we can get the government to step up and cover pharma's R&D budget in the absence of patents?