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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."
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
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."
> 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.
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!
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.
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).