Slashdot Mirror
Photographers Want Their Cut From Google's Ebooks
It's not just the writers anymore: carluva writes "The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and several other visual artist groups are suing Google over its digitization of of millions of books, claiming copyright infringement related to images within the books. The photographers initially wanted to be included in the authors' and publishers' class action suit, but filed their own suit after that request was denied. Google and others assert that images are only included in the digital copies when permission has been obtained from the copyright holder."
I wonder how this will develop.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
The complexity is that a modern book can have a large number of owners, who may have come together and agreed to publish a given book, or even a given edition of the book. But republication, translation, adaption for the stage, movies, song lyrics, etc., all need to be negotiated separately. It gets even crazier with video, since then you have musician rights, composer rights, etc.
I think Lessig gave us one of the best reads on this problem a couple of months ago: http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2010/02/05_lessig.html
that was so bad I had to reply.
The American Pulp and Paper Manufacturers Association has announced they intend to claim royalties for scans of books printed on paper produced by members of APPMA!
I think this is just becomeing a suing opportunity. Anyone that has anything to do with Google sues them because they have so much money. Hell, Google has been sued for linking to sites not using robots.txt or having thumbnails or images or.... the list goes on.
People are greedy and Google has money. Of course everyone sues it whether or not it is doing no evil.
And the devaluing of information continues....
I understand old contracts wouldn't compensate for what the internet is capable of, but from this point forward, it is not economically sound to think any creative work you produce, can be kept away from the information machine. Try your best in the court system, but that is just a money pit, and the internet is an information vaccum. Get used to it.
If it can be digitized, it will belong to the internet ages. That is all.
The typographers are gonna want a cut too.
So will the company that made the font the book was printed with.
So will the company that manufactured the paper the book was scanned from.
So will the company that manufactured the scanner.
The company that manufactured the USB cable the scanner was plugged in with would like a cut too.
And the company that manufactured the USB port on the computer.
The musicians are gonna want a cut when Google scans a music book.
The coders are gonna want a cut when Google scans a programming book.
When a book contains maps, the cartographers and explorers will want a cut also.
The author of the typesetting software's gonna want a cut too.
By the time this is all done, it's going to cost Google more to make a book available, than the price people will be able to pay to see it.
Copyright that last forever is the problem here.
Current U.S. copyright for an individual is life plus 70 years and for a corporation 95 years. Since both of those are longer then the U.S. life expectancy, copyright is now infinite. I guess Jack Valenti got his wish.
I'm a newspaper photographer. I'll offer this perspective on Google's respect for copyright:
Google recently used some of my photographs on Google News, as the 'headline' photos to represent collected coverage of major stories. This fell outside any reasonable definition of fair use. This was for-profit publication of photographs that other publishers were paying for the right to use. Google used them for free.
Now, it's common in the news business that publishers use breaking news photos without permission, because they need to publish them quickly. But they ALWAYS pay afterwards, market rate, without question. This side of the business works on trust.
When I sent Google a bill, their first reaction was exactly what it should be: They would pay the market rate. They rang up to get my banking details for fund transfer, and that should have been the end of the matter.
Then they wrote to me saying that they wouldn't pay. They even denied publishing the images, which was clearly untrue. They told me that to take the matter further I would need to file a DMCA complaint -- and in doing so I must give Google permission to publish the DMCA complaint online. I believe this is outrageous! I only sell my pictures to UK publishers, yet here was a US company publishing my work without permission, and telling me that I would need to pursue them through the US legal system!
This gives me a fairly clear view of Google's attitude to other people's copyright. It seems that Google will take what they want, publish it however they want, profit, and then to hell with the people who originally produced the material in question.
There, fixed that.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Even if they don't display the pictures to anyone, they still made digital copies without permission. That's against long-standing copyright law.
I don't understand this or the earlier related dustup.
What's wrong with scanning the books? Sure, if they later publish without permission the scans or OCRs of the scans or whatever, that's worth getting worked up about. But suing over simple scanning? I don't understand.
What's so wrong with just scanning them? Doesn't the internet archive do basically the same thing? I highly doubt they pay anyone for the privilege -- instead relying on fair use.
"Google does not make available any of the visual material that might be in the books, unless the copyright holder has agreed to it", claims Google. Photographers do deserve to be compensated if their copyrighted material has been published online, but Google claims they have never done that without permission. If Google is omitting the pictures (which makes sense because they are not searchable), then they are doing the photographers a favor by publicizing their work online. If they are publishing the artwork without permission, then they certainly should pay for it.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Most photographic work is licensed in a rights managed fashion. The payment calculated for the image is based on usage and distribution. What Google is attempting to do, is no different than a publisher initiating a second print run, sometime generating income for them, without compensating the photographer a second run. In most walks of life, we call that stealing.
If I understand it right, Google is being sued for scanning copyrighted works - I don't completely understand the legality of this (I'm not from USA, nor do I know its legal system). Of course, it seems logical that if Google is giving away verbatim copies of the books they should have permission to do so. Maybe showing just - e.g. - 5 pages per user is allowed under some exception (fair use, etc.)?
But what I'm really afraid is if somebody just decides Google should pay a tax on every book they scan, no matter if they actually need that permission or not (sometimes, people give their works away for free, or copyright expires). Just like those taxes that are paid to play musics publicly, which are also sometimes incorrectly applied to public performances of CC music.
Let's set that expiration for, oh, three years. That oughtta fix the whole problem right there. Bang! No worries.
you give rights to a writer to use your photos in his/her book and get paid.
google makes previews of books. the previews contain your images.
you go sue google, DESPITE you have already been paid.
basically, you want to be paid double. in lieu of all the honest people who work, and get salaries only once a month for what they do, not twice.
the court should charge those photographers for wasting public money for time courts lose for dealing with that case, and some additional punitives.
Read radical news here
Time to return to old values that worked till they got changed. Let the originator hold rights to the invention or work for a short time (4 years) and if they can't make a profit from it in that time, tough shit! The world marches on. If they are talented they will make more. If not it was a fluke and who cares! This copy and patent crap is taking up too much time and waaaay too much progress.
Senator Bono blowing Mickey f**kin' rat is a perfect example of the crooked kind of crap that got the U.S. in the mess it's in now. Thank God for trees and skis. Now if we could get the rest of the crooked bastards on a tough slope drunk and blindfolded.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
> An system that can take your property and requires you to "opt out" rather than opt in deserves to have as many law suits thrown at it as humanly possible.
Well, I don't believe that IP is property, so I'll have to disagree with you there. There's no way to drag books online (which is where they need to be to be useful) except to do this wholesale, and I'm sorry, but I don't care about the estates of long-dead artists who are out to get another buck or two. Hell, they'd make money if only they signed on to this, but the lawyers wouldn't make as much by not suing, so go figure.
Anyhow, any book that doesn't get digitized will fall into much-deserved obscurity soon enough. I wish they'd make sane copyright laws so that anyone (not just Google) could do this, but that's not going to happen any time soon, so I guess I'll disagree with you and say that I'm glad we're finally getting a digital library.
If authors want to stand in the way of progress, they shouldn't complain about getting run over by it. Nobody cries for the buggy whip makers.
Whoosh. The point is that Google (if it used the quoted argument) would be trying to establish a legal precedent for their behavior based on their own similar questionable behavior in the past. Such an argument is both circular and inefficacious.
"Google presumably owns a copy of each book it scans. Scanning it is fair use."
I don't know if Google does own a copy of each book - did they claim that?
When I was in high school a teacher bought a humorous book for her humor in literature class. She made copies for all the students to study from. Later she had to stop it because of copyright issues.
Google's employees are several orders of magnitude greater in number than our class was. How can making a work available to thousands of people be considered fair use simply on the basis of purchasing a single book?
You may disagree with copyright law, but the courts aren't going to render it meaningless by stretching the idea of fair use past the breaking point. Nor should they.
People who make money taking picture without paying for what they are taking picture of complain about not being paid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I don't want to work, but I want lots of money... I'll get a lawyer!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
You say it's only the equipment. Well, how many family members do you have who own a pair of Canon 5D bodies, a 24-70mm f/2.8 and a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, external flashes and flip flash brackets?
Suppose you do know somebody in your family that has this gear. Do they know how to use them effectively? How often do they shoot ceremonies like yours? How good are they going through the results on Lightroom?
And don't forget: are they willing to spend all of the ceremony taking photos when you supposedly invited them as guests? Will they want to socialize at all? Will they be reluctant to be pulled away from socializing because you want them to take some posed shots of the people after the ceremony?
When you pay for a photographer to cover your ceremony, you're not just paying for equipment. You're paying for their time more than anything, followed by skill (but mostly technical skill in operating their camera), and only then for gear. You might want to argue that they should be charging per hour and not per copies of photos; well, that's not unreasonable. But again, you're arguing that you're paying primarily for their equipment, and I'm telling you that you can rent the same gear, and good luck getting Uncle Bob to get it right for you.
Are you adequate?
It doesn't matter how big the photo is. 80x80 is irrelevant when you are using it for millions and millions of potential hits. The google employees who modded you up are a bunch of greedy retards who can't follow the standard procedure that every other company has to follow and somehow think they are exempt.
Copyrights aren't patents.
In the United States, it is possible to get sued and lose for accidentally copying someone else's work. Match eight or so notes of a major-label song and you're in trouble. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music; Three Boys Music v. Michael Bolton.
Exactly how many people who have copyrights (and care about them) don't know about Google Book Search by now? Seriously?
If it's their property, it's up to THEM to protect it.
Of course, I realize it's not actual property and that's why they can't or won't protect it. An opt-in system simply isn't reasonable for an operation of this scale and importance. I understand what they're trying to build: the world's first digital library.
Frankly, any author who declines to participate deserves to see their work die in obscurity. Maybe they're famous now, but information that isn't copied dies and the people who created it will be forgotten. You'd think people would have learned their lesson after that ancient Greek guy who historians decided not to record because he killed someone to become famous. The historians did record it somewhere, but they ignored him well enough that I can't remember his name any more and most people haven't heard of him.
Which, ironically, is probably why people haven't learned that lesson. This is the inverse-Streisand effect. The ignored are forgotten.
Time to start a class action lawsuit against everyone for not thinking of the modern readers.
We don't need books, we got our digital copies. yes, we want all pictures intact (mainly in sex books), and damn it, we don't want to pay more then it cost for the paperback version of the same book!!!!
Actually, we don't want to pay at all, but thats not really fair to the authors, but damn if they should be given more money then they do for a print book of their works.
So, if you don't think of us, the modern readers, then your going to regret it. Because most of us modern readers, can well, read. And using google to find a copy of that ebook for free, is well, a few clicks away.
So remember, while your trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip, we can just find a digital copy of that turnip.
Be seeing you...
When a photographer sells a license for an image to be used for publication, they don't typically transfer copyright of the image. The photographer is the copyright holder of the images being used, by and large. If Google is obtaining permission from the book publisher, the book publisher often will not have the right to grant second use license of the photographs to third parties like Google.
A person who doesn't own something in the first place can't give you permission to use it.
I was replying to this:
"I understand old contracts wouldn't compensate for what the internet is capable of, but from this point forward, it is not economically sound to think any creative work you produce, can be kept away from the information machine."
Sure, today Avatar has made a lot of money, but if the poster is correct, it wouldn't be the case in the future.
Surely your not suggesting that if theaters could have downloaded Avatar without paying for it and movie fans could watch it without paying it as well they'd still be making big bucks off it.
The original publisher of the book most likely obtained permission to use the visual material only in the actual printed book, so this all makes sense. If Google is, however, (as Samuelson claims) not displaying that material, then why are these people even bothering to sue? Is it really true that they are not displaying the visual material?
I searched my bookshelf for a book full of pictures that I could use to test this theory, and I found the likely candidate in "A Military History and Atlas of the Napoleonic Wars" by Brig. Gen. Vincent J. Esposito and Col. John R. Elting. This is a book that is has massive ~11.5" x 9.5" images on half of its pages. Unfortunately it has no preview available (it is, after all, long out of print and had a tiny run to begin with). Too bad.
A preview was available, however, for "The Napoleonic Wars: the Peninsular War 1807-1814" by Gregory Fremont-Barnes, which is also chock full of pictures of various types. According to the copyright page: cartography, by The Map Studio; picture research by Image Select International; origination by Grasmere Digital Imaging, Leeds, UK. In addition to that, every individual image has an attribution such as (for a fantastical looking artillery painting on page 39) the "Ann Ronan Picture Library." Now, do you really believe that Google actually went out and got a new permission from a different copyright holder for nearly every page of this book, or that they at most got it from the publisher, which may or may not be able to grant general permission to Google. Since Prof. Samuelson does not work for Google, I don't see how she can assert quite that confidently that Google indeed has permission in every instance. Even if the publishers all gave general permission, they might have been wrong to do so themselves, which still leaves Google on the hook (on some hook, anyway).
These photograph owners may well have a case; the result could be that we will either see another settlement similar to the book/author settlement (with more royalties), or Google will just cut out everything they couldn't successfully OCR, on the assumption that it is an image of unknown providence. This is certainly an awkward situation, and I would like to second Palestrina's earlier recommendation that everyone read what Lessig had to say about the obstacles presented by this sort of compilation work.
> What Google is attempting to do, is no different than a publisher initiating a second print run, sometime generating income for them, without compensating the photographer a second run. In most walks of life, we call that stealing.
From the summary, which you ignored: "Google and others assert that images are only included in the digital copies when permission has been obtained from the copyright holder."
If you're not being compensated, talk to your publisher. Google got permission from them, as stated.
I don't care if you won the Pulitzer for the photo. We're talking about 50 year old books. It's immoral to say that after 50 years the photographer that took the photo present on one page of a 300 page book, properly licensed at the time, is entitled to by his authorship of that one trivial photo prevent the collection of the library of the world's culture simply because of some subsequent legal interpretation of copyright law. It's absurd in a way only a lawyer can appreciate. If you're hanging your hopes on this, you're doomed because at least 99% of these rights are owned by faceless non-sympathetic resellers of rights.
Keep up your objections and - mark my words - the law will be changed to strip your rights in far more extensive ways than you envision. Copyright's purpose is to promote progress. Your objections are a perfect example of why copyright does not serve this purpose. Your every objection is an argument for the abolition of copyright.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Game, set and match.
Internet Freedom: 1
Copyright Cartels and their shills: 0
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Google isn't selling the copies, idiot.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1610696&cid=31784824
APK