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Federal Judge Rejects Google Books Deal
14erCleaner writes "US Circuit Judge Denny Chin has rejected a $125 million settlement between Google Books and the author's guild that would have allowed Google to publish all out-of-work fiction online. Chin has previously ruled more favorably on this case."
to represent all authors of out of print fiction? Can I install myself
as the representative for all out of print romance?
What a load of cowpucks
Once again the legacy business model behemoth that is, well, anything from the USA it seems right now, stamps all over innovation. I bet there's hundreds of books that would be useful to me that could either not be found over here, out of print, or just plain overpriced that need some better system for handling them in this age.
Judge Chin does make a good point. Even though the book is out of print, the author is still the copyright holder and should have say in whether or not the out of print book may go into a Google digital library. After all, maybe the publisher decided to drop the book because it wasn't selling and the author may want to look for a different publisher or attempt to self-publish. I can see the digitalization of out of print material where the author is deceased and therefore has no say in the matter.
How does some guild get authority to represent all authors of out of print fiction?
Well, according to TFB (blurb), that's essentially the judge's rationale for rejecting the deal.
I am torn: on one hand, I believe that copyright law no longer "promotes the progress of Science and useful Arts", so I would like to see Google have the ability to make a sweeping digital library of abandonware books (seriously, if the authors aren't selling the book, how are they harmed?)
However, if this deal went through, it seems likely that it would have been the birth of another MAFIAA-style intellectual property racket.
So, perhaps we are considering the situation from an artificially constrained viewpoint. The pragmatic approach to getting the digital library would have been to take the deal with this newborn devil, but we would have to live with those consequences. The idealistic approach would be to "fix" copyright law so that such a library could be created... you know, the better to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Does anyone else want some of what I am apparently smoking to cause me to have such fantastic & vague ideas (haha)? Maybe I got hit on the head or something.
Could you be a little more obviously prejudiced? And while you're at it, could you please identify how anyone (Google or not) goes about getting access to (or rights for) a book by a dead author that's not longer in print?
It sure would be nice if all those works weren't effectively dead (and their knowledge lost) just because my local bookstore or library can't get them.
That's only part of the problem. The other part is that Google would have been granted a license to disregard copyright (for the cheap price of $125m! That's about 30 cents per American. Don't you wish that you collectively could by an exemption from copyright or that little?), but no one else would have. I wouldn't have minded if Google had been advocating a change to the law to make this kind of archive possible. Some form of compulsory licensing with fixed royalty rates would have been great. But a ruling that lets Google violate copyright but prevents their competitors from doing the same thing? That's pretty horrible.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That is extremely true. Now, perhaps Google shouldn't be the -only- way to acquire these books, but it's a start. I, for one, would -love- to be able to buy some obscure paperback from the 80's in ebook form, especially when I couldn't find it in print.
Now, sure, we'd all like to compensate the author etc... but if the author stops publishing something, then we -need- another way to get it, lest the content gets lost.
If we had 20 year copyrights, that would be one thing - in 20 years a few copies will still be around. But with ~100 year copyrights... all copies of an obscure work could easily be gone, which is a definite detriment to society.
2.4 Non-Exclusivity of Authorizations.
The authorizations granted to Google in this Amended Settlement Agreement are non-exclusive only, and nothing in this Amended Settlement Agreement shall be construed as limiting any Rightsholderâ(TM)s right to authorize, through the Registry or otherwise, any Person, including direct competitors of Google, to use his, her or its Books or Inserts in any way, including ways identical to those provided for under this Amended Settlement Agreement.
Google was not trying to get exclusive rights to anything. Anyone and everyone else would have been free to scan in books and sell them exactly like Google wanted to do.
Everyone posting here about how evil Google is for wanting exclusive rights to sell these books is wrong. None of them have read the proposed settlement and they have no clue what they're talking about. They're spreading FUD and you idiots are falling for it.
It would be nice to get free things, and I hate the MPAA and RIAA as much as the next /.er, but rewarding a company for illegally copying books from the library seems lame to me. Digitizing the data is to make a reproduction of the work by definition. It doesn't even have to be distributed by google, the fact that they have kept scanned master copies of all the books they could get their hands on is illegal. I don't understand why they have been able to keep this dataset at all...
It sure would be nice if all those works weren't effectively dead (and their knowledge lost) just because my local bookstore or library can't get them.
They are not lost. Pretty much every work has to be deposited in the Library of Congress or similar institutions (Nasjonalarkivet here in Norway). If you truly wanted copyright to expire earlier you could easily make some kind of process where abandoned works would enter the public domain.
In fact that was the case in the US up to 1992. The problem was that a lot of active holders failed to realize and erroneously let their works expire. Plus there's as far as I know no good international system of renewal so really only the big corporations with procedures would get it done worldwide. It's a less than ideal system yet still massively better than letting Google just grab it underhandedly.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A while back I was doing some research on vacuum tube based logic circuits (don't ask). My random googling brought up repeated mention of several books. They may even be public domain by now, I'm unsure. They dated to around WWII.
Anyhow, regardless of copyright status, the things were absolute fucking unobtainium. It really is a shame that things like this essentially get lost to the wheel of time. Whether it be due to copyright, or just plain being out of print and public domain. It's a crime against knowledge.
Fortunately I don't think this will be the case in the future, as most currently released books are surely digitized (legally or not) and hopefully will be around by the time they are hopelessly obsolete, out of print, lacking demand, commercially unviable, and/or enter public domain.
Sent from my PDP-11
I have about 20 out of print books that would have netted me some nice cash
If you're convinced that's true, digitize them yourself and self-pub on Kindle, PubIt, Smashwords, etc. It's not that hard.
They're never going to make more money in any event.
And if you're convinced that that is true, why should Google pay you anything?
Heck, tell us what the books are and maybe I'd be willing to fork over $1200 to buy out your copyrights. Or you could put them up for bid on eBay.
-- Alastair
Because it is a class action, and he feels the members of the class are getting hosed.
I just finished reading the entire decision. It was quite interesting but at 45 pages I doubt many people here would bother.
The judge pointed out quite a few problems with the settlement proposal, but two of the most important are:
1) It's pretty likely that the settlement would violate a number of US and international laws.
2) It would contradict recent US Supreme Court decisions that say it is the job of Congress to update copyright law for changing technology.
but if the works are out of print...
perhaps if copyright holders had some kind of burden of maintenance - ie when a property reaches "end of life" and is no longer worth the shelf-space, then rights should be forfeit.
otherwise too much culture will vanish.
what i'm seeing (there's scant information in TFA and no links to previous discussion of the case) seems like "i don't want it, but i'd be damned if they're gonna get it".
if IP is no longer profitable, then how are the plaintiffs losing anything?
I think you're missing the core issue. Google scanning a bunch of books and then not showing them to anybody is hard to make out as a crime against humanity. The crime against humanity is a copyright system that renders nearly all out-of-print books (i.e., 95% of books ever written) as orphans, protected against copying but with authors that are long-gone (in many cases long-dead). Everyone loses in this situation: Authors of out of print books cannot make money, readers can't get the books unless they live close to a good library, and publishers receive no revenue from this back-catalog of older material. The core question is, how do we get all of that content to be useful again? The judge's "solution" of opt-in is no solution, because by definition orphaned works have no rights holder to opt in for them.
The correct answer would be to change our copyright laws to accomodate for orphaned works. With this ruling I hope Congress finally grows the stones to take that on, however with the Hollywood lobby I'm not hopeful. In the end we will likely have millions of volumes of our culture simply vanish as at the library of Alexandria, all because nobody cares.
Google is worth like a gazillion dollars. Google has the resources to simply do what it wants anyway and wait for injured parties to come forward. So long as they are reasonably careful about selecting out of print books for which owners cannot be readily tracked down, one could reasonably expect them to be able to publish THOUSANDS of books like this while having to settle only a few lawsuits filed by copyright holders.
Can any of those "lesser competitors" get away with this? Perhaps if that "lesser" is named Microsoft. Not many, though.
Copyrights were created so that authors could profit from their works for a time, under a protected monopoly, in exchange for releasing their works into the public domain after the period of their profit.
by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
Once dead, this no longer applies. Nowhere in there is mentioned estates, and the original application of copyright specifically ceased at death.
From Copyright Act of 1790:
to secure to the said authors, if they shall survive the term first mentioned