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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
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.
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.
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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.
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 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.