Slashdot Mirror
Google To Seek Dismissal of Suit Against Google Books
angry tapir writes with an update on the drawn out legal battle between Google and everyone else over their Books service. From the article: "After a so-far fruitless three-year effort to settle the case, Google and the plaintiffs suing it for alleged book-related copyright infringement apparently are moving away from seeking a friendly solution. Google has notified the court that it intends to file a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against it by authors and publishers in 2005, in which they allege copyright infringement stemming from Google's wholesale scanning of millions of library books without the permission of copyright owners. Google Books has been at the center of copyright-related controversy since 2005 when the Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers sued the search giant. This has been followed by other legal wrangles, including a 2010 suit by the American Society of Media Photographers, lawsuits in France and Germany and conflict with Chinese authors over the book-scanning project."
Which I am not, but if I were an author, I would be THRILLED to find my book on googlebooks !!
Why?
Unless I am a very well known author, so well known that even people deep in the jungle in Africa or people from the hinterland of Siberia know me, there is NO WAY my book get to people in those places.
Getting my book scanned and placed online by google is a way to get my book to THE WORLD.
Profit loss?
No way.
As my book wouldn't be getting into the hands of people living in deep jungle in Africa or in the hands of people living in the frozen Siberia, I wouldn't be able to make money selling my books to those people in the first place.
BUT, as Google scanned my book and place it online, people all over, as long as they can get access to the Net, can, in theory, access my book.
So what if those people reading my book online don't pay me?
I ain't losing any money one way or another.
Those who sued Google are greedy bastards.
And no, I am not employed by Google.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Nice try. Troll harder next time. Authors have nothing to do with this. The greedy middle-men were the ones pushing against Google.
Regardless of my own opinions on the state of copyright/IP law in the US (I can't speak for the other countries listed in TFS), it is what it is. So I have to ask... What is Google's defense? It can't be the "public good" or "cultural preservation" play, because those have already been stabbed, short, burned, poisoned, beheaded, then drawn and quartered.
So what the hell are they claiming that's had the lawsuits lasting six frigging years?
While I think it's a good thing they're trying to do (though maybe not their motivations), I really thought they would have been bitchslapped down a long, long time ago. What cards are they holding here?
The evil is that they are scanning commercial literary works subject to copyright with the intent of giving the scans away, and doing so against the wishes of the copyright holders. Though copyright law states the duration of copyright, and that the copyright holders retain all rights unless explicitly granted, Google is claiming "silence gives consent" for items which are still under copyright. Essentially, Google is accused of directly engaging in piracy of literary works.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Where, in any of the legitimate arguments against Google, is there the suggestion that Google wishes to withhold money from or steal content from authors with a claim to profits generated from the sale of their content?
Additionally, where is the claim that Google plans on making available copyrighted material for which an author is known and interested in claiming their legitimate profit?
What Google is doing is exactly the sort of thing copyright law is supposed to prevent. They are copying massive amounts of copyrighted works and using them for their own profit without permission from the copyright holders.
Sure, I love the idea of a computer search engine for books. And I can see how it could be very advantageous for an author to have their work on Google books. And I think that the term on copyright is far too long. Having said that, the courts should have put a stop to what Google is doing long ago. With something this clear cut, Google should have already been forced to pay damages. For that matter, they should have been the target of some of the government's anti-efforts.
-WolvesOfTheNight
Only if your mind id very small.
Please take the time to investigate the issue at hand before revealing your ignorance.
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Where, in any of the legitimate arguments against Google, is there the suggestion that Google wishes to withhold money from or steal content from authors with a claim to profits generated from the sale of their content?
Additionally, where is the claim that Google plans on making available copyrighted material for which an author is known and interested in claiming their legitimate profit?
This!
However, I doubt you will make any headway with these people who are convinced that this is blatant copyright violation on a grand scale. Their mind is closed on the subject.
At issue is a tiny TINY number of Unknown Authors who in most cases are dead, leaving no known heirs, who published something after 1923, but which is now out of print. Abandoned works by and large. Google does not violate copyrights, and uses the power of their own search engine to find these authors.
But every time this story comes up, the same google haters jump up and scream copyright infringement.
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They give excerpts away, under fair use exemptions. You do not get entire works. Check your facts.
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The problem here is that Google's mission is supposedly to index all the world's information, but when that information doesn't naturally live on the net, the core values are incompatible. Hence the clash with books (copyright issues) and the clash with street view (privacy issues), and there will be clashes in every other area of life where information doesn't normally follow the internet rules of openness and unlimited shareability.
As long as Google's mission remains this ambitious, they'll continue to piss off a lot of people over time every time they hit the natural limits of their philosophy. But if they change their mission to something more realistic, they have to acknowledge that there's going to be limits to their growth and the markets that they can enter while playing up their strengths.
(*) The robot exclusion protocol was a response to this, but it's never been more than an ethical guideline.
They give excerpts away
I do not consider "the exact pages you needed, in their entirety" to be "excerpts"
"His name was James Damore."
Say I have a book with 1 million words, and I have 1 million customers, and I show each customer only one word, but it's always a different one. Have I distributed the whole book or not?
(I've simplified the issue obviously, but the principle remains valid with the actual Google books practices).
Would you get less in a library or a book store?
What you consider is of no importance here. What the law says is.
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By any legal definition of the word "distributed", you DID NOT.
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It is trivial today for the creator of a manuscript -- an author -- to put his book online, on his own website/blog, at his own pace. Sell a chapter at a time? Give away chapters, or the whole thing? Interact with readers in his own blog forum during the writing process? Add a Facebook and/or Twitter component to the self-promotion? Link his writing work to his speaking work, or other creative and possibly more profitable endeavors? The possibilities are near-endless, and an entire cottage industry to assist and advise authors with marketing their e-books (circumventing traditional publishing houses) is emerging. It's a wonderful, liberating time!
So why in hell would an author give away control over any of that to Google? Fuck Google and fuck Google's Greed! A smart author will put his book (or parts of it) online, and buy the appropriate Google ad words and do all the other SEO bullshit that puts money into Google's pocket for delivering eyeballs to his site. Google is already making money from someone else's creative work -- and that's fine, I get that. But scanning a book without the author's or publisher's permission because -- why? -- it gives them something additional to turn up in search results once indexed, something new to hang ads on? Just wrong in Oh So Many Ways.
Wrong. The entire book is scanned. The filtration is done at presentation time; the entire work is digitized. I know this because Google tried to do this with my book. They also lied about trying to contact me for permission; I received no such contact even though my contact information had not changed in years, and the publisher is still in business at the same contact points listed in the book itself. Needless to say, when I found out about this I cease-and-desisted Google. My work is not theirs to give away.
The lawsuit notes they they are scanning the entire work, without permission, with intent to provide the entire work to libraries in addition to presenting excerpts to anyone. The lawsuit also asserts that the usage is NOT "fair use". Kinko's Copies used to photocopy portions of textbooks selected by professors, assemble those chapters into custom textbooks per the professor's specifications, and sell them; they too claimed "fair use". Kinko's had their heads handed to them in court, which forced them to greatly diminish their campus income and started a slide into non-profitability that led to the FedEx buyout. (I managed a campus-facing Kinko's in the late 80's; I saw it all firsthand) The only differences are that with Kinko's, the copied material was presented in physical form, and that the financial benefit for the infringement was immediate (a retail sale) as opposed to diffuse (advertising data collection and presentation). The Kinko's case is being cited by the plaintiffs as precedent.
The lawsuit also states that Google is exposing the authors to the risk of having all of their works compromised at once. If someone breaks into Google's storage system, they can get every book Google has ever come into contact with. The pirates won't have to do the scanning and OCR work; Google will have already removed that hurdle. This is a risk which Google has imposed upon authors without consent; it's another example of Google not giving a damn about what authors want, and assuming rights and powers which they have no legal or ethical claim to.
Check your own facts.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Authors have nothing to do with this.
Authors have EVERYTHING to do with this, fool. The Author's Guild has been fighting this since day one.
Sorry, but you can't cry and whine that it's the E-E-E-E-E-VILLLL *IAA's/licensed distributors (who only rip-off the poor artists anyway) who are leading the fight against piracy this time. The authors are on the front line -- have been since the day Harlan Ellison first sued AOL back in the 90's
Google has already prevailed on all of these points. Only the abandoned works issue is still at issue.
Had you not issued a cease and desist order, you might be selling some books. As it is you post on slash dot.
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Dozens is fair use.
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All I want--far, far more than Netflix or Rhapsody--is to be able to give somebody money on a monthly basis to have access to nearly every book in every library in the world. Just somebody make this easy. I don't want to have to think, "Is reading a chapter of this obscure work on Russian formalism worth $0.50?" I just want to fucking click on a link, and read it.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
I hear that swearing and acting like a tough guy on Internet forums in lieu of real life gets you all the chicks. Is that true?
Orphan Works, works for which the author is not known or after reasonable efforts cannot be contacted, can NEVER 'suddenly' be owned by some Guild or some Association. I'm not saying that what Google does is 100% right, but the orphan works problem cannot be ignored.
It's the publishers and "guilds" that see their monopoly profits fade away as they are being cut out of the business. In fact, any publisher and author who doesn't want to be on Google Books can simply notify Google and they'll remove their content. Their claims that they are protecting the authors are bullshit. What they really want is to stay in control of the publishing business. They also don't want free content and orphan works to appear because that would be unwelcome competition.
Publishers and "guilds" have conned some authors into supporting them; but any author with half a brain quickly figures out that Amazon, Google Books, and the e-book revolution are good for them.
Google compensated the copyright holders too.
On October 28, 2008 the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google announced that they had settled Authors Guild v. Google. Google agreed to a $125 million payout, $45 million of that to be paid to rightsholders whose books were scanned without permission.
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Hey, I bet Google scanned more than a few law books. This should be easy.
The scans provide only snippits, and are insufficient for any legal research, but hey, thanks for proving my point.
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I agree in part, but I feel that 28 years is still too long of a time. I've already disregarded copyright for anything over 14 years. You want full control for all of time, well then don't release it.
Call me a thief, freetard or whatever, I don't care. The contract has already been broken.
They do so only within the exemptions for fair use as provided in the copyright law.
And a word to each person can hardly be considered distribution of a book. Each person walks away with essentially Nothing.
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John Scalzi posts on various Slashdot-esque websites and forums. I'm pretty sure he still sells books.
And his books still appear on Google Books. So if there was a point, I missed it.
https://www.google.com/search?q=John+Scalzi&btnG=Search+Books&tbm=bks&tbo=1
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"As it is you post on slash dot."
Point speaks for itself
So... how do you feel about libraries?
Under what claim does Google to get fair use. Just because they offer a few pages does not make it fair-use.
17 U.S.C. 107
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Google is not using these excerpts for any of the above reasons, they are using them for profit, thus it is not protected under fair-use.
You are all stuck on the fact they are only allowing excerpts but that is only one of the requirements of fair-use.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
You are talking about legalities not "evil". Monkeys stringing words together (I'm being generous--the normal authorship process is far less original) and staking claim to them out of pure meanness for as long as we shall live is what evil looks like.
There's no fair use when the whole of the book (or say 80% of its contents) is distributed. Google's use is not fair use.
What each person walks away with is irrelevant. There's no distinction between distributing to a single individual or distributing to a group. In both cases, it's distribution.(*)
But let's do a quick back of the envelope calculation. The way Google books actually works is: people get to see a full page, not a single word.
Now, let's say the average book contains about 300 pages. That means if 300 people look at a different section of the book, then the full book has been distributed once on average. In actual fact the number of pages a person gets to see is more than one, let's say people look at about 10 pages on average. In that case, when 300 people have looked at the same book, then Google has distributed the full book about 10 times already on average.
Of course, anybody who's used Google books knows that there are some pages that are deliberately missing each time you come back to look at the same book. Let's say about 20% of all pages are deliberately missing this way. Now when 300 people look at the book, they each look at about 10 pages from the 80% that's available, so Google hasn't technically distributed a single full book, but it still distributed 80% of the full book, about 10 times altogether.
That's not fair use. You can't distribute 80% of a book under fair use. You *might* be able to get away with distributing less than 10% of a book under fair use. If Google books did that, then the number of deliberately unavailable pages would have to be more than 90%, and that would make the service pretty much unusable.
Amazon actually do this right. If you use their "look inside" service, you can't see most of the book, it's well under 10%: just the table of contents and a few more pages.
That's what Google have to do if they want to argue "fair use", but that would cripple the service. As it is, they're massive "fair use" infringers so they had better use another legal argument.
(*) At this point, you might also like to think about bittorrent distribution, which uses the same principle of cutting up a file into tiny independent pieces distributed separately - but that's a digression.
The author's guild wanted to settle with Google you fucking pathetic idiot! God I hate name calling on the Internet but I'm forced to do it sometimes!
'fair use' is using small bits. not dozens of pages.
What we have to admit here is that Google is a massively wealthy company, and that authors are, in general, poor as shit.
How anyone can call this 'fair' is bizarre. Authors own their property, just like you own your toothbrush or your socks. Google comes in and makes money off of this property, without asking, in violation of the rule of law and the custom of law.
If it were Fair, google and all its highly payed, perks-out-the-ass employees would be giving a little sumpin sumpin to the Philip K Dicks of the world, and the obscure research book writers who have found their employment in journalism to have been so destroyed as of recent years by consolidation, and the internet.
There are countless scandals and corruption episodes going on right now that we will never know about because there are no journalists being payed to report on them. That is not magic, that is the fault of the internet. Google has decided that it doesnt care, and it is not picking up the slack by giving some tiny sliver of its vast billions away to people who actually create content. Instead, it hires masseuses and black-belt baristas to staff its incredibly opulent cube farms.
The publishers are often horrible, but Google is just another publisher - the funny thing is that it doesnt really pay anyone to write anything, and there is only one of it (i.e. its a monopoly).
unfortunately, big companies do not have any managers saying "i just want our customers to fucking click on a link, and give more money to labor"
Every book in the library was printed WITH the permission of the copyright owner.
Every book in google's scanned book database was scanned WITHOUT the permission of the copyright owner.
Stop lying. Google shows "dozens of pages" only for publishers and authors who opt into their partner program.
http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=43729&topic=9259&hl=en
And, if, for some reason, your book slipped through the cracks, you can have it removed.
But what you and the publishers really want is to force Google to promote your books and then pay for the privilege. And you want to make it so cumbersome for small authors and publishers to get onto services like Google that you retain a monopoly. I don't think so.
The reason authors are "poor as shit" is simple supply and demand: there is a glut of authors and books. The world doesn't owe you a living as an author. If you can't make it as an author under the existing copyright law, which is already very strict, choose a different profession or get a day job to pay the bills.
Copyright is a temporary, limited grant by the government. It is nothing like physical property. Read the Constitution.
There is nothing in copyright law that generally prohibits others from profiting from your writings; such a notion is contrary to the very idea of copyright laws. Your rights in your copyrighted materials are limited.
Same thing applies to journalists as to authors: either there is a demand for their services or there is not, either they can make a living at it or they can't. Because of the Internet, it turns out that we need far fewer journalists than we used to, so a lot of them lose their jobs. I don't see a problem.
Google has spent billions on creating free software. That alone more than makes up for any moral quibbles you may have with them.
What you can and cannot do with a book is determined by copyright, not by those notices. Publishers have a habit of lying about what rights they do and do not have to the content they publish. I think anybody who claims more rights to their works than they actually have under the law should automatically lose all rights.
They charge you NOTHING. No profit.
But nice try.
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The decision as to what is fair use is significantly above your pay grade.
I suggest you let the legal experts decide this issue.
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That's Rule 27, right? Never admit defeat, especially when it's obvious you've lost ;-)
You've done nothing but blurt out your pin headed opinion.
And you stand up and thump your chest like you have Won the Internet.
How are those wool pants smelling?
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I personally only right stuff that I am guaranteed to benefit from. Once I benefit from it, it is hard to argue that I wouldn't have done it in the first place if copyright did not exist. The only authors that have trouble are the ones that have been sold a song about how they can write a book and people will automatically buy it on its merits. Piracy has become the running cliche like lawyers. No one in jail is guilty it is just that their lawyer screwed them.
And that's Rule 43 I believe. Wow, you sure know a lot of rules!
I spoke to a couple of copyright lawyers about this and I asked them to define "fair use." How much can you copy? How many pages?
The answer is, nobody knows. There are a few cases that the court decided but outside of those very narrow conditions, no lawyer can tell you for sure.
Incidentally, those same authors who are complaining about their books being copied without their permission usually copy entire reviews of their books to give away in the press kits of their books.
What's obvious to you isn't obvious to somebody else.
The other issue is that libraries want to scan their collections for use within their own building, so they can send disintegrating books to cold storage or throw them out. It's sort of like making a backup. But the Author's Guild doesn't want to let them do that either.
The libraries want to be able to send images of the pages of their books to their patrons, rather than bringing up the physical book.
That seems reasonable.
Here's a real problem: I was at the New York Public Library's performing arts library in Lincoln Center. The librarian explained that they have collections of folders of clippings about all kinds of theater topics, such as theaters. These clippings contain information that's available noplace else. They don't have a good index, and the only way to find out what's in the folders is to get them from the stacks. The newspaper clippings are printed on newsprint, which is disintegrating.
They want to image the whole collection, so patrons of the library can sit at a terminal and view images of the folders, rather than have to send them up from the stacks in elevators and read through the disintegrating clippings. They're waiting for the resolution of the Google suit before they can go ahead. If the Authors' Guild wins, they won't be able to image their own collection, and they'll have to watch it turn to dust.
A lot of this stuff has the problem of orphan works. It would be almost impossible to digitize it if you needed permission from the copyright holder (which is not necessarily the author).
A folder might contain articles, such as reviews, from a dozen different publications. Some of them might not be in existence any more. If the reviewer was an employee of the publication, the copyright belongs to the publication. If the reviewer was a freelancer, it probably belongs to the freelancer or his estate -- but that depends on long-lost contracts. There are people who track these copyrights down when publishers want to reprint things in textbooks -- it might cost $10 or $100 per article to track down the current owner, and sometimes you can't find them at all. Sometimes it's still in copyright, but they can't figure out, without a lawsuit, exactly who owns the rights (like that Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau).
I think it's a social good to have these disintegrating files imaged. I think it's fair use. The Author's Guild doesn't think so, and if they get their way, these folders will turn to dust.
BTW, I also make my living as a published author. But I've spent days searching through paper copies of old books and microfilm, and I've always dreamed of being about to search for it by computer.
Most of the posts are saying the google just shows search snippets. That's not true.
Some of the books just have a snippet view. But there are a lot of books where you can get many pages of the book.
Here is an example
http://tinyurl.com/727xtle
This is from the book "System Dynamics" by Ogata. Several complete & continuous pages can be seen. There are various books where I have seen anything from 20% to 50% of the book being shown on Google books - after every 4-5 pages - couple of pages are not shown & then again 4-5 pages.
The discussion of whether it helps the author or not is irrelevant.
books that have dozens of pages available have been authorized by the author/publisher afaik.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
Wrong. The entire book is scanned. The filtration is done at presentation time; the entire work is digitized. I know this because Google tried to do this with my book.
Fuck you and your book.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
What you can and cannot do with a book is determined by copyright, not by those notices.
So you keep saying, and of course you're right. What you seem to keep conveniently missing out is how mass-copying works as Google are doing is actually legal under fair use or any similar provision.
Perhaps you could make a start by explaining how Google are entitled to copy all of these works into their own database without at the very least paying for a legal copy of each and every one of them.
Then you can explain how republishing the work on-line qualifies.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Are you seriously claiming that Google are doing this other than for commercial purposes, and that they are not going to make money by bringing eyeballs to their site to view other people's work?
As has often been observed, Google's users aren't their customers, they are their products. Advertisers are their customers, and their advertising operations are most definitely profitable.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Google has already prevailed on all of these points. Only the abandoned works issue is still at issue.
[citation needed]
It seems to me that Judge Chin has been less than supportive of Google's case so far. In fact, the original settlement in 2008 was thrown out after extensive review as being unfair, largely on the basis of the kinds of objections many people are suggesting in this very Slashdot discussion.
Moreover, it seems the current state of the case very much still includes deciding fundamental questions such as whether the mass-copying of works onto Google's own servers without permission is fair use. This is straight from TFA, so you're going to need more than wishful thinking and proof-by-intimidation as counter-arguments.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
"Silence gives consent" is how all search engines operate on the net
Well, yes and no. I suspect search engines for web pages would do better to argue that their behaviour constitutes fair use because, among other factors, the original material is readily available on-line from the original source anyway. In that case, it's not "silence gives consent", it's "consent is not required" or perhaps "consent is implicit in the rightsholder's other actions". There is nothing in copyright law in any country I know about that says silence is sufficient for consent in the general case, and indeed that would be a very dangerous principle to adopt, since it places the burden on copyright holders to notify everyone in the universe that they wish to enforce the rights the law gives them or they lose those rights.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Google does exactly the same for building their web index: copy all the content, then digest and index it. Indexing just entails effectively having a copy of the content around. Google didn't invent this, a lot of search engines before them did the same thing. There were a whole bunch of lawsuits over it and people lost (which is a good thing). Why should it be legal for electronic content and not legal for books?
Google isn't "republishing" the work; unless you opt in or the book is out of copyright, all that is shown about a book is a few short snippets, just like web search results. And you can even opt out of that.
by indexing my website and listing it in their search engine!
Seriously, people are working tooth and nail trying to get their content indexed on the world's biggest search engines so they can enjoy the extra visitors, but these idiot ass-backward authors can't wrap around their head that getting indexed is a good thing.
Google is fighting an uphill battle to make the authors richer in the long run? How idiotic. Someone slap some sense into these authors please.
*Nods*. Right. My comment ought not to be construed as a statement along the lines of, "Screw the authors! Gimme!" It's just a goddamn shame that this hasn't been pulled off.
Tenemus pyrobolos atqui jacimus cognitiones.
Why should it be legal for electronic content and not legal for books?
Web pages are already available for free, to anyone, on-line, with immediate access, from their original sources. That's five factors right there that distinguish the Web search engine case from what Google Books does.
Google isn't "republishing" the work; unless you opt in or the book is out of copyright, all that is shown about a book is a few short snippets, just like web search results.
There seem to be plenty of books on there where a lot more than a few short snippets are shown. I suppose it's possible that all of the corresponding rightsholders have joined whatever scheme Google offered, but given the stories of some posters here about Google just taking their work and using it without any permission at all, I'm less than willing to take that on trust.
In any case, even a few snippets could easily undermine the value of a book if it happens to be all the highlights.
And you can even opt out of that.
Irrelevant. The law in every first world jurisdiction I know requires that someone making a copy have permission from the copyright holder unless they have a specific exception/exemption, not that the copyright holder opt-out of forfeit their rights.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The reason I'm particularly fond of it is the access to out-of-print material. I went searching for an old book that I couldn't find for purchase, and luckily found scans of it in this project.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Google doesnt profit? What a fucking asshole liar you are.
First you claim (A) Its only a few pages, then we find out its dozens.
Then you claim (B) Its legal, but we find out that it isn't.
Now you claim (C) There is no profit, which is obviously fucking bullshit.
Take Googles cock out of your mouth and wake the fuck up.
"His name was James Damore."
I hear that not having a valid arguing point but mouthing off anyways is worthless. Thats true.
"His name was James Damore."
"Being able to flip through a few pages to get a feel for the book is an essential part of the buying process for me."
..."
Flipping through books that are meeting the copyright holder's distribution desires, not violating it.
"I'm chalking this up to
Then, you would be wrong.
Ads. Ads. Ads. Yes they profit.
But, nice try.
You're wildly contradicting yourself, saying on the one hand that it doesn't matter because it's free, and on the other hand that you need explicit permission for everything.
Fact is: you don't need explicit permission to make copies under many circumstances: you can make copies under fair use, you can make copies if you already have paid fees through some other mechanism, you can make copies for indexing purposes, etc.
Tough cookies. It is not the purpose of copyright law to "protect the value of the book" against all possible threats to your revenue.
Which means that you are groundlessly accusing Google. What's really going on is that you don't like Google and are now looking for shit to throw at them.
Your signature is ironic, given that you are arguing for limiting liberty through the power of the state.
You're wildly contradicting yourself, saying on the one hand that it doesn't matter because it's free, and on the other hand that you need explicit permission for everything.
There is no contradiction at all. Being available for free is not the same as being in the public domain. However, such availability weighs on several of factors that determine whether a use is fair in the US (which I assume is the most relevant jurisdiction if we're talking about Google).
Fact is: you don't need explicit permission to make copies under many circumstances: you can make copies under fair use, you can make copies if you already have paid fees through some other mechanism, you can make copies for indexing purposes, etc.
That's just begging the question: the final case that you quietly added on the end there has not been shown to be a fact at all.
It is not the purpose of copyright law to "protect the value of the book" against all possible threats to your revenue.
No, it isn't. However, one of the four factors in determining fair use is, explicitly, right out of the statute books, the effect of the use on the potential market or value of the work.
Which means that you are groundlessly accusing Google.
It's only groundless if the cases I mentioned -- which are demonstrable fact -- all turn out to be justified. Speculation? Sure, and I acknowledged the other possibility. Groundless? Only if you show convincing evidence that what they are doing had the necessary permissions in advance. The burden of proof is on them/you as the people who are performing/defending an act that is by default illegal.
Your signature is ironic, given that you are arguing for limiting liberty through the power of the state.
All laws ultimately limit liberty through the power of the state. My signature is a warning against permitting the state to become too powerful, not a call for anarchy.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I.e. you don't need explicit permission for some uses of copyrighted materials. As I was saying...
Yes, and for most people, the market value of their books goes up. For a few badly written books, it may go down. And that is why the default should be opt-out, not opt-in.
And that is exactly why we should not give authors or the government too much control over our culture or intellectual creations. Excessive copyright restrictions are a threat to our economy, our liberty, and our democracy.
Yes, and for most people, the market value of their books goes up.
That is what lawyers sometimes call "assuming facts not in evidence". Of course, you're welcome to cite additional evidence to support your position if you have it, but I've seen this sort of argument made before by people who dislike copyright, and I've yet to see a case where there wasn't obvious selective evidence or confirmation bias at work when they were called on it. If you really do have a good counter-example, I'd be genuinely interested to learn about it.
And that is why the default should be opt-out, not opt-in.
If the process is as beneficial to rightsholders as you claim, what is the problem with making it opt-in? Surely they would be queueing up to register, since it would surely take less than a minute and, by your argument, for most people it would increase their profits. Moreover, if there were a high rate of opt-ins in the early days, followed by a worthwhile increase in profits for those who tried it, that would represent compelling evidence for switching to an opt-out-by-default policy in future, without any of the hypothetical thought experiments or philosophical views we see today.
By the way, for someone so hot on promoting liberty, I can't help noticing how keen you seem to be on taking the decision out of the hands of the people who have done the hard work and favouring the organisation that is profiting off the back of someone else's work. I think this is my fundamental problem with a lot of anti-copyright advocacy: however you dress it up, copyright ultimately exists to incentivise the creation and distribution of valuable works, and historically, favouring middlemen further from the artist over those closest to the artist has rarely achieved that.
Excessive copyright restrictions are a threat to our economy, our liberty, and our democracy.
That is essentially a tautology. The question is whether it would be excessive to prohibit what Google is doing. Indeed, I notice that others in this discussion have already suggested that Google's actions are a prime example of exactly the sort of behaviour that copyright is intended to restrict.
I'll just finish by observing that having one law for multinational corporations with in-house legal teams and millions to spend on lobbying and another law for everyone else is harmful to democracy, too.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include: 1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; 2) the nature of the copyrighted work; 3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and 4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Emphasis mine. Profit is only one factor and on top of that the page has a bar at the top advertising Google products and links on the left to buy the book, which they probably get a cut of. But nice try.
That's only a statistical majority of content though. Various types of websites (commercial or otherwise) often try to hide some of their information behind an access barrier, and this has always been the case since the early days of the net.
The technologies that have been used to control access weren't always well thought out, and even then misconfigurations were/are common. Also, it's always been common for people to mirror data (anonymously or not) without having been given permission. The upshot is that spiders collect a lot of web pages and media content that aren't at all intended to be readily available online from the original source. That makes the fair use argument on its own too simple IMHO.
Well, as you yourself observed: most books on Google Books show you more than snippets, which means that most people choose to opt in.
Making opt-in the default further limits the rights of the public; it has effects far beyond Google. Just because you hate Google's guts doesn't mean that we should screw archives, non-profits, and scholars even more than they are already screwed by the overreaching lobbying activities of the movie and publishing industries.
Liberty doesn't mean that you can force people to pay for whatever crap you produce. Copyright is a utilitarian tradeoff, not a natural law. Since we have a glut of books and movies, we don't need even stricter copyright legislation.
And I am not concerned with Google, I am concerned with the ill effect your kind of knee-jerk law-making has on everybody else.
Actually, it's not a tautology, it is rhetoric and implies that it would be excessive. Maybe your inability to comprehend simple English is why you have trouble making a living from your "intellectual creations"?
Oh, how right you are! And the multinational corporations that are lobbying here are big, bloated, obsolete publishers that are screwing authors and customers alike and have been pushing one copyright extension after another. Those organizations are the real threat. Google showing a bunch of small snippets and giving you an opt-out if you are dumb enough to take it is a threat to nobody.
Well, I think your incivil tone and unnecessary personal attacks have pretty much put an end to any sensible discussion here, so I will simply leave you with this thought: by my count, you have made several outright false statements in that one post, including jumping to some conclusions about me that are waaaay off-base.
For example, I've actively campaigned for copyright reform in my country for a long time, including objecting to all the silly term extensions and such, so my views are in no way knee-jerk reactions and I'm amused that you seem to think I'm on the side of Big Media. Also, I've never published a book, and while technically some of the work I do is protected by copyright, none of the business models I am currently using actually rely on that protection, so I have no axe to grind about this particular case.
In short, I have no vested interest in this issue other than getting a fair result for both the public and those who create and share their work. I just happen not to agree with you about the best way to do that, and that includes not letting Google trample all over the law just because they're Google.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Search engines typically won't index content behind access barriers, though. Indeed, showing something different to a robot from somewhere like Google to what you show the general public visiting your site is a pretty reliable way of getting blacklisted.
You have a fair point about content that's been mirrored without the permission of the legitimate rightsholder. I'm not sure anyone has come up with a good solution to that basic problem yet. I suspect a combination of penalising the original source of illegal distribution in proportion to any damage they do* and providing a safe harbour/takedown notice system as many jurisdictions now do is probably a decent compromise.
* That's reasonably argued damages, not random conjecture as we often see from Big Media, whose losses to copyright infringement have now exceeded global GDP according to one recent argument I heard about! However, in the former case, I have no problem with throwing the book at someone who has wilfully infringed copyright and caused a lot of damage because of it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
A great historical example for this are web server logs, which people use to mine for all sorts of information including passwords/etc. Early web spiders would simply follow all the links in them indiscriminately, because they're great sources of URLs.
It's hard to make a good job of filtering those URLs with a script or AI program. There are so many possibilities that even a tiny failure rate of 0.1% becomes gigantic when you multiply this by the scale of the web. (the current web is at least 1 trillion urls...)
US copyright is based on utility, not "fairness". Even though I have pointed this out multiple times and pointed you at the Constitution, you still keep droning on about "fairness". And even though the issue is clearly legally unsettled and the court hasn't ruled, you keep talking as if it were a fact that Google is violating the law. Don't expect people to remain civil if you just keep ignoring them and the facts.
But you are on the side of Big Media--you are parroting their attacks on Google, with the same irrelevant arguments about "fairness" and the same attacks on the public domain.
US copyright is based on utility, not "fairness".
Says who? That's the first time you've mentioned anything about "utility".
Even though I have pointed this out multiple times and pointed you at the Constitution
Wrong on both counts. Go ahead and search your history of replies to me in this thread.
you still keep droning on about "fairness"
That's because I think a fair result for both sides is the most beneficial to society. Apparently those who wrote the law in the US agree, since reproducing works under copyright is (under most circumstances) illegal by default, and whether Google can avail themselves of the fair use affirmative defence is the key to this whole debate.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
There is one major difference, though. In the case of the library, it owns the material. Google does not own the material.
The library also needs to look into preservation options. They could do some sort of lamination to protect the newsprint. There isn't any reason the clippings need to remain exposed to the air.
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
I see a lot of comments regarding authors, but this is mostly about publishers and their legal rights. They want to make money on their terms exclusively, it's really nothing new. I actually worked as a contractor on the book search project I was out at the actual library, Stanford has about NINE of them. We always worked against the threat of the project ending or changing prematurely.
The library owns the material. They contract out to Google the job of managing the images.
They do laminate selected clippings. I don't know how much it cost, but it's certainly >$1/page and probably >$5/page to do it in volume. These are fragile clippings that won't always easily fit through a high-volume laminating machine. If they laminated every page, they'd need 5 times the storage space. And it would be even more difficult to file them and bring them up from storage.
The New York Public Library (like all major reference libraries) has been preserving books and old paper since they opened. They have a system for de-acidifying rare books and paper. I think it costs around $10/page.
The judges will decide. Since the copyright law is so vague, they'll decide it on the basis of how much the social value of an index of all the books in all the libraries in the world overrides the (undefined) copyright rights of the authors of those books. Google lets them opt out. The issue is whether it should be opt-out or opt-in. If it's opt-in, orphan books will be effectively gone. And there are a lot of important orphan books.
OK, I that was in another thread. Nevertheless, if you engage in arguments about US legal cases, it is your responsibility to inform yourself about US law.
Why do you persist in making things up? US copyright law is based in the US Constitution, which defines it to be utilitarian. There is no "apparently" about it. Notions of "fairness" only enter into European copyright law.
Great! I consider the original US copyright system to be fair: 28 years plus mandatory registration. I consider the current system (life+70 years, no registration) to be highly unfair, because it lets publishers control works they did not create and keep works out of the public domain that should be in the public domain. Hence, in the interest of fairness, let's go back to the original copyright terms and system. It's only fair, right?
OK, one more try. Here is what the US Constitution actually says in Article 1, Section 8:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
I will just note in passing that if you're going to make an argument based on the Constitution, there is nothing in there restricting the Right of Authors in their works or making any exceptions at all for anyone else to do anything with the work during the limited Time when the exclusive Right applies.
In other words, while you could make a decent argument against permitting the permanent transfer of copyright to middlemen (which I would agree with) and you could make a decent argument against extending copyright terms such that they are effectively no longer a limited Time (which I would also agree with, as I mentioned before), you have no case whatsoever based on the wording of the Constitution to argue for automatic rights for others in specific contexts.
That means any such rights are down to the specific laws that grant Authors those exclusive Rights as permitted by the Constitution. And on that score, we turn to 17 U.S.C. 107:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. 106 and 17 U.S.C. 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
I've added emphasis, so you can see exactly where the US statute books say fairness is relevant.
By the way, when you're looking at things in this level of detail, there isn't really any such thing as "European copyright law". There are centralised directives, which are subsequently implemented by individual member states within their own legal frameworks. There may also be local laws independent of centralised Europe, for example the fair dealing provisions in the UK. These laws may be created on their own merits, or they may be required because the state in question is a signatory to major international copyright agreements like the Berne Convention and TRIPS.
I consider the original US copyright system to be fair: 28 years plus mandatory registration. I consider the current system (life+70 years, no registration) to be highly unfair, because it lets publishers control works they did not create and keep works out of the public domain that should be in the public domain.
The irony is that if you were actually reading my posts, you'd realise that I completely agree with you about the silly term length extensions and the problems of letting middlemen grab the rights from the people who really do the work and exploit them in the long term. Mandatory registration is the only thing I disagree with there, because I simply don't think it's practical in the modern world; if say 10% of the bloggers in the world started registering every post, any government-run system would probably collapse pathetically within hours, even before you consider all the professionals who would surely want robust protection worldwide for all
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The US Constitution doesn't grant rights, it takes them away, leaving all remaining rights in place. The fact that the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact copyright laws tells you that by default, everybody has the right to copy everything, but Congress has the power to limit that right temporarily for utilitarian purposes.
So, I don't have "to argue for automatic rights [to copyrighed works] for others" because everybody has the right to copy everything, unless specifically limited by copyright law. And limitations by copyright law need to be justified by utility. If there is some new, money-making way of using a copyrighted work, under US law, by default, it is permitted until Congress enacts legislation to limit it.
This is fundamentally different from Europe. European Constitutions enumerate a limited set of rights that you have instead of enumerating a limited set of rights that you don't have, and European law recognizes "moral rights" in copyrighted works, which the US does not.
"Fair use" is a technical term meaning a defined "legitimate use". It says "even though we have given authors these special restrictions for utilitarian purposes, it is nevertheless always legitimate for people to copy for the following purposes...". It doesn't refer to "fairness" in the sportsmanship sense or balancing of interests.
Out-of-copyright and orphan works is exactly what this lawsuit is about. Publishers and guilds want to rip off the public, and neither libraries, nor archives, scholars, or other non-profits have been able to reign them in. I'm glad Google is mighty enough to take on these scoundrels, because nobody else has been able to.
You're almost literally spewing the anti-Google propaganda of people like Murdoch, Berlusconi, and German state TV (and if you're from somewhere else, there are similar people everywhere), companies and individuals that have monopolized the European media markets and conned Europeans out of huge sums of money. European politicians are doing their bidding because they know they can't get reelected if they act against them. Berlusconi just skipped that step and used his media empire to become the leader of Italy.
These people see their obsolete business models and their control over public opinion threatened and they are fighting back. Someone needs to take them on, and the only one powerful enough is other big companies and the US government, which is why they publish all that anti-US and anti-corporate claptrap. If Google uses its "might" to destroy their businesses, we'll all be better off.
If there is some new, money-making way of using a copyrighted work, under US law, by default, it is permitted until Congress enacts legislation to limit it.
Sure, and if that way of using the work involves reproduction, then Congress has enacted such legislation and reaffirmed it on several subsequent occasions.
"Fair use" is a technical term meaning a defined "legitimate use". It says "even though we have given authors these special restrictions for utilitarian purposes, it is nevertheless always legitimate for people to copy for the following purposes...". It doesn't refer to "fairness" in the sportsmanship sense or balancing of interests.
That might be your interpretation, but I know of nothing in US law that supports it. I just quoted you the relevant law verbatim, and nothing in there says any of what you just wrote.
Out-of-copyright and orphan works is exactly what this lawsuit is about.
I notice you sneaked in the always controversial "orphan works" there. The trouble with orphan works is that if there really isn't any way to get hold of the rightsholder then probably we do want to release them into the public domain immediately, but organisations with a vested interest in not being restricted by copyright tend to want some inevitably failing token effort at looking someone up to result in the same effective cancellation of the copyright. Right here in this discussion, there is someone posting who says Google used his copyrighted book without making any contact with him.
You're almost literally spewing the anti-Google propaganda
Oh, please. I don't like big, international organisations that try to put themselves above the law. I'm perfectly entitled to that opinion, regardless of whatever politics any other person or organisation might have.
And for the record, that includes Big Media, who should long ago have been punished for rampant price-fixing, anti-competitive practices, etc.
I don't like organisations that effectively buy laws with lobbyists either.
European politicians are doing their bidding because they know they can't get reelected if they act against them. Berlusconi just skipped that step and used his media empire to become the leader of Italy.
How is that working out for him?
Someone needs to take them on, and the only one powerful enough is other big companies and the US government, which is why they publish all that anti-US and anti-corporate claptrap.
I find your implication that the US government is on the side of the people and/or organisations like Google, rather than bought and paid for by Big Media more than any other first world nation, to be highly amusing.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You claimed that that passage showed that "fairness" was a consideration in US copyright law. I pointed out that you misunderstood the passage. The passage says that it is "fair" (legitimate) for the public to do something even with copyrighted books, nothing more. The only basis of giving privileges to authors is utility under US law.
People claim all sort of bizarre things about US copyright law, as you yourself have been doing, so "someone said" is not an argument.
(I would imagine that Google rarely if ever contacts authors of books, since they make most deals with the publishers.)
Well, you just reaffirm again your political biases against the US and US corporations. In fact, the US government by and large actually represents the will of the people. I know that must be hard for a European to fathom, first because European media provide you a steady diet of anti-American propaganda and selective reporting, and second because European governments represent the will of the European people so poorly.
He is laughing all the way to the bank, and he still controls the Italian media.
They profit by using your eyeballs to sell advertising space, who ever said you were Google's customer, you are their product.
Are you trying to tell me Google is not a profit making company?
So quit being so smug and try and understand what your talking about.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Your right, Fair-Use is muddy water. No one knows what it really means. The letter of the law is very vague, I am sure this was done intentionally so as to cover future reasons that may have been disallowed if they were too specific, kind of like the Bill of Rights. But the spirit of the law is less vague. Basically fair-use is for the betterment of society at large, not for corporate profits.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.