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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 !
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?
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.
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.
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.
Copyright law isn't intended to prevent people from profiting from copyrighted works. If you publish a cookbook, I can use it to prepare meals and charge for them, for example. Copyright law gives copyright holders specific, limited rights in order to encourage them to publish and produce, nothing more. What Google is doing is no different from establishing a privately run reference service with a large staff that can look things up for you. They don't redistribute the works (unless the copyright holder gives them explicit permission).
With something this clearcut, the court really should have kicked out authors and publishers as having no standing and no damages: any author or publisher who doesn't want to be on Google can just ask to be removed. What authors and publishers really want is to force Google to pay them no matter what. It's the usual rip-off of these groups of trying to get paid no matter what crap they produce.
The people behind the lawsuits are publishers and "authors guilds", organizations made obsolete by Google and electronic publishing. And they aren't suing over their own books (they could just have them removed), they are suing over the vast quantity of orphan works that they don't own but that would provide unwelcome free competition to their content.
Are you an author or publisher and don't want your books on Google? Remove them:
http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=175010
Given that there are very few people like you and very few services like Google Books, opt-out is a reasonable default. Making opt-in the default because of a bunch of malcontent potty-mouths like you is unreasonable.
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.
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.