Slashdot Mirror
Court Rules Book Scanning Is Fair Use, Suggesting Google Books Victory
concealment writes "A judge has ruled that the libraries who have provided Google with their books to scan are protected by copyright's fair use doctrine. While the decision doesn't guarantee that Google will win—that's still to be decided in a separate lawsuit—the reasoning of this week's decision bodes well for Google's case. Most of the books Google scans for its book program come from libraries. After Google scans each book, it provides a digital image and a text version of the book to the library that owns the original. The libraries then contribute the digital files to a repository called the Hathitrust Digital Library, which uses them for three purposes: preservation, a full-text search engine, and electronic access for disabled patrons who cannot read the print copies of the books."
Obviously, samzenpus is trying to prove that copying is fair use by copying Timothy's front page article....
On one hand, it's deplorable that Google isn't paying tribute to authors.
You need to get more info on this - Google is doing authors a favor here. They're taking tons of out of print and generally unavailable books, making them available online, and allowing authors who claim them to get most of the proceeds from their sales.
True, I suppose, but would it really have killed Google to just go out and buy a single copy of each book they scan? I think that would be more fair, and negligible in terms of cost to the almighty Google.
These are old books that you can't get anywhere else. At what store do you believe Google can buy them, Barnes and Noble? Do you think they're getting them from libraries to be cheap?
We don't want to hear about your dumb American football.
A major aim of the project was to digitally preserve books that are out of print. Most of these can't be bought, by anyone.
Also, the authors of a significant fraction of these books cannot be located. So while many of these books are still covered by copyright, there's nobody available to pay anything to, or to get consent from (well, the Authors Guild might nominate themselves as "default" copyright holders somehow). For these books, proceeds from sales are held separately in trust, against future claims if the authors are eventually located. For the rest, identified authors naturally get the lion's share of sales. Google also profits from advertising, but authors are entitled to a 63% share of this too. And under various versions of the settlement, authors could even claim $60 per book, while Google does the all work of making their books more available to the public.
Money is not the issue; it's control - the Guild (and some actual authors) are mostly objecting that Google didn't ask first.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?