Slashdot Mirror
Google Books Can Proceed As Supreme Court Rejects Authors Guild Appeal (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to Google's online book library -- Google Books -- from authors who complained that the project makes it harder for them to market their work. The Authors Guild and other writers had claimed that Google's scanning of their books should be deemed as copyright infringement and not fair use. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers' claims. The decision today means Google Books won't have to close up shop or ask publishers for permission to scan.The ruling, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the authors group, said, "misunderstood the importance of emerging online markets for books and book excerpts. It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision. The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
Waaaaaaah! Our rent seeking behavior has been denied! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
Google Books is not a "short-term public benefit", it's a real tangible benefit to the public. I can't tell you how many times I've found important information from Google Books on scientific topics that I otherwise wouldn't have had ready access to - even though interspersed by blank pages. I can always buy the book if I want the additional information in the missing pages - but the key point being, I would never have known that the book existed and provided the information I was looking for had it not been scanned, indexed, and shown up in Google searches.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
one small step for mankind....
Now we need open standards for multiple archival sites to steward and prevent the complete corruption or loss of the Google archive as the world churns.
Most libraries are eventually destroyed in time.
> The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
Like Justin Bieber and Donald trump? We can only wish...
Copyright without registration isn't copyright at all. If nobody knows what is copyrighted and who owns the copyright, how are you supposed to find out?
Very Real Potential Harm is the same as no actual harm. So good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I've tried. Google is an advertising company in the business of harvesting your personal information into ad profiles. You can't keep your info out of their hands: even if you try, other people will give it to them. The company you work, your friends, your neighbors, companies you do business with online, all of them will.
I don't know why this should be different for authors. Letting Google collect every shred of info about your behavior, what you write, what you read, what you buy, who your friends are, is now compulsory. If it's compulsory for some, it should be compulsory for all.
"The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
Locking Americans out of American culture is the biggest limit on the vitality of American culture. We stupidly let people pretend that entertainment media are "property" for the profit of the elites, and made American culture into business by locking out anyone who won't pay cash.
Many years ago, libraries decided that they would save money by joining into cooperatives in which each would buy 1/N of the N needed books. When someone needed a certain book, it would be shuttled from its permanent location to the requester's library. Google books does the same on a grand scale.
On behalf of everyone who has ever set foot in a Library, or tried to obtain a book but was no longer in print, and the publisher won't make it available in any format whatsoever, I say...
Go fuck yourself.
Authors want everything to go their way, but the reality of the power balance is that they are producers of creative works, not marketers of them. (by and large). Time to admit that the pendulum has swung to where the people/entities who can aggregate and find information are even more valuable than the ones who produce the elements of that information.
They're unhappy if Google (or anyone) puts their entire works online, and also unhappy if Google puts just snippets of their works online. What do they want, to be able to pick and choose exactly what passages get to be indexed and put into search?
The heart of the matter is that this is a dispute over the money to be gathered from selling creative works, not the incentives for creating that work (which many people incorrectly buy the story that losing patent/copyright protection will strip away -- I never met an author who wrote because they had copyright protection). Authors will still continue to write, artists will still continue to record -- they will simply get less margin on each book, while actually probably getting even more exposure and marketing than they would on their own (or without Google).
Authors want everything to go their way, but the reality of the power balance is that they are producers of creative works, not marketers of them. (by and large). Time to admit that the pendulum has swung to where the people/entities who can aggregate and find information are even more valuable than the ones who produce the elements of that information.
Good God. What Universe are you living in? The power balance has NEVER favored content creators in almost any medium, and has always favored producers and aggregators. The exceptions are hugely successful artists probably three or more standard deviations above the mean in terms of demand for their work.
THIS! As soon as I read this article on Slashdot, I stopped reading books altogether. I fear soon my ability to read articles on websites will also go away, not to mention my ability to write a cohesi dkhfdipd ihdd dhdjs fiohdfho hdugcfls sivkshf hscoidcsihfhh
[The authors group said that the court] failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision
If I run a shoe store and somebody opens a competing shoe store next to me, that will reduce my profits and possibly even put me out of business, but that person hasn't "harmed" me. If I sell copies of data and somebody else starts offering competing copies of data, that may well reduce my profits or put me out of business, but they haven't "harmed" me. They are just competing. (Of course, under the legal system, what they are doing may be considered "harm," and it may be illegal.)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
How many people out there have read an entire book by searching for every page on Google?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
....It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision.
How can a potential harm be real harm? Until the harm is actually done it's just all hot air.
The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
This won't effect American culture. It probably will effect American publishing companies and force them to find better ways to survive than artificially inflating the prices of ebooks to $9.99 or higher when the paperback is $6.99. You know, stop being thieves and maybe we'll have sympathy for your plight?
You write for nothing
Google sells ads on your work
Sharing economy
It is the only thing that keeps you in business and you are being dragged kicking and screaming to the money just like music.
"The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
How in the world can someone possibly say that with a straight face. I would bust up laughing before I was halfway through that line.
"The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
Sometimes people say "black is white". But that doesn't mean there's any merit to such a claim. The only reason I can see for that quote to be mentioned is to provide a target for ridicule.
For people born before 1990, there was this thing called "research" which took more than 5 seconds to do, thus its need to be described as an actual activity.
The high time cost of "research" before everything was electronic meant that research was often lower quality. (By research, I mean "looking up sources" -- not "doing science" in general.) I'm a physicist, and it's very interesting to look back at old papers (which I do often because it's easy thanks to the internet). Old papers tended to cite few other papers, probably because looking up references was time consuming, and there are only so many hours in a day. E.g. the paper I'm working on cites over 100 other works. Many older papers don't even cite 20 other works.
For example, I was interested in a specific topic (a finite-difference time-domain solution to the Schroedinger equation), so I started digging. It turns out that the technique was "introduced" no less than four times -- basically once a decade since the 1950s. Each paper which "introduced" the technique did not cite previous work on the technique. That's both a dick move and a waste of time and effort. People should have been refining the technique instead of wasting time by rediscovering it. You also see this in even older work. E.g. the "Fokker–Planck equation" is also known as the "Kolmogorov forward equation" because Kolmogorov didn't know that the equation had already been developed.
I wouldn't have been able to learn about the history of the technique if not for electronic records. This research still doesn't take 5 seconds to do. I spend days doing it and discover much more than anyone in 1990 could.
Author's Guild Reponse auto-translation:
Google has lots of money and we wanted some. We are angry the court didn't recognize we are entitled to some of Google's money. We think depriving authors of part of Google's money will irreparably harm American Culture because they can't have money for all of Google's work to preserve that culture. Congress must act to eliminate this activist court ruling or we will get angry and stamp our feet more!
You can only do that, #1, if you can find which book has the info you want & #2, if it is available somewhere new or used.
I think that authors need to set up their own online stores and sell their own copies if they intend to make money off their out of date books. Of course, many authors have signed away the right to do that.
USA going communist.
Well I, for one, welcome our communist overlords.
I can't wait for Google to launch a 'Google Music' and 'Google Movies' projects.
Oh, wait...
You know, Things like this make me wonder:
In the old days (pre internet), the only way to get a book was in the dead tree variety. Back then, the world still recognized that free public access to paid periodicals, reference materials, and even works of cultural fiction resulted in a more well rounded, better educated, and more cultured public.
To facilitate that noble goal, exceptions to publisher exclusivity for public libraries came into being. As long as the physical books were never duplicated, just kept in good repair, and purchased from the publisher at onset, these operations were and still are perfectly legal and have provided tremendous public good.
Now, we find ourselves in a pickle:
These days, it is possible to purchase a "book" that has no physical substance whatsoever. Ebooks are here to stay, and this is what I wonder.
If a person wanted to buy all those ebooks directly from the publisher, set up a digital lockout system to prevent simultanous viewing (to better approximate the book being physically checked out) do you suppose these author's guild types would consider the creation of such a digital library above board?
Recent history with the motion picture association and the recording industry of america suggests that the answer is a resounding "FUCK NO." These people have lobbied hard to get congress to evaluate the contents as being provided as a service with a highly restrictive license, not as something that can have steward/ownership transferred. In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
As a consequence, I feel obliged to tell these poor, wounded darlings the following:
Either allow public access ebook checkouts for digital libraries (that bend over backwards to prevent concurrent access, and probably even additional copy protection you did not have to pay for, out of courtesy to you, free of charge) or shut the fuck up when somebody with deeper pockets than you (and can fight you in court) offers a similar modern public service.
No, that doesn't mean "you have to be this big to make a deal with us"-- the days of that shit are over. The cost to reproduce a digital download are less than a cent per copy. There are no overhead costs beyond the initial production, and the library will be footing all subsequent bills for data retention and bandwidth for public access. The way the laws covering libraries in the US are worded, anyone can open one.
Your lust for money is what is destroying american culture.
Open access is what helped create it.
I wonder, but very much doubt about the prospects of a modern lending library with digital versions. I have the firmly bases suspicion that you would consider such a modern version of a classic cultural staple to be a dire threat to your financials, because of your addiction to exclusivity, and recent binging on extended copyright terms and laws.
I also wonder, what do you intend to replace the public library WITH, given that attendence of these august organizations is declining in the digital age, and that as a consequence, they are doomed to posterity.
Yes you can cite 100 papers relevant to a subject at hands, but what is the quality of those citation ? When i wrote a paper ~20-25 years ago I only cited 20 or so paper, but that is because they were *relevant* and I read them entirely. Searching them was actually not that long, the reading, understanding and proper citation was what took time. As well as classifying what was the most relevant. Now you speak of citing 100 papers. How many are really relevant ? Even in the field I was in, there were hardly 5 to 10 papers VERY relevant per molecules, 5 to 10 semi relevant, and the rest not relevant or redundant or overhauled by the previous one. And that's not even counting the time spent reading it all.... Because you would not put a cite you did not read yourself, right ?
I don't know about your field, but in mine -- unless you're doing something absolutely new (unlikely) -- there's always plenty of relevant works (many more than I cite). That's kind of the point. Maybe 20-25 years ago you only _thought_ there were 20-25 relevant papers. That doesn't mean you were right.
I'd go further and say that all the easily available information allows you to make connections you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm using a technique used to model earthquakes and applying it to heat flow in nanostructures. It turns out that research done by seismologists is also relevant to solid state physicists! Who knew? Probably not you.
I can't claim that I've read every single paper. When the reviewer told me to cite certain papers, I did and didn't bother reading them. However, I've read more papers on the topic than I cite. I've been working on this project for a year and a half. If I read one paper every four days (not hard), that gets me to ~135 papers.
Independent (re)discovery is a good thing - it means that several sets of brains have come to the same conclusion.
No. Science should be iterative, not repetitive.
Why should multiple people invent the wheel? One person should invent it. Another should say, "Gee, that's cool, but stone is heavy, so I'll make it out of wood!" A third person should say, "It would be better if I greased the axle to make it roll with less friction!" And so on... That is an iterative process. At each step, you improve things while verifying the original result (that the wheel make transportation easier). Simply reinventing the wheel is a waste of time compared to iterating the wheel.
The same thing often happens in science. In the process, if prior results turn out to be bunk, they'll get called out for it. That way there's both progress and verification. That said, there is a place for straight-up verification of past results, but there is no reason for that to be the norm.
In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
And there's nothing new about that. They have done it with every technological improvement in publishing media ever.
For instance: Look aat the labels on very early 45 records. You'll see a license warning telling you you don't own this record, you're only licensing the right to play it under certain circumstances.
It took the government and the "first sale doctrine" to break that assertion. But such things apply only to the media for which they were written. So with every new technology the publishers do the same old tricks until the government is prodded into making the analogous edict (if it hasn't grown too corrupt to do so).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well, you figure it out:
o The library typically gets one copy.
o The library buys its copy, same as you.
o The author gets paid accordingly.
o Only one person can read that copy at the same time, same as you and anyone you lend to
o No one gets to keep it permanently (or they have to pay), it's the library's
o The library requires its patrons to expend time and effort getting/being there
o The library isn't 24/7/365, you don't get to do this on your own schedule (if you need that, you have to buy)
o The library makes NOTHING from you reading a book there
---
o Google has essentially infinite copies
o Google doesn't have to buy its copy
o The author doesn't get paid
o Any number of people can read from the copy
o Keeping the content is as simple as a screen capture, etc
o This requires so little effort, you can automate it
o Google makes this content available 24/7/365
o Google inundates you with ads, and
o Google gets paid by the advertisers
---
So... which is okay? Which is more okay? Which makes the most sense for the author/artist?
c'mon... you can figure it out.
Buying needlessly expensive coffee and thinking granola bars are a staple food?
Commenting about the fair treatment of employees, on a phone assembled in a Foxcon plant?
Constantly being offended by everything and expecting the world to continually make accommodations?
Can't say as I'd mind if all that stopped being a thing and if digitizing books somehow magically makes that happen... which I doubt it will in any way.... more power to our book scanning robot overlords!
Google should do this with music. It'd be fun to watch them battle the music industry....
Google Books is of tangible benefit to the public by presenting short stretches of individual, copyrighted works for fair use by the public, but it's also of great benefit to Google itself, by having the ENTIRETY of each work in its holdings.
That's not reinventing! That's iterating! Iterating is approaching a problem with knowledge of previous results and come out with even more knowledge. That is useful. The GP is instead suggesting that the reinvention should be done _independently_; i.e. without knowledge of previous results.
Feynman did not do that. Feynman read a work by Dirac, who had an important insight but didn't do much with it. Feynman realized he could do more with it, and that was the birth of the he path integral formulation of quantum mechanics.
That's the power of iterating vs reinventing. If Feynman hadn't come across Dirac's insight, we wouldn't have his path integrals today.
Heisenberg and Schrodinger were basically inventing the wheel at the same time. Both methods reproduced the hydrogen atom spectrum in 1926 but were developed starting in 1925. So they were not *re*inventing anything; they were inventing the same thing independently (although in slightly different forms).
In another post, I gave the example of a numerical technique that has been independently rediscovered no less than four times (roughly once a decade). In at least one case, the reinvention had errors. That is "reinventing", and it's unequivocally a waste of time. The time would have been much better spent refining the technique instead of rediscovering it and introducing errors in the process.
These defenses of "reinventing" are baffling. Are you two scientists? Do you spend your time rederiving pre-existing results from scratch? How's that working for you?
He's got good code to look at slashdotters like and use. You don't. Every antivirus at Google's virustotal proves his app safe too. How odd you omit that in your preaching reverend Coren22 (or should we say rabbi?). Additionally the person who audited apk's code is from a great security company! Take your own advice and replace your reading glasses and fix your sermon. It's failing again.
AlmostALLAdsblocked+ can't do 16 things hosts do 4 speed, security & reliability:
1.) Protect vs. bad sites (past ads)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C talk
3.) Protect vs. dynamic dns botnets + stop C&C talk
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C talk
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (4 reliability)
6.) Protect vs. DNS redirect poisoning
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam malicious payload links
9.) Protect vs. phish malicious payload links
10.) Protect vs. caps
11.) Get past dns blocks
12.) Keep off dns request logs
13.) Speed up surfing (adblock & hardcoded favs)
14.) Works on anything webbound multiplatform.
15.) EZ data control
16.) Block ads better vs. addons more efficiently
* See subject & the above list for truth (vs. "Rabbi Coren22's 'ministry of UNTRUTH'" (lol) )
APK
P.S.=> Ab+ does less vs. hosts less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN operation (as 1st resolver)... apk
Ab+'s a 151mb memory hog http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte... (hosts use ~3-10mb w/ my program initially). ClarityRay + BlockIQ detect & defeat AlmostAllAdsBlockedMINUS via native browser methods!
Ab+'s bribed not to work by default http://www.businessinsider.com... & ABP bought out adblock http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Ab+ adds complexity in slower usermode (w/ more messagepassing overhead + context switch vs. hosts in kernelmode)
AdBlock's SLOWER: http://superuser.com/questions...
(Rabbi Coren22 - I suggest you quit preaching your "ministry of UNTRUTH", lol!)
APK
P.S.=> Adblock's other shortcomings vs. hosts too https://slashdot.org/comments.... ? Nobody accuses you of intelligence, Coren22
secretary at MalwareBytes took a look at his source code and said it looked all good - by Coren22
My code's verified by Mr. S. Burn of Malwarebytes
"I've seen the code and yes it is safe." FROM http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi...
NOT a secretary!
I don't give it away to be stolen or misused like GOOGLE CHROME http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
won't demonstrate security of his product be exposing the source - by Coren22 (1625475)
57 antiviruses show different https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
MalwareBytes' employee hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
* EAT YOUR WORDS Coren22
APK
P.S.=> See subject - & remember a lesson Google had w/ Chrome above (even gov't.'s not opening all their code & same reason https://slashdot.org/submissio... )
secretary at MalwareBytes took a look at his source code and said it looked all good - by Coren22
My code's verified by Mr. S. Burn of Malwarebytes
"I've seen the code and yes it is safe." FROM http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi...
NOT a secretary!
I don't give it away to be stolen or misused like GOOGLE CHROME http://it.slashdot.org/story/1...
won't demonstrate security of his product be exposing the source - by Coren22 (1625475)
57 antiviruses show different https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
MalwareBytes' employee hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl...
* EAT YOUR WORDS Coren22
APK
P.S.=> See subject - & remember a lesson Google had w/ Chrome above (even gov't.'s not opening all their code & same reason https://slashdot.org/submissio... )
I've written your bogus source with what's in my subject - no response. They're nobodies in comparison. They know this too:
EACH company listed below HAD to rescind their false positives clearing my ware in 2012:
1.) McAfee/Intel
2.) ESET/NOD32
3.) Symantec/Norton
4.) Sophos
5.) Comodo
6.) ArcaVir
7.) ClamAV
8.) EmsiSoft
9.) Qihoo360
10.) Computer Associates
(They know I am right & WON'T face up to it as my ware's perfectly safe & Malwarebytes' folks proved it by a code audit too - they host & RECOMMEND it in fact too!)
* So much for your weak bs "Rabbi" w/ your ministry of UNTRUTH I shot you down w/ easily-> https://slashdot.org/comments....
APK
P.S.=> Question: ARE you jewish? Answer that - I'm curious, & have a few questions to ask on that note... apk
I support APK's stand on the hosts file by Trax3001BBS
his hosts program is actually pretty good by xenotransplant
his hosts tool is actually useful for those cases in which one does indeed want to locally block stuff outright while consuming minimum system resources by alexgieg
I've never tried to belittle (APK's) work, I've flat out said it's good by BronsCon
I like your host file system by Karmashock
I find your hosts file admirable by vel-ex-tech
take a look at the APK hosts file engineby SuperKendall
APK is kinda right. I've given up on JS based adblocking and gone to blackholing in /etc/hosts, just like it was back in the 90s. The computational load has gotten intolerable for any ad-blocking using JS. I've tried his hosts file generating software. It works by bmo
APK is totally right on this count. Adblock Plus on Firefox mobile is a dog on older, or lower end, phones. A hostfile based adblocker makes for a much better experienceby chihowa
APK
Your premise that hostfiles are a good way to deal with advertising and malvertising is quite valid by JazzLad
No complaints from me, I like APK's spam. Reminds me to use a host file. Also, his stuff is free by aaaaaaargh!
I'm a fan of apk. Yes he trolls, but he only trolls where it's contextually appropriate. I respect that by Noah Haders
APK was right! Is it time for us to point Sourceforge to a non-address in our hosts files by wonkey_monkey
APK's monolithic hosts file is looking pretty good by Culture20
APK... Awesome to see he's still spreading the good word by Molochi
dammit MS, you proved APK right about something by lgw
ABP is insufficient as a solid hosts file does everything that APK reminds us about by fast turtle
APK isn't wrong by cfalcon
APK, I know people give you a lot of shit regarding hosts, but please don't ever stop by nasredin
You need APK's hosts fileby Teun
APK solution STILL relevant by Thud457
you're right about hosts files by drinkypoo
Where else can you search a huge corpus to find books that are relevant to your interests? Authors and publishers would have never come up with something comparable, because of money, logistics and technical inaptitude, but also because of their self-defeating hangups with copyright on the tiniest snippets. Nowadays I don't have to go to bookstores and libraries to browse whatever random, small, mainstream selection of books they might have on display. I can search Google Books, find relevant books, read a page or two, read some reviews -- and then buy them online. Without Google Books I wouldn't even know that these books exist or that I might want to read them.