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."

Comments

Short-term benefit?

[Rei]

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.

Re:Short-term benefit?

[religionofpeas]

We'd go to a thing called a "library" where books were actually purchased, thus the author actually getting paid.

The number of books sold to libraries is so small that the authors could perhaps buy a cup of coffee with their profits.

We'd look through these "books" and find the information we needed.

Yes, and we also went to record stores to listen to music, and we'd buy folded paper maps, and we'd look up phone numbers in the yellow pages.

As someone else said, this is just Google being greedy - they could have come up with some sort of agreement with the authors that allowed them to do it via a subscription service

So, why didn't the authors and/or publishers set up a system for finding books ?

Re:Short-term benefit?

[TWX]

As one of those born-before-1990 people, you were still limited to the editorial choices made by your librarian or library staff, or the city-council or schoolboard or college board that made policy decisions affecting the library. It was also difficult to evaluate the worthiness of the book itself, there were not as many sources to use to find out if the author was truly an expert in the subject or if the author was pushing an agenda that ran toward fringe/junk science.

Then there was the time-element. It simply took a long time to peruse the material. It was often not possible to search the text of the book to find something relevant, one had to hope that the author and editor did their jobs well and organized chapters and subjects in a logical fashion.

Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of veracity problems with modern Internet-based techniques, and there are still problems with junk work and authors masquerading as legitimate that are merely trying to push an agenda, but it's a lot easier than it used to be to get to that part of evaluating the work, instead of spending so much time just trying to find the works in the first place.

Re: Short-term benefit?

[Foobar of Borg]

Why buy the book when you already got your answer from the Google scans?

Because he didn't. He was able to read enough to realize that the book is a good discussion of the topic he was researching. You see, it actually takes time, careful reading, and detailed analysis to understand a subject. You seem to be under the impression that he wants a simple-minded, one phrase answer, when in reality he is trying to carefully do this thing known as "thinking", something your response shows you are clearly incapable of doing.

Very Real Potential Harm

[phantomfive]

Very Real Potential Harm is the same as no actual harm. So good.

Re:Dissolve the Berne Convention

[Verdatum]

If you managed to infringe on a work, it should mean that you either had access to something that you didn't create, thus implying it is copyrighted until you can show otherwise, or it shouldn't be something worthy of copyright. A better question would be, how do you license a copyrighted work if you are unable to contact the property holder? This question has been a major issue that the Google Books plan has had to deal with, and what prevented it from putting everything it had ever scanned on sale, as it had originally intended (which would've been REALLY NICE).

Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not what the publishers are complaining about in the summary. They say that it's harder for publishers to market their authors' works because Google is already marketing it for free as search results. This means that authors no longer need to spend any money on marketing if they don't want to. Basically publishers are victims of market efficiency.

Starving Artists...

[Etherwalk]

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.

Re:Starving Artists...

[phantomfive]

That's true, it's why authors often make only 2% of the total book price in royalties: because if the publishers (aggregators, etc) didn't advertise the product, they would make even less money.

It's really sad how important the gatekeepers are for content production (and this includes things like the iTunes app store: good luck getting people to buy your app).

Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out.

[JoshuaZ]

Rent-seeking for a limited time, to encourage people to actually write things. Limited time is really important there.

Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out.

[chipschap]

Publishers hate the on-line revolution and the ability of authors such as myself and millions more to self-publish.

What the publishers don't realize is that Google is giving them free publicity. I'd guess that Google's efforts increase sales, not decrease them. Google just publishes sample pages. Like what you read? You'll have to buy the book, and you just might do that!

But no, publishers want things to be like they were 50 years ago, when they were the kings of the book world, and they controlled everything.