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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."
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?
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.
So.. it was simultaneously important, but also not worth paying the authors anything?
I can always buy the book if I want the additional information in the missing pages -
How often did you though? A potential sale, as slashdot loves to point out to the music industry is NOT a sale.
but the key point being
That you didn't buy anything.
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.
True enough; there is clearly a problem that does need solving here. But perhaps google's solution here... isn't the solution.
Perhaps being able to search google's scanned books should be a subscription service with some portion of that subscription payment going back to the authors of the books you looked at.
Or perhaps it should be nationalized into a public library system and we pay taxes into it that go back to the authors.
I'm just not sure a system that benefits you and google but not the authors is the best solution to the problem here.
" I would never have known that the book existed"
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 work you were doing was, at the time, leagues beyond what the AIs could do. We'd go to a thing called a "library" where books were actually purchased, thus the author actually getting paid. We'd look through these "books" and find the information we needed.
I'm all for progress, but a paradigm shift needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't destroy the future. There will be little purpose for authors to do the work, if you can then yank the snippets you need (likely out of context, because hey - who has time to actually read the whole paper?) without giving them any money. 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, or such. Instead, they decided to give away someone else's work for free.
If you can get all of the information out of a book that you needed from a small snippet, you were not going to be buying the book in any case - you would go to the library and photocopy the page (which is, except in rare circumstances, most certainly fair use.)
The only difference is now, you have a much better chance of being able to find out that the snippet of information exists in that book, whereas before you would likely never know that that information even existed in that book.
-Nick
My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi. You killed my master. Prepare to die.
Correct. You are not seeing danger to "culture" from the VHS tape or the MP3 or the scanned book. I mean the recording industry has not dried up and blown away like a dead leaf.
This isn't going to end culture, what it is going to end is *their business model*.
And I agree that a business model to support artists and writers is important, but as long as those items have intrinsic value to humans, humanity will see that they continue to exist. What doesn't have to exist is the specific method that the middlemen use to extract value.
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.
If publishers would only catch up they could make a reasonable amount of money from google books via POD. On many occasions I've found what I seek on google books, wanted to buy the book in question... and been blocked because the title is out of print.
Now imagine if the publishers teamed up with google and a print-on-demand service. Google finds the book but it's out of print, so you request a copy, publisher gives the ok, POD service prints a cheap softcover, book gets sent to customer, and everyone gets a cut of the profit. Sure quality may not be perfect but so long as that caveat is clear up front I see no reason why this wouldn't be a viable revenue stream. Hell for ebook fans you could even cut out the POD and serve DRMed files direct for a nominal fee.
I'm not holding my breath...