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."
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.
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?
The rent-seeking was built into the Constitution by design.
In this case, merely offering up the relevant passage someone searched for did not violate copyright law, as it was akin to a catalog. They wanted a cut of Google's deep pockets just for searching their books. The court declined to entertain this.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Very Real Potential Harm is the same as no actual harm. So good.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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.
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.
Rent-seeking for a limited time, to encourage people to actually write things. Limited time is really important there.
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.
You write for nothing
Google sells ads on your work
Sharing economy
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...