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?

[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: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.

Article haiku

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

You write for nothing
Google sells ads on your work
Sharing economy

And old "research" was lower quality for it

[dlenmn]

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.

Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out.

[tnk1]

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.

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.