Google To Seek Dismissal of Suit Against Google Books

angry tapir writes with an update on the drawn out legal battle between Google and everyone else over their Books service. From the article: "After a so-far fruitless three-year effort to settle the case, Google and the plaintiffs suing it for alleged book-related copyright infringement apparently are moving away from seeking a friendly solution. Google has notified the court that it intends to file a motion to dismiss the lawsuit filed against it by authors and publishers in 2005, in which they allege copyright infringement stemming from Google's wholesale scanning of millions of library books without the permission of copyright owners. Google Books has been at the center of copyright-related controversy since 2005 when the Authors Guild of America and Association of American Publishers sued the search giant. This has been followed by other legal wrangles, including a 2010 suit by the American Society of Media Photographers, lawsuits in France and Germany and conflict with Chinese authors over the book-scanning project."

Re:Google doing evil again

[Caerdwyn]

The evil is that they are scanning commercial literary works subject to copyright with the intent of giving the scans away, and doing so against the wishes of the copyright holders. Though copyright law states the duration of copyright, and that the copyright holders retain all rights unless explicitly granted, Google is claiming "silence gives consent" for items which are still under copyright. Essentially, Google is accused of directly engaging in piracy of literary works.

Re:Defense?

[Stormy Dragon]

Their reasoning is probably a more fancy version of: it's only copyright violation when little people do it to a big corporation. When a big corporation wants to do it to an unknown author, that should be perfectly legal.

Re:Defense?

[Ichijo]

Actually, the length of the copied passage is in fact one of the determining factors: "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole." [cornell.edu]

it's publishers, not authors, that sue

[khipu]

It's the publishers and "guilds" that see their monopoly profits fade away as they are being cut out of the business. In fact, any publisher and author who doesn't want to be on Google Books can simply notify Google and they'll remove their content. Their claims that they are protecting the authors are bullshit. What they really want is to stay in control of the publishing business. They also don't want free content and orphan works to appear because that would be unwelcome competition.

Publishers and "guilds" have conned some authors into supporting them; but any author with half a brain quickly figures out that Amazon, Google Books, and the e-book revolution are good for them.

Re:Problems with copyright law...

[khipu]

What Google is doing is exactly the sort of thing copyright law is supposed to prevent. They are copying massive amounts of copyrighted works and using them for their own profit without permission from the copyright holders.

Copyright law isn't intended to prevent people from profiting from copyrighted works. If you publish a cookbook, I can use it to prepare meals and charge for them, for example. Copyright law gives copyright holders specific, limited rights in order to encourage them to publish and produce, nothing more. What Google is doing is no different from establishing a privately run reference service with a large staff that can look things up for you. They don't redistribute the works (unless the copyright holder gives them explicit permission).

With something this clear cut,

With something this clearcut, the court really should have kicked out authors and publishers as having no standing and no damages: any author or publisher who doesn't want to be on Google can just ask to be removed. What authors and publishers really want is to force Google to pay them no matter what. It's the usual rip-off of these groups of trying to get paid no matter what crap they produce.

Re:Problems with copyright law...

[khipu]

Are you an author or publisher and don't want your books on Google? Remove them:

http://books.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=175010 [google.com]

Given that there are very few people like you and very few services like Google Books, opt-out is a reasonable default. Making opt-in the default because of a bunch of malcontent potty-mouths like you is unreasonable.

Re:If I were an author ...

[Baloroth]

You have no right to full-text searches of books. Yea, it's great. Awesome, really. It helps a ton with research of all kinds, or just finding that quote in a particular book or set of books, but this is something that should most likely be part of a licensed database. People pay good money for access to databases to search published journals. This is of the same class.

Why? Published journals are a somewhat different class, since the original author isn't going to get money if the searcher buys the journal (generally). A book, on the other hand, they will.

And just because people pay money for it doesn't mean that is how it should be, either.

Re:Defense?

[ortholattice]

If I have a CD, I have a right to make a backup.

Yes, but I don't have the right to make a "backup" of a friend's CD and take it home with me.

If a library owns a book, they have a right to scan it (or even to make a photocopy of a rare book for archival purposes). They have a right to use that scan within their building, or campus, to transmit to one other computer terminal at a time.

Yes, but (as I understand it) Google took the entirety of the scans off campus, not just snippets of them at at time.

Google made a deal with the libraries. That's how they scanned the books. The libraries agreed to let Google distribute snippits. You can go into a library and photocopy several pages from a book.

The library has no right to make a "deal" with Google, since they do not own the copyright to their books. Google did not photocopy several pages, they photocopied entire books. The library thus "distributed" entire copies of books to Google, for profit-making purposes. The fact that Google re-distributes only snippets to a 3rd party (the public) seems irrelevant. I cannot legally make a copy of a library book even if I promise to distribute only snippets to a 3rd party.

If Google wins, will I then be able to copy entire library books also, like they do? Somehow I don't think so.