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The Point of Google Print 404

Posted by Zonk from the lookie-loos dept.
vinohradska writes "Eric Schmidt has written a good article called the The point of Google Print. It clearly lays out the argument against the current lawsuit: 'Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages.'"
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The Point of Google Print More

The Point of Google Print

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  • Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:5, Insightful)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:34PM (#13859386) Homepage Journal
    This is about control. I guess I didn't notice the corporate copyright lawyer trawling the library taking photographs of the card catalog, which is an index of books in the library's holdings. Of course our library doesn't *have* a card catalog any more; it has an online search utility. Funny that didn't get mentioned in the lawsuit.

    Who cares if Google has copied every book ever printed. As long as the copyrights of the author and publisher are honored (they don't give copies away for free), the who cares? If I took every book off the shelf from my library, copied them, and then took the copies home and stuffed them in my garage, who would care? That constitutes 'fair use'. But if I start making more copies and giving them away, or give my copy away, now I should be held to account.

    The publishers are just ticked because they see themselves losing control over content. Meet the new RIAA.

    Even those critics who understand that copyright law is not absolute argue that making a full copy of a given work, even just to index it, can never constitute fair use. If this were so, you wouldn't be able to record a TV show to watch it later or use a search engine that indexes billions of Web pages.

    Is Schmidt the only one who gets the webpage angle? I would beat the publishers over the head with this one. What do you want to bet that they all have copyrighted webpages indexed on Google. Did they ever protest this fact?

    • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:40PM (#13859435)
      Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written . . . Imagine one giant electronic card catalog that makes all the world's books discoverable with just a few keystrokes by anyone, anywhere, anytime.

      I've added the emphasis to show why there is a problem for many people with this. You can't advertise it as a full text search of every book every written while justifying it by claiming it's just a card catalog. Last time I stopped in at the local library, the card catalog indexed a brief descriptive blurb, publishing date, printing, editor, publisher, author, page count and title. It did not contain the contents of said book.

      • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:4, Insightful)

        by geomon ( 78680 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:44PM (#13859462) Homepage Journal
        I've added the emphasis to show why there is a problem for many people with this. You can't advertise it as a full text search of every book every written while justifying it by claiming it's just a card catalog.

        Because.....?

        Last time I stopped in at the local library, the card catalog indexed a brief descriptive blurb, publishing date, printing, editor, publisher, author, page count and title.

        And if they had a more automated system then you think they wouldn't offer more?

        It did not contain the contents of said book.

        But even after you get a hit on the search parameters, you don't get the whole book for free, do you?

        I still fail to see how having a digital copy on their hard drive constitutes a copyright violation. If they were to make that image available without charge, then they would be violating the copyright.
        • I still fail to see how having a digital copy on their hard drive constitutes a copyright violation.

          Because they're making a copy without the permission of the copyright holder, apparently without being covered by any exemption?

          • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:5, Informative)

            by Eustace Tilley ( 23991 ) * on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:10PM (#13859638) Journal
            You are mistaken. From Google Print's FAQ:
            #I'm already logged in. Why are you telling me the page is unavailable?

            As part of our efforts to protect a book's copyright, a set of pages in every in-copyright book will be unavailable to all users.

            # I really need to see more of this book. What can I do?

            Google Print helps you discover books, not read them online. To read the whole book, we encourage you to use the "Buy this book" link to purchase it online or the "Find this in a library" link to look for a local library that has it.
            • You are mistaken.

              You didn't say how. At all.

              Your parent said, "[b]ecause they're making a copy without the permission of the copyright holder, apparently without being covered by any exemption," and you say nothing that demonstrates that they either don't copy the work or are covered by an exemption.

              There's no denying that Google copied the books. The only other way to do what they did would be to have an awesome machine that reads and OCRs the books each time that someone makes a search. Do you think they'
              • That's a copy. The fact that they don't transmit that copy anywhere doesn't matter.

                Yes it does. Copying is allowed under fair use; distrubuting is not.

                • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:4, Insightful)

                  by EvanED ( 569694 ) <evaned@NOspAM.gmail.com> on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:30PM (#13860602)
                  Copying is NOT allowed under fair use. It is allowed for plenty of cases, but by no means all.

                  The courts rule whether a use fits under fair use based upon an analysis of four factors. There are virtually no hard and fast rules for what constitutes fair use. The fact that they are copying entire works for commercial gain probably pretty much rules out fair use.

                  (Also, if fair use allowed all non-distributing copying, why would reproduction be listed as one of the copyright holder's exclusive rights?)

                  Here are my thoughts (quotes from 17 USC 107):

                  the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

                  This is being done by a for-profit company for commercial gain. Weighs strongly against Google.

                  Works aren't actually distributed, weighs for Google.

                  Both are strong forces. Overall, this is probably neutral.

                  the nature of the copyrighted work;

                  Another poster in a long-ago story about Google Print gave an analysis about this point that consisted of balancing the factual nature of the works. According to that poster, fiction books weigh against Google more than fiction books. (Facts can't be copyrighted.) This analysis sounds reasonable, and I don't know any better.

                  But all-in-all, this point is probably reasonably neutral.

                  the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

                  Google's copying the entire work, and not only THE entire work, but LOTS of entire works. This weighs strongly against Google.

                  the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

                  May help, may not. The impression around here is it can't hurt, but there's one poster who makes a very good point [slashdot.org] about how Google Print could hurt: it more or less destroy's the position of publishers to offer their own for-pay search services or licence their libraries to other search services. On balance, because of that issue, I'd say that this point weighs weakly against Google.

                  So we have two neutral points vs. two points against Google, one strongly against.

                  I don't think Google will come away from this.
            • The moderators apparently didn't notice that you called the parent "mistaken", but didn't address the point. Google will have an entire copy of the works in question on their hard drive(s). It doesn't matter that most people will not have it - Google will, and in so doing, Google is violating copyright on a massive scale.

              All Google has to do to make everybody happy is to make this an opt-in program. Amazon.com has been running such a program for years, and you don't hear any complaints about it.

              There's a
              • There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.

                It is difficult to see how anybody is being "screwed over," because the restrictions Google is placing on access are such that nobody is likely to lose sales (and many sales will probably be made) by virtue of the existence of this archive.

                An "opt-in" scheme is obviously unworkable, because the amount of effort required
              • You are absolutely right. Here's the CRITICAL point in this whole argument:

                All Google has to do to make everybody happy is to make this an opt-in program.

                I work for an independant Australian publisher [kenduncan.com] (which is owned by the people actually writing the books). As a geek, I am completely in favour of the Google Print program's objectives. I mean, it's really an amazing idea, and I'm all for it. However, I cannot understand Google's attitude here. Google have suddenly become really arrogant. This isn't
                • Google, if you're reading this, how about just making it opt-in?

                  No respectable publisher would then opt in. Google Print would be reduced to the level of fanfiction and vanity press, and that would kill the whole idea.

                  Publishers won't opt in because they don't want any changes. They are all set already, and I can understand why they want to keep things as they are. Any electronic distribution is seen by them as danger (not without a reason, I must say.) So when a huge Internet site publishes pieces o

                • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:4, Informative)

                  by LMariachi ( 86077 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @08:09PM (#13860511) Journal
                  even webpage search engines are opt-in. Your website doesn't get indexed unless you submit it...

                  What on earth are you talking about? Any general search engine worth using is opt-out via robots.txt. Do you really think every page indexed by Google was actively submitted to them?

                  The real reason that publishers have to pursue this...is that copyright can be reneged if you are not seen to be defending your rights.

                  With the amount of IP-related discussion on Slashdot, it's amazing how often this misinformation is still expressed. It's only trademarks that may be forfeited for lack of defense. Not copyrights, not patents -- trademarks.

                  So your whole post boils down to "it's debatable." A trenchant analysis indeed.

              • There's a term that describes what Google is doing: "evil." They are screwing over the authors and publishers, and it's starting to tarnish the reputation they've worked so hard to maintain.

                Let's stop to think for a moment. Google indexing book contents is a major step forward in everyone's ability to find the right content. It does, however, affect the market:
                1) The general public can now (more) easily find content; and thus
                2) Editors' role in the publishing chain might get diminished.

                While (2)

          • Well but...am wondering if "fair use" wouldn't include everything not specificly exempted from fair use by copyright law, since the natural state of events is "copy everything", and property-like rights where granted to the psuedo-property of IP to limit said natural rights. Seems like, then, rather than a type of fair use being granted by an exemption, it could be that only exemptions to fair use are covered by copyright.

          • I thought "fair use" was never explicitly spelled out excepting a few examples such as the home audio recording act (name may be wrong), but required the application of the four factors [copyright.gov].

            So, here's my amateur opinion:

            1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

            Well, it's commercial, but they aren't selling the copyrighted work, just (presumably) advertising space.

            2. the nature of the copyrighted work;

            *shrug

            • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:4, Insightful)

              by (negative video) ( 792072 ) <me@NospaM.teco-xaco.com> on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:54PM (#13859883)
              4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
              I think this can only increase the market...?
              What Google is doing destroys the value of licensing a book to a commercial search service. For example, a publisher could give an exclusive full-text search license to Amazon, who could then use their "customers who purchased this also purchased..." to increase sales of the publisher's other titles.

              Remember, the whole point of book copyright is control. The author doesn't just get a certain number of pennies for each copy, he gets exclusivity, which is much more useful for building a self-sustaining business. We can argue whether it should be that way, but right now that's what the law says.

              And the control cuts both ways. If a publisher tries to sneak cigarette advertisements into a novel against the author's will, the copyright holder can haul them into court and get major financial damages. (This example is not theoretical. Some sleazeball publishers actually did this to, IIRC, Harlan Ellison. And then probably wished they hadn't.)

            • While I disagree with you (my analysis is here [slashdot.org]), I wanted to say that I appreciate that you're bringing actual facts to the debate. Thank you.
        • That's why I don't think we have the whole "real story" here. Great, so I can find that some place in the middle of nowhere 10,000 miles away has a copy of a book with a certain title and author that has the word "Bighorn" in it. Unless Google is going to sell me a digital copy of this or somehow let me download the contents or at least view the pages involving it, how does this help me whatsoever? Or is the idea that now I can contact the little small town historical archive that has a copy of said book an

          • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:5, Informative)

            by ornil ( 33732 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:14PM (#13859667)
            Trust me, knowing that a book exists is already very helpful, even if you can't obtain it immediately. If a book is in print, then you can buy it. If it's in the public domain you can access it immediately. If it is out of print, but not in the public domain, then you may still be able to buy it used. Even if you can't, your local public library can obtain just about any book that's been published for you. If it is something extremely rare, but you really need it, then it is still useful, because you can fly over, or contact the library by phone and explain your circumstances, or find someone with access to the library who can obtain the necessary information.

            If you don't know whether the books exists, you can do neither of those.
          • I use my university's online catalogs all the time. Most of the relevant material isn't available online without subscription, of course, and we have a limited budget. However, I can order photocopies of most journal articles (although lately many of them show up as PDFs). These come through other libraires in this state, first. Then, if not available in this state, through other public universites in the USA. Then, if that fails, it falls back on all public libraries in the USA. It does matter that y
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • This in combination with ABE will kick ass. (Score:4, Interesting)

            by douglips ( 513461 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @06:11PM (#13859966) Homepage Journal
            The ABE (http://www.abebooks.com/ [abebooks.com]) is a searchable inventory of a gazillion independent bookstores world wide.

            If Google Print tells you the book exists, you can go to ABE and find it in some bookshop in New Zealand, and order it with your credit card. I've used ABE to buy books that are out of print on several occasions.

            Now, if Google integrated their Print search with ABE, then the "buy it now" could be buying it from that rare bookseller in the middle of nowhere.

            This kicks all kinds of ass.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • YOU may trust Google but not everyone in the world shares that view.

            I don't automatically trust anyone. Because this system is only the subject of discussion and not available for use by the public, everything I have written in defense of Google has been on general principle.

            If you have some evidence of the nefarious intent of Google, then feel free to contact your local US Attorney. I'm sure that their is some enterprising future mayor who is just waiting to cut their teeth on a giant of the industry.

            They

    • Re:Publisher's Have a Bug Up Their Ass (Score:5, Insightful)

      by silentbozo ( 542534 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:49PM (#13859499) Journal
      I think that the publishers are protesting this, for the same reason the RIAA, and the MPAA are trying to stifle ways that make it easier to sell products. The reason is that they're all distribution channels, but in the age of the internet, there are easier, more cost-effective methods of distribution (ie, direct downloads, Amazon.com, etc.). More so than that, they are MARKETING MACHINES - the reason Author X, or Band Y wants to sign with Publisher Z, is that Publisher Z can front a million dollars pushing product into people's faces, and thus drum up large sales volumes... but only on NEW product.
       
      You notice that many of the new technologies (iTunes, eBooks, etc.) really mostly benefit older back-list titles. This is because there is no marketing, production, or distribution budget for these things. There are few, if no jobs in promoting these backlist titles, whereas there is a lot of money in promoting the new stuff.
       
      Things like Google Print will help promote sales of older items, and I think the fear is among the publishers, is that their ability to push new content will be drowned out, and they'll all lose their jobs. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of kickbacks, marketing contracts, air time, cushy offices, the whole idea of exclusivity - all down the toilet, because people only have so much time. If they can find what they're looking for without having the consumer Big Brother tell them what they want, then what use are these marketing organizations, especially when most of the new product they peddle is crap to begin with?

      • That may be one of their fears, that their marketing will become less valuable when people can search for themselves to find books that interest them, but I would say that would be an unreasonable fear. Consumers often enough become interested in new books because of the promotion, and not because they already cared enough about the subject matter to actively search for it. Else they'd just browse shelves (or online categories).

        The indexing, then, would be most useful to people who are actively searching

        • Re:Doesn't meet the same need (Score:4, Insightful)

          by cheezit ( 133765 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @07:12PM (#13860250) Homepage
          The parent post is making a different point. Publishers are not "sellers of books"---book distributors do that. Publishers are "marketers of books" and as such have invested large amounts of money in setting up a system for creating demand for their product.

          The modern consumer is bombarded with thousands of marketing messages a day and publishers can't afford to have the consumer's attention divided, even if it might generate a few more bucks on old titles. Think of it like Microsoft, having trouble competing against its own installed base of Win95/98/ME/2K users. The risk is that the complex network that creates a publishing "phenomenon" might start breaking down.

          Take Oprah's book club...the big publishers are actually somewhat ambivalent about it. It generates demand and the type of "phenomenon" they need in order to justify their continued existence, but they can't control what Oprah chooses. The functioning of this demand-generating system requires that these big publishers control the entire lifecycle. Hence it is highly vulnerable to disruption and they are alert to anything that might represent the first major crack in the edifice.
    • That constitutes 'fair use'

      No it isn't. Librarying is not fair use.

      But if I start making more copies and giving them away, or give my copy away, now I should be held to account

      You've already made an unauthorized copy. You've already infringed the copyright holder's statutory exclusive rights. You can already be held to account.
      • No it isn't. Librarying is not fair use.

        So every copy of every article or book I've made for research or other fair use reason should be destroyed after I've completed the task?

        I don't think you are correct on that one.
      • His point was that making a copy of copyrighted works doesn't require authorization except for specific uses. The "exclusive rights" are limited.
        • You're backwards. Making a copy of a copyrighted work is by default ILLEGAL except for a few specific LIMITATIONS on those rights. The "exclusive rights" are limited in two senses, neither of which are what you're thinking of:

          1. There's a limited number of them. For instance, you can't prevent someone from talking about your work in a review.

          2. The rights that are granted are limited by specific exceptions in the law.

          Title 17 [cornell.edu], section 106:

          Subject to sections 107 through 122, the owner of copyright under thi


          • The limitations are:
            107 - fair use
            108 - library and archives
            109 - first sale, maybe more
            110-122 - not sure just by scanning, you can read them if you'd like. From titles, none apperas to apply to books.


            Considering that this is being done by libraries for purposes of an archive, it may well fall under 108.
    • The Google Print service is cool and even useful, but the more I think about the service, the more I see some problematic points. One problematic issue is Eric Schmidths comparison of web and print, where he in an almost childish, threatening manner says something that could be translated to: "If you don't allow us to do this, we won't do the other thing either (web search)"

      The big difference between indexing the web and indexing books is the senders intention: When I publish my web pages, I make them elec
      • What Google does with Google Print, however, is to take content from a medium (books) that probably never were intended to be transmitted in this manner.

        I don't know if this is universally true. The technology did not exist when some of the print copies were made, but you can bet that publishers are jockying for position to sell their wares as ebooks.
    • This is about control. I guess I didn't notice the corporate copyright lawyer trawling the library taking photographs of the card catalog, which is an index of books in the library's holdings. Of course our library doesn't *have* a card catalog any more; it has an online search utility. Funny that didn't get mentioned in the lawsuit.

      Library catalogs (online or in print) offer searching by Title, Author, Subject (Keywords), series, etc. But they rarely perform a full text search on every item in the entire

  • rational of opposing google print? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by matt4077 ( 581118 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:38PM (#13859410) Homepage
    Aside from law issues, I don't see the business case against opposing google print. Could the net effect be anything else but higher sales due to the amount of people who will find just the right book when searching through google?

    The only reason I could see is strategy: the publishers are afraid that google print could be _so_ successful that it gains power against them, ultimately maybe even replace them and directly connect authors and publishers and providing a print-on-demand service. A situation not unlike Apple vs. The Record Companies.

    • One potential, legitimate problem is that a small vulnerability in the code could allow lots of people to download lots of complete works before the gap was closed, costing (best case) big publishing houses a bit of profit, or (worst case) small-time authors trying hard to pay the rent their rent for this month.

    • On the other hand, if you have a financial or emotional investment in the imminent domination of the planet by Google, you've got to wonder why they didn't think to preempt this controversy, either by coopting the publishing industry (the comparison to Apple is striking) or by preemptively getting their legal arguments (and lobbyists!) out.

      It's reasonable as a rookie mistake, but not for the Most Important Company On Earth.

    • Re:rational of opposing google print? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by schon ( 31600 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:54PM (#13859529)
      I don't see the business case against opposing google print. Could the net effect be anything else but higher sales due to the amount of people who will find just the right book when searching through google?

      The business case is simple:

      "It's my football."

      I've talked to a publisher about something similar, [slashdot.org] and his attitude was "I don't care if it will make me more money - if I want it indexed, I will do it myself, so I can charge for it. I don't want anyone but me making money by providing a service for my products, even if it's a service I can't or won't provide myself."

      They don't care about more money, all they care about is control.
      • Ah but a football is property. Copyright is about mere "intellecutal property" (which is a misnomer, because it isn't really property at all.) You are right that it is really about control, and in fact, it is about extending control.
        • So what you're saying is that whenever an author refers to "my book", they're mistaken. You're saying that they really should be saying "the book I wrote", because they have no real claim to the ideas that they came up with and they transcribed. Which basically means that all the effort behind this work is worth... nothing. If they have no claim to this stuff, then what right do they have to charge anyone for any of it?

          Well, I say, unless you can come up with the same ideas and transcribe them in exactly
    • The only other thing I can think of is that if entire books are indexed, it would be hard to prevent people from reading the books online in their entirety. This would mean less sales.

      The problems with this are with books that aren't available to buy. I can go down to my public library right now and read all the books I want for free. I can even take 'em home. And I won't go through the fact that I (and I assume most people) would rather read a physical book than stuff off my computer screen. Besides, how

  • Have these publishing companies (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Chickenofbristol55 ( 884806 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:38PM (#13859412) Homepage
    even used google print? You can barely see any of the book, just the "about" page in the beginning. This service is used to DISCOVER books. If millions of people can search and find the book they have been looking for, and they happen to buy it off of amazon let's say, why in hell would they sue Google. THIS WILL ONLY HELP PUBLISHING COMPANIES SELL MORE BOOKS.
    • Actually you can access much more of the book that you might realize. Run a search, and then click "More results from this book," then select a page and you can view several pages. Try a new search, view more pages. They currently have several pages left out from being viewable, but I would say you can access a substantial amount of the book.

      Given a person with enough time and a book worth copying, they could probably reconstruct almost the entire thing. If Google is so confident, they should offer a re

    • Re:Have these publishing companies (Score:5, Insightful)

      by kebes ( 861706 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:33PM (#13859784) Journal
      You're right, and probably the copyright-holders know that they stand to make more money from google print. The question is, how much and when, and for how long? I think google print, in the short term, will increase sales of books. But as others have pointed out, the danger (as far as publishers see it), is that eventually google print will be viewed as THE WAY to find/get/buy books, and eventually the publishers will become unnecessary. Authors could sign directly with google (or just upload their book to google free of charge?), and they could start selling copies immediately, without needing a publisher.

      In my opinion, cutting out middle-men in copyright-work fields (music, books, etc.) is often not a bad thing (proofreading and sound-engineering will always be needed, but will record labels and publishers?). I'm fully in favour of google print and all it represents. Google print is a good thing for authors and for readers. It is not such a great thing for (some) publishers.

      From a business point of view, the publishers might be right that this is bad. They realize they are getting screwed in the long run. Of course, the very smart publishers will realize what is happening and modernize their systems. For instance, I use scientific journals alot, and most of them have realized that by putting the journals online, they offer a much more important service than the print version ever did. They are adapting and will continue to thrive. The publishers that can't get with the program will die off... and in my opinion they should.
  • If the copyright is lost who cares. Well, Disney perhaps.

    I love these projects which OCRs old books where the copyright is no longer active. As for new books, I think it is a bad idea unless the author gave his permission.
  • I'd love to see the oldest chinese editions (or as close to as possible) of Sun Tsu's The Art of War side by side with english translations and annotations. I'm sure there are lots of other people out there who feel similarly about thousands of other publications.

    Not really going to happen till we as a society[1] get comfortable with the idea of books being available online from sites like Google.

    I'll bet the Project Gutenberg people are jealous of the resources. Go for it Google, an astoundingly huge but v
  • SOME use of books, particularly books in reference libraries, is PRECISELY to find quotable snippets.

    The old days:
    I'm making a speech and I need a nice quote.
    I remember a partial quote and look it up in a quotation-reference book and while I am in the library, look up the original source material to see if there is anything more I can use. The library paid for all the resources I am using, and while I am using that particular copy nobody else can use it. If I like the book, I buy it.

    The Google way:
    I searc

    • Re:Playing devil's advocate (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Dr. Zowie ( 109983 ) <slashdot@defores t . org> on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:00PM (#13859575)
      THE PUBLISHERS RECEIVE ZERO RENUMERATION

      At first, I thought, "Huh? Why would the publishers be renumbered at all?". Then I realized you meant to say "THE PUBLISHERS RECEIVE ZERO REMUNERATION".

      Then I thought, "Huh? they didn't receive any money under the old way either -- when I visited the library to find my quotes."

      First get your facts straight. Then you can distort them as you please. -- Mark Twain

      • Then I thought, "Huh? they didn't receive any money under the old way either -- when I visited the library to find my quotes."

        Sure they did. The library bought the book with cold hard cash.
  • This case will never make it to trial.

    I assume that you know that attourneys & the courts serve only the wealthy & connected few. They exist to keep the rest of us down. If I were writing the search engine, it would have been taken down by DMCA notices day one. Only a rich company like Google can compete against a rich company like Perfect 10.

    Trial by pocketbook, togeather with the trampling of the Bill of Rights, makes our "government" illegal. Some of us have known this for quite some time, and ha
    • The revolution is coming in the next year. It will be a pleasure to hunt down the attourneys, hiding in basements, and exterminate them.

      Since when do psychotic fantasies of violence warrant a mod-up to +2, Informative? God help us all if this loon actually shoots someone.

  • Schmidt's disingenuousness (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fuzzy12345 ( 745891 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:57PM (#13859546)
    A lot of Schmidt's points are lame. "Enhances the value of copyright holder's works" doesn't mean you can do what you like with it without permission.

    His fair use argument will be very difficult to make indeed if he's making money off it -- and that can be interpreted VERY broadly. Is his plan pure altruism, or is he using the content as a traffic magnet, for ad sales, etcetera?

    and the summary's VCR analogy? Lame. Home VCRs are personal use, which this isn't, and not for financial gain, which this is.

    Schmidt is just trying to win in the court of public opinion a battle that can't be won in the courts, and hoping publishers will go along before he gets to the litigation stage.

  • SMELL THE FEAR (Score:3, Insightful)

    by a_greer2005 ( 863926 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @04:59PM (#13859567)
    They are scared of this for the dame reason the movie studios are scared of torrents, not because everyone will pirate, but because people can know going in if a film/alblum/book is good or a total peice of shit.

    If I buy a new gadget and discover that it fails to meet my needs or expectations, I can return it, not so with books movies or music, If I cant return something, then you better beleave that I am going to be damn sure that I know what I am getting when I purtchase it.

  • Google print, Amazon book search, this lawsuit and others are just small steps in the evolution of copyright into something else. I don't think we can anticipate what that will be, any more than our ancestors anticipated a day when making and distributing copies of information would be as easy as talking. In the time it's taken me to type this message I could have sent the lifetime works of Benjamin Franklin to someone on the other side of the world. Not just his published writings, but every single word he ever wrote down. It's ludicrous to think that our ancestors would have formulated copyright in the same way if they had known what we know, or that copyright shouldn't evolve like everything else.

  • Is Indexing the Root Password to Infringement? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by samuel4242 ( 630369 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:09PM (#13859630)
    Here's a fairly funny satire about Google Print:

    http://www.vortex.com/reality/2005-10-23 [vortex.com]

    It argues that you can copy anything you want-- as long as you promise to index it and put the index on the web. Then you can keep the text around and do what you will. If anyone gives you a hard time, come up with some inane opt-out policy with a real nasty bureaucracy and blame them for being uncool.

    I hate to say it, but this satire convinced me that Google is pretty sleezy. The creators are getting nothing and a bunch of guys who happen to build a few automated indexers are multibillionaires. I'm happy to reward innovation, but this is nutty.
    • Okay, that satire is quite interesting. But let's be careful. Hopefully the law is not quite that blind. Google's database is used for searching and indexing. Now, if google employees start reading those books, then basically google is breaking the rules: they are allowing full copies to be distributed to some people. But if google only allows snippets to be available to the public, and internally there is no abuse, then this is fair.

      In the satire, the guy who makes copies, what does he do with them? If he
  • The only way this comment has something to do with the story is it's copyright related. I guess it could be interesting.

    Anyways, I run a karaoke show a few nights a week. For those that aren't familiar with karaoke, most of it is produced in a format called CDG. It's exactly the same as a regular audio CD, but the subcode section that is normally set aside for seeking and disk position has a few extra bits crammed onto it for the graphic display.

    Fair use is there for audio CD's. We're allowed to copy th
    • I am not a lawyer, but I am an informed Canadian journalist who has closely followed the issue of copyright and sharing in the US and Canada over the last ten years as part of my beat.

      The situation you describe above is perfectly legal under the Canadian system.

      That may not be relevant, but it is an interesting counterpoint perspective.

  • This editorial is exactly right (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:11PM (#13859645)
    I certainly think that the world would be a better place if Google won its suit against the publishers, for exactly the reasons stated in the editorial. Will they? It's hard to say. We have judges with extremely political agendas, who do not often enough explicitly set out to do good rather than just doing the bidding of the politician who appointed them.

    So suppose it's a close call, because there is no precedent in copyright law that exactly anticipates this sort of search capacity. One option for a judge would be to try to bend some precedent to fit the case, but I think that would be wrong to do here. You see, nobody thinks that copyright law is supposed to mirror anything like moral law. This isn't like murder or perjury. Copyright laws exist only for the purpose of their good consequences. We allow people to own copyrights and patents only to encourage them to produce good stuff by making sure they will be financially rewarded for that stuff. The good consequence of this system is (supposed to be) that it provides us with more good stuff. That is its only justification.

    Because of this, I think decisions about copyright should not take the original laws as sacred, on the level of moral laws, and instead maintain the pragmatic spirit of the original laws themselves. When we're unsure about precedents, we should ask: Which ruling would have the better consequences? And I think it's clear for reasons outlined by Schmidt that allowing Google to go on will have better consequences for researchers (obviously), but also for publishers, because it's free advertising. This will disproportionately benefit small, specialty presses who don't have the means to get the word out about what's in their books. This should be reason enough to allow Google to continue.

    Of course, they might turn evil at some later time, or (gasp) unveil a revenue model to make back all the money they spent on scanning. But this is the sort of this that companies should be encouraged to do for money. They really are improving the lives of people through their work, without taking anything away.

    • You apparently have a false view of the role of judges in our legal system is.

      Judges are to apply the law as written in light of the precedents whose purpose has been to clarify ambiguous areas in the law, not just make up rulings to fit whatever they think is "good" and find something to justify it after the fact.

      If you disagree with how the law applies to a specific set of circumstances (like this case), then that's what legislators represent you for, to accomplish changing the law or making a new law tha
      • I'm saying that there are two different sorts of laws, so two different ways in which precedent ought to be treated. The distinction is between 1. Moral laws designed to bring about rightness or justice, and 2. Pragmatic laws, explicitly designed to bring about good social consequences.

        And what I object to is treating laws of the latter kind as though they were like the former.

        It's absolutely clear that copyright laws are of the latter sort, written explicitly and only to generate consequences that bene

  • Isn't the whole point of letting people find and discover books is for them to be able to buy what they find useful? (book piracy crowd apart, most people still *buy* real books from publishing houses.)

    Business-wise, this will help publishing houses ultimately. They are going to lose some hypothetical control over who gets to see their books' indexes, and who all get to know what is inside a book without flipping it over a book store. But then, how does that matter if books still sell, and probably sell mor

  • Piracy vs. Obscurity (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brett Johnson ( 649584 ) on Sunday October 23, 2005 @05:21PM (#13859715)
    Tim O'Reilly made an excellent point in support of Google Print when he
    pointed out that the biggest threat to authors is not piracy, but obscurity. [oreilly.com]
  • Google are making entire copies of books for their own use and profit. That's illegal (at least in the UK where there's a limit on the percentage of a work you can copy for personal use) and immoral.

    The idea that a company can just stand up and say "We're going to break the law as we feel like it and authors that object must write to us and say so. If we don't hear from you we'll assume we have permission to steal your work. Thanks." is insane.

    What the hell is wrong with people that they think it's okay

  • Eric's comments in the op-ed are insightful, but he appears to have missed the point of the lawsuit.

    Lawsuits like the ones facing Google aren't intended to win on their merit. They are designed as bargaining tools. They create fear, uncertainty and doubt. And in the unlikely case that they actually end up going all the way to a verdict (which, through some miracle, might go the way of the plantifs), there are always rounds of appeals.

    The US needs tort reform immediately, to put an end to the abuse of our
  • The first lawsuit filed against Google's plan to scan books is by The Authors Guild and three authors who are described by their press release (http://www.authorsguild.org/news/sues_google_cit i ng.htm [authorsguild.org]) as follows:

    "Herbert Mitgang, a former New York Times editorial writer and the author of numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including "The Fiery Trial: A Life of Lincoln," published by Viking Press; Betty Miles, the award-winning author of many works for children and young adults, and the co-author of "

  • These arguments doesn't hold (Score:3, Interesting)

    by erik_norgaard ( 692400 ) on Monday October 24, 2005 @04:30AM (#13862184) Homepage
    As much as I support the idea of indexing all books, these two arguments claimed by Eric Smith just don't hold. The problem is that there are good reasons that "fair use" differs depending on how you initially made the information available:

    1. It is ok to record an entire tv program for personal use - it was broad cast to the public. However, it is not acceptable to broad cast the recorded program again, this is not for personal use.

    2. While webpages are not broad cast as a tv programs they are published to be freely accessible. The web builds on linking accross pages and sites from the very birth, so it is reasonable to argue that you should have known before hand.

    However, one thing is linking another is copying entire sites or pages. To provide the context in which a keyword appears in a given page, google must actually have the entire page stored. That may not constitute fair use - in particular because the copying is not for personal use but for commercial use.

    For books, these are not made freely available anywhere in any form. Copying entire books for any use - even if only an extract is shown to the user - does not constitute fair use. In fact, at least in Europe, it is not considered fair use to borrow and copy a book for personal use, just as you are not allowed to copy a music cd. It is only within fair use if you restrict to copying a limited extract of the book.

    Giving opt-out for tampering with others rights is never acceptable - as much as we dislike sites that require you to opt-out of their commercial e-mails - google should not require authors to opt-out. They should opt-in.

    Now Googles strong arguments are the benefit for the general public, in particular for the advancement of science and education, and in particular in 3rd world countries where access to litterature is limited and expensive. And the fact that by making litterature findable, otherwise lost works that constitutes part of our cultural heritage would remain lost.

    If Google can argue for the benefit of the general public at the minimal cost of the copyright holders, then Google may be able to make it through.

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