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Google Businesses The Internet Government The Courts News

Google To Resume Scanning Books 257

Posted by Zonk from the love-of-the-digital-printed-word dept.
SenseOfHumor writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google will resume scanning copyrighted books from Stanford and Univ of Michigan libraries. Let the battle resume!" From the article: "It isn't known just what percentage of library holdings fall into the category of being in copyright but out of print. About 18% of the books held by the libraries working with Google were printed prior to 1923 and are therefore in the public domain, according to an analysis by the Online Computer Library Center, a Dublin, Ohio, nonprofit library cooperative. An unknown percentage of the rest still are protected by copyright, depending on whether it was renewed. Google's resumption of its scanning of copyrighted works comes amid heated debate in the library community over participation in the program."
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Google To Resume Scanning Books More

Google To Resume Scanning Books

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  • How exactly are they doing this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DroopyStonx ( 683090 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:12PM (#13925971)
    Is there some machine they have that separates all the pages and scans each one?

    How do they verify that the items being scanned are being scanned properly?

  • Out of print - fair game (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tim Ward ( 514198 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:12PM (#13925976) Homepage
    I'm not usually one to support the knee-jerk slashweenie response, that all intellectual property is theft, but I do object to commercial enterprises refusing to sell me something and insisting that I can't copy it.

    It might be their intellectual property but it's my culture, dammit. If they won't keep it in print and sell me a copy, which I'm willing to pay for, then they should keep their mouths shut when I go and find one for myself.

    Anybody got a DVD of Dance of the Vampires they can let me copy then?
    • Nope, but I DO have a full-copy of a book that is out of print for 10 years, only 25 years old in IT. It's one of the few books in IT where age doesn't matter, but which doesn't sell well but is still very useful. So, you can only buy second-hand books at a greatly increased rate (original book between 30 and 50 dollars, second hand cheapest is 150 dollars).

      F*** that, I'll copy.
    • Yeah, that's one of those cases where the legality is clear, but the ethics are debatable. You're certainly not damaging their ability to "leverage their assets" since they aren't doing anything to leverage them, and if they'd just sell you a copy, you'd be quite happy to buy it. (Of course, this argument would fall apart laughably with physical goods.)

      The saddedst stories are the ones about silent-era films left practically rotting in the studio vaults. If the studio doesn't think they'll get any money
      • You're certainly not damaging their ability to "leverage their assets" since they aren't doing anything to leverage them,

        However, they could start selling it at any point in the future - at which point the pre-existing unauthorized copies would potentially interefere with their making a profit, thus that factor would not help him in making a fair-use defense.
        • However, they could start selling it at any point in the future - at which point the pre-existing unauthorized copies would potentially interefere with their making a profit

          Yep. I, personally, would in most cases buy the official copy even if I had a bootleg. But how many people would do so, and how often? And what happens when the bootlegs start to rival the official copies in quality?

          It's the anime fansub debate, generalized.
      • You're certainly not damaging their ability to "leverage their assets" since they aren't doing anything to leverage them, and if they'd just sell you a copy, you'd be quite happy to buy it.

        Disney does this or rather did do this with it's movies, they would go on moratorium for a while and you couldn't buy it. Snow White, sleeping beauty etc. I only know this from my experience with working at a video rental store, If someone left the tape in the back of their car in sunny Fl it would get all melted/warped a
        • I was distinguishing physical products from intellectual products -- i.e. the books vs. the contents of the book.

          It's laughable to say "You won't sell me your first edition Catcher in the Rye, so I'm going to take it." That's out-and-out theft. It would be if the book in question were in the public domain.

          It's a bit different to say "You won't sell me a copy of this book, so I'm going to make my own copy." That's where the copyright infringement as theft metaphor breaks down -- he still has his copy of t
    • I do object to commercial enterprises refusing to sell me something and insisting that I can't copy it.
      It might be their intellectual property but it's my culture, dammit.

      Ah, but the owners of the Disney Vault disagree... and it so happens that they also own some key lawmakers.
      They like creating artificial scarcity in order to raise the asking price. It pleases them. The law of supply and demand is a lot of fun when you controll the supply.

    • People always forget (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:46PM (#13926298) Homepage
      It might be their intellectual property but it's my culture, dammit. If they won't keep it in print and sell me a copy, which I'm willing to pay for, then they should keep their mouths shut when I go and find one for myself.

      What I find funniest about the entire copyright debate is how so few people are actually aware of what a flimsy basis copyright rests on.
      The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries -- The U.S. Constitution
      Intellectual property rights are not property, nor rights. They're grants (a decidedly un-libertarian form of state monopoly), given by the government, with the explicit intent of promoting the public good. Copyright holders are created for the good of society, not the other way around. The way I see it, once copyright starts being used to limit the creation and propagation of information and culture rather than encourage it, copyright might as well just not exist
    • I agree. Copyright law should be modified so that a copyright expires if a work goes out of print (defined as being unavailable from the copyright holder) for more than 5 years.
    • Ever heard of the "Disney Vault" as they call it?

      They remove their movies from the market for 10 years in order to create artificial demand.

    • Re:Out of print - fair game (Score:5, Funny)

      by Mechanik ( 104328 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:57PM (#13926406) Homepage
      Anybody got a DVD of Dance of the Vampires they can let me copy then?

      Actually, since according to IMDB [imdb.com] this movie is just the Fearless Vampire Hunters by another name, you are in luck as it was recently released to DVD [amazon.ca]

      Mechanik
    • I'm not usually one to support the knee-jerk slashweenie response, that all intellectual property is theft, but I do object to commercial enterprises refusing to sell me something and insisting that I can't copy it.

      It might be their intellectual property but it's my culture, dammit.

      I think I've figured out to how win the intellectual property wars... recast the battle as a culture war and you've got the support of knee-jerk conservative bush-apologists everywhere! ;)
    • I support this 100%. By bribing politicians to extend the copyright period, the global media corporations have stolen the public domain. For that reason, they have forfeited any claim to any intellectual property that they believe that 'own'.

      Suppose that you have bought a car and are making regular monthly payments on it. After five years you have one more payment to make and the ownership of the car is completely yours. The finance company bribes a politician, who puts a rider int
    • Oh how I do concur! There are far too many books, movies, and audio recordings languishing in cultural limbo for just that reason, and the governments of the world are greatly remiss in not creating a copyright exemption for out-of-print items that were never intended to have specifically limited runs. It is of course worst for movies, hundreds if not thousands of which are being lost forever because the original prints expire before the copyrights.
    • I think your comment is absolute nonsense. Well, at least for most publications.

      You should NOT be able to obtain material for the purposes of personal entertainment that is out of print but nevertheless covered by copyright. Why? because there is a compelling public interest to encourage the creation of novel works. To put things into persepctive: EA (I thin) made LHX attack chopper, a PC game that is virtually impossible to find these days. It can still theoretically provide entertainment, however,

    • It is simply greed. Limiting culture through copyright is the same thing to a society as putting a copyright on the use of the letter "E" would be to language. Language is how individuals communicate with each other. Culture (inclusive of music, literature, etc.) is how a society communicates with itself about its values, aspirations, and innovations. If you freeze culture in the straitjacket of copyright, then you necessarily freeze the ability of a society to dream, improve, and innovate.

      There is a re

  • I can not wait (Score:5, Insightful)

    by w.p.richardson ( 218394 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:13PM (#13925985) Homepage
    until this is available! I can't count the number of times that I have been flipping thru a book and wished I could use the search function, only to realize that it doesn't work in meatspace. Searching is up to me, using old fashioned tools, like the table of contents or the index!

    • Index! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Karma_fucker_sucker ( 898393 )
      There are actually books that do not have an index. And boy is it a pain in the ass! I can understand why. From what I've heard from authors, indexing a book is the most boring and tedious thing to do.
      • That's a bunch of horseshit. You just read it, select text, and flag it as being part of the index. The software does the rest. If this is one of the most annoying things to do, then clearly the book is not worth a squashed shit, because writing it should be about a million times harder.
        • Remember that lots of the books Google is attempting to index are old books from before computers made indexing a lot easier. I've seen how indexing is done without a computer, and it made me wonder why anyone would choose to do such a thing.
    • I can't count the number of times that I have been flipping thru a book and wished I could use the search function...

      Yes... and you'd think this'll prove so attractive that any copyright-holder will be loath to forego it. And you'd then think that some sort of legal/other rights-management will quickly emerge that does allow such functions, but that still makes it at least damned inconvenient to read/copy an entire text.

  • Good. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothic_Walrus ( 692125 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:14PM (#13925996) Journal
    Books are fragile. They need to be preserved somehow.

    Would Google be allowed to store scanned copies of books even if the authors opt out? Someday, those print copies are going to be destroyed or deteriorate to the point of uselessness, which means that Google could be archiving works that might otherwise be lost forever.

    I still don't get the uproar over the scanning, because it's not like the entire book is made available for free. The search is so crippled that it makes me think the people who are upset have never used it before.

    • Re:Good. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by daniil ( 775990 )

      Books are fragile. They need to be preserved somehow /.../ which means that Google could be archiving works that might otherwise be lost forever.

      Nonsense. Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap. Drop a book, and nothing bad happens to it (unless you drop it into water). Drop a hard drive, and it's dead. All in all, it is more likely that digitally stored information will be lost forever than a book.

      • Nonsense. Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap. Drop a book, and nothing bad happens to it (unless you drop it into water). Drop a hard drive, and it's dead. All in all, it is more likely that digitally stored information will be lost forever than a book.

        Nonsense.

        Digital information is far less fragile.

        A distorted one or zero, as long as it can still be recognized as a one or a zero, can be reproduced as a perfectly formed new one or zero onto a new media.

        Just how many copies

        • Re:Good. (Score:3, Informative)

          by Kelson ( 129150 ) *
          The big advantage of paper is that all you need to view it are your eyes. (Or your fingers, if it's written in Braille.)

          On the other hand, anyone who has visited the US National Archives [archives.gov] can see the efforts needed to preserve the original US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. We have zillions of copies, but the originals are kept in sealed vaults with limited lighting. Exposure to air damages the paper. Exposure to light fades the ink. They've struck a careful balance to make sure that people
        • I guess we'll just have to wait and see then :7
        • a distrorted a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y , z, space or punctionation mark provided it can still be recognised correctly can be reproduced as a perfectly formed new a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y, z, space or punctionation mark

          the big difference is we can read the ones and zeros on a hard drive with an error rate that can be considered to be effectively zero (partly due to error correction systems built into the drive) whereas we cannot recognise the letters in a book

      • Re:Good. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MindStalker ( 22827 )
        Yes, and no. Digital information while easily lost can be copied indefinatly. Joe shmo making a scanned copy of a book is more likly to lose their data before that book is destroyed. But we are talking about a consistantly archieved raided to the max system of storage. Googles storage of the huge amount of material from website caches to searching index is googles product. There is litterly billions of dollars invested in Googles data. If they wern't being discustingly obnoxious in their backup system, thei
      • That's what colocated mirrors, revision tracking, RAIDs, tape backups, remote online backups, and backups of backups are for.

        It's not easy to backup a printed book.
      • Nonsense. Books are far less fragile than any of this digital crap. Drop a book, and nothing bad happens to it (unless you drop it into water). Drop a hard drive, and it's dead. All in all, it is more likely that digitally stored information will be lost forever than a book.

        In a dry environment, both paper and stone carvings have been known to last over 6000 years.
        But for all the documents we have found that are this old, in many cases there is only one copy
        and with words or the ends missing.

        Having a digita
      • Which one takes longer to duplicate the information from?

      • Re:Good. (Score:2, Informative)

        by oliverthered ( 187439 )
        You know nothing about paper do you?

        Most modern books will be printed on acidic wood pulp paper (as apposed to acid free hemp, cloth (cotton based paper) or more expensive acid free wood pulp). Over a period of time the acid will erode the paper until between 20-60 years later all your left with is crumbs.

        Modern print is crippled by paper tech that means you'll never have a copy survive until it's out of copyright, just like modern digital is crippled by DRM and can never be released into the public domain

      • I agree. It's realy cool to have the latest technology, but everything depends on the ability to read it. But what the hell, technology is so cooool.
    • Huh?

      Have you ever thought about how much more effort it takes to destroy a book in comparison to the effort it takes to destroy its digital copy?

      It's the same thing with all digital data: in a few centuries this era will be called the dark ages of information - most of the historical data (text, images, sound) will be lost because it was stored on media that just couldn't hack it. People are just too eager to store precious data in a digital form just because it is convenient.

    • I'm in favor of Google's work, here, but this argument is just plain ridiculous.

      We have pieces of paper whose age can be best measured in millenia. Do you honestly think that Google's hard drives will be readable in AD 3005?

      The information is more copyable once digitized, which makes it potentially durable, as long as someone is interested enough to keep copying it. But that's a far cry from the real durability afforded by books.
      • long as someone is interested enough to keep copying it

        That's true today, because it takes a special effort to preserve digital data. However, we seem to be heading for a world where all digital data is stored in multiple archives unless a special effort is made *not* to preserve it, as it's cheaper to keep all archived data on disk forever than to figure out what's safe to delete.

        The real threat is encryption. Once archived data becomes encrypted by default, poor key management could doom most data, desp
    • That's the interesting thing.

      Many (most?) authors are supporting Google in this.

      The resistance comes from the publishers, who either feel that they have to prevent a precedent, or are being pressured by other entites with a vested interest in "protection copyrights".

      Once a work is in digital form, it may not only be copied perfectly, but it may also be easily modified. It's easy for us to stand back and say there is vastly more benefit than downside. They won't see our side for a long time

  • Funny how things change... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by conJunk ( 779958 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:15PM (#13926006)

    A lot of folks are going mental about the "copyright implictions" of google books, and I'm just laughing. On my bookshelf is a first-edition colleciton of George Bernard Shaw plays, printed in the UK in 1911. There's a legend on the inside cover that is a reference to the U.S.'s lack of copyright laws at the time: (paraphrasing from memory:)

    Please note that unauthorized editions of the book are available in the United States, and that neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for them.
    • I've got an old enough copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy that the intro -- and the back cover -- commented on the existence of unauthorized (re: no royalties to Tolkien or even his publisher) copies printed in the US, finishing with something like "Those who believe in courtesy, at least, to living authors will buy this edition and no other." This would have been late 1960s or early 1970s. (I've also got a newer set as a reading copy, since the older books are starting to fall apart.)
    • US Copyright Law has existed since July 1790. Back then it was for only 14 years, not the current, overreaching 70 years after the author dies.

      The difference back then was neither the US or the UK recognized each other's copyright laws back then.

  • Hmm. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daniil ( 775990 ) <evilbj8rn@hotmail.com> on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:17PM (#13926022) Journal

    FTA: "I feel that this is a potential disaster on several levels," said Michael Gorman, president of the American Library Association and university librarian at California State University, Fresno. "They are reducing scholarly texts to paragraphs. The point of a scholarly text is they are written to be read sequentially from beginning to end, making an argument and engaging you in dialogue."

    The sad thing is, scholarly texts are so abundant nowadays that it's neigh impossible to keep oneself current with all the new things published. Already there are magazines that only (or mostly) contain abstracts or reviews of new dissertations and articles. I fail to see how Google Print is a greater disaster than this. If anything, it'll only improve the situation.

    • Re:Hmm. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by joelpt ( 21056 )
      Well, this librarian just doesn't get it. He thinks that by making the texts searchable, that readers will consequently read just the 1-2 sentence snippets and that will be the end of it.

      In reality, readers will actually just locate the texts pertaining to their search, and then read those texts in their entirety outside of the search results page -- inasmuch as they choose to. Presumably, scholarly readers would choose to read the entire texts more often than others.

      Following his reasoning, we would all ha
      • Come to think of it, he does have a point, though. Making books electronically searchable does take them out of context. The reader will read the snippets, find the book he needs, order it, read it -- and that'll be it. He'll only read what he wanted to read, but quite often, the most interesting things are the ones we never intened to read. This is why I like libraries (and bookstores): quite often, I'll go looking for a specific book, but end up picking something completely different off the shelf, leadin

  • Did I miss something? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Descalzo ( 898339 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:17PM (#13926024) Journal
    Assuming Google won't make these scanned copies available to everyone to just read on their Palm Pilot, what is the big deal? I would think that it would be to the copyright owner's benefit to have their text in a database to be searched. If Google has my book in its database, and someone searches for text that happens to be included in my book, doesn't that make it more likely someone will buy it?

    Seriously, though, I feel like I'm missing something here. What is it?

    • It's all about control - the publishers don't like the fact that Google didn't grovel at their feet and offer to pay for the priviledge of exercising its fair use rights.
    • IANAL but AFAIK, the technical (non-political) part of it is about legal copyright issues. Google isn't allowed to internally copy any book onto many different computers.

      For example, let's take the company I work at. If we have 5 different employees that want an O'Reilly book, the company is required to purchase 5 different copies of the book. If my company were to buy one book, scan it, and put the digital data on 5 computers, that would be blatant copyright infringement.

      • If my company were to buy one book, scan it, and put the digital data on 5 computers, that would be blatant copyright infringement.

        Maybe, maybe not. It might very well be fair use, though not useful to your company.

        Ask yourself the following questions:

        1. Does copying the scanned text onto several computers benefit you? (Ignore anything other than the act of copying the book.)

        2. Does it harm the copyright holder?

        3. Is it educational?

        4. Are you copying the whole book, or part of it?

        The answers a

        • Read up on the my.mp3.com case comparisons here [slashdot.org]. I really think they're similar. Especially in the judge's ruling, when they talk about the number of CD's copied onto their computers, not the number of copies that were sent out to users.

          There are a couple of differences between television programs. 1) timeshifting usually does not involve creating a new copy. 2) creating a new copy of a show and giving it to a friend is sometimes considered to be within fair use. However, US fair use law [wikipedia.org] calls out f

    • What you missed (Score:4, Interesting)

      by reptilicus ( 605251 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @04:04PM (#13926476)
      What you missed here is that Google intends to make a lot of money from selling ads on the pages where the search results are shown. The publishers see this as someone else taking their intellectual property and using it to make a profit, without asking their permission, and more importantly, without offering them a share of the profits. This is not about fears of people downloading books or not buying the books because they can get a 3 sentence answer from Google (anyone whose question can be answered in 3 sentences wasn't going to buy the book anyway). It's clear that even the publishers involved in the lawsuits realize that this service would result in higher booksales.

      It's a question of how far fair use rights extend. Fair use does not prohibit you from making a profit from exercising your rights (the NY Times Review of Books can excerpt content in a review and profit from selling ads on that page). The publishers argue that Google's use of their material goes beyond fair use, particularly because they're copying the entire work and not just an excerpt.

      It will be up to a court to weigh the many factors involved and come up with a ruling. The obvious question is, if Google loses the lawsuits, what then happens to web search engines that spider and cache copyrighted text without the author's explicit permission? Will they be held to the same standard, and will plain old Google, Yahoo!, MSN Search and their ilk become "opt in" only search engines?
      • It's about greed. Manical, frothing at the mouth greed. Or, as I like to call it: "Corporate America".

        A lot of authors think this is a brilliant idea. Wil Wheaton loves the idea. Search for "holy shit" and you'll see why. :)

  • Intellectual Property Taxes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Safe Sex Goddess ( 910415 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:18PM (#13926032) Homepage Journal
    There is nothing new created in the world that is not built upon the foundations of human history. What is created today in science, technology, and the arts, is built on the foundations of those who created before them.

    As a recognition of this debt to society, intellectual property that is not in the public domain should be taxed. Just as our other physical property is taxed, why not intellectual property?

    And the taxes can be used to invest in new science, technology, and the arts.

    This has the added benefit of also moving a bunch of stuff into the public domain.

    If the taxes aren't paid within two years, then the item moves into the public domain. If you aren't sure on the status of an item, see if it has had IP taxes paid in the last two years. If not, then it's free!

    • Or you know, maybe we could actually implement copyright law as it was once meant, and have copyrights actually expire after a [relatively] short time. Personally though I prefer a model with a logarithmic scale for royalty payments that lets you maintain copyright status for as long as you want provided you're willing to spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on it eventually. For instance, a fee might start at a dollar, be assessed every so many months, and double each time it's charged. If you assesse
    • You're actually proposing to tax thought? To have a government say that they are entitled to a piece of something that I have written? Wrong level... Tax the book that is sold, the CD, the file... The way we're doing it now is just fine. I don't want anyone saying that since I didn't pay taxes on time for a text I wrote that it immediatly becomes communal property.

      This idea is wrong on so many levels that I can't begin to express how bad it really is... Just the thought of government agency charged with the
    • Bzzzt! Too late, ship's already sailed. Companies are taxed all over the world every day on the value of their assets, including intellectual property. See, e.g., http://www.cap-press.com/books/1246 [cap-press.com].

  • Book Tablets (Score:4, Insightful)

    by GoodOmens ( 904827 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:20PM (#13926049) Homepage
    This will make those book tablets that never really sold a neat idea.

    1.Connect to google.

    2.Download a rare book only found in a handfull of libraries.

    3.Go read it....

  • 1923 - 1990: the gap years (Score:4, Insightful)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:23PM (#13926080)
    The move to digitize out-of-copyright works combined with the natural movement of new materials to web creates a kind of internet information gap. Many things appearing after 1990 or so are now on the net in some form or other. And things that occurred before 1923 are in material now lapsed from copyright and will be on the net courtesy of Google. Things in between are too old to be on the net directly and too new to be out of copyright.

    In 75 years, give or take, the gap will close for oldest years on. But for a while the internet will not have as much on a wide array content on pre-digital topics.

  • It's a shame... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by coupland ( 160334 ) * <dchase@ho[ ]il.com ['tma' in gap]> on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:24PM (#13926087) Journal
    It's a shame to see many libraries taking such a regressive approach to this. I happen to think libraries and access to information are the cornerstone of a free society -- they level the playing field and provide education and knowledge to people who otherwise couldn't afford it. However as a result of the digital age, our current standard of living and draconian copyright laws, the importance of libraries has diminished of late, as people turn to the web for information, buy their books at Barnes & Noble instead of borrowing them, or are merely incapable of borrowing copyrighted material because of digital or legal barriers created by content owners. What Google is doing here is progressive and in the spirit of free access to information. They're not giving away books, here. They're merely adding the ability to search for and view specific pieces of information. If anything this will only increase demand for the books they're scanning. And on top of that, it will provide access to information for a new generation who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Really now, I thought most librarians were more hip and with-it than this...
    • Plagarism becomes a lot harder when wide searches can be done, in addition to other benefits of scanned books.

      Ultimately, a "whole earth" attitude toward information and learning is going to shift increasingly away from paper, so it is a matter of time before it is going to be more efficient for libraries to hold server banks in "the stacks", than actual paper copies, of which they can only have a very very limited small % of the works out there.

      Time to get in with the new era, and actually, these recalcitr
    • Complaints from the copyright holders are understandable. If they could find an effective way to charge you each time you read a book you'd already bought or prevent people from selling used books, they would.

      My guess on the librarian complaint has to do with research. Someone commented here the other day that "Researchers" have become "Googlers". In some cases this might be true. It also means that someone sitting in their living room using Google ( or other search engine ) and the 'Net can gain access t

  • I love the fact (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gregbains ( 890793 ) <greg_bains.hotmail@com> on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:26PM (#13926102) Homepage Journal
    Its great that a lot of the people opting out think this will save them, when all you need to do is visit local library and get entire book to read for free. Surely this is worse?

  • Correction (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dq5 studios ( 682179 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:31PM (#13926147) Homepage
    Google's resumption of its scanning of copyrighted works comes amid heated debate in the library community over participation in the program."
    It's my understanding that the library community and most authors support this. It's the publishing industry that's having a hissy fit.

  • Lessig's Tough Call (Score:5, Interesting)

    by loggia ( 309962 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:32PM (#13926156)
    My colleague Jamie wrote the following letter to Wired yesterday regarding Lawrence Lessig's column [wired.com] supporting Google Print.

    I think she makes some compelling points about the problems with Google's plan...

    -------------

    Lessig's Tough Call

    In defending Google Print ("Google's Tough Call," issue 13.11), Lawrence Lessig and others overlook one thing. If the publishers and authors have no rights to prevent this, what rights does Google have to protect its own extensive efforts in creating this database? By their own arguments, the answer must be: none. Google does not own the raw data. In almost talking point fashion, Google, Lessig and others describe this as nothing more than a "card catalog." This description could come back to haunt Google, as the only thing they own is their original presentation of the data itself. And the image of a card catalog does not bring to mind "originality."

    If the Google DRM is broken and I create my own "Jamie Print" index on the web... without Google's ads... what basis would Google have to argue? Google can scan a million books and by Lessig's arguments, that investment is irrelevant. If I find a way to download those million books from Google, store the data and use my own search engine, Google's supposed benevolence in creating this project will be hard to swallow amidst a flurry of lawsuits against my superior ad-free index. Google would have little basis to sue except under the DMCA, a statute whose very existence is vilified by Lessig and the very people defending Google Print as progress (and I don't care for it either).

    If Google's investment in the project cannot be protected, they may have little incentive to create this and other projects. Isn't this much the same for the publishers and authors seeking protection for the right to control their work? Lessig defends Google Print in the name of progress, but progress is a careful balance of reward and public benefit. Google might not create Google Print if it cannot profit from the ads it inserts and publishers may lose out if they cannot choose how to profit from their properties.

    It is almost inevitable that Google Print will be subverted and Google will seek the very same protections that it claims the publishers should not have.

    Jamie Cole
    New York, NY
    • If Google's investment in the project cannot be protected, they may have little incentive to create this and other projects.

      I doubt if this matters much to Google. This is closer to a philanthropic project than a money making endeavor for Google. The only thing Google really gets out of it is a boost to its public profile and its image at the portal to all things searchable. Neither would be diminished by somebody producing a competitive database. Indeed, Google is so well entrenched that people would prob

    • It is almost inevitable that Google Print will be subverted and Google will seek the very same protections that it claims the publishers should not have.

      While Google's investment in scanning is certainly worthwhile, it is by no means the only one of its kind and some of the others are freely available. Take a look at the EU's project to do the same with the libraries of Europe. No, the real advantage Google has and has always had over its competitors is not content, but the ability to rapidly, and cheap

    • Re:Lessig's Tough Call (Score:4, Insightful)

      by judmarc ( 649183 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @04:05PM (#13926481)
      Why would Google care? You can make "Jamie Web Search" right now and Google has no right to stop you. Go ahead, index the Web. MS and Yahoo have, and Google isn't suing them. It isn't the *data* that's the secret sauce, it's the *search algorithm(s)*. The very same is true of Google Print.
    • There is a Project Gutenberg that has FREE copies of certain books in e-book format. They PROCEEDED Google, so in this case Google copied others so they must feel there is something unique about thier methods. Henry Ford invented the low cost automobile, and a lot of others copied his idea and entered competition with him, yet he survived just fine. It's not always about the idea, or the product, it's about something else that is unique about HOW the concept is implemented. If someone copies Google's idea a

  • spread information (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dingDaShan ( 818817 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:35PM (#13926193)
    I currently attend the University of Michigan, and have encountered much frustration in tracking down books. The university has several libraries and finding some books is nearly impossible. Additionally, the University has old collections and manuscripts that are barely indexed in the University's system. For the purposes of research, scanning the books is a dream come true. Searching for keywords, the ability to quickly find books, and the ability to view old manuscripts that one would normally need to be present at the library (and under supervision) to view. The copyright issue is important, but the books that are in public domain (primary sources especially) should definitely be scanned. As for the copyrighted books themselves, Google does not allow the full book to be viewed. If anything, Google advertises for these books. For a student such as myself, I would not buy the book as it is, so what is the harm?

  • Increase your Google Page Rank! (Score:3, Funny)

    by mOdQuArK! ( 87332 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:40PM (#13926238)
    You've got to wonder if there will be books published where the contents are designed to increase the book's Google Page Rank.

  • Google[black]mail (Score:3, Insightful)

    by matt me ( 850665 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:42PM (#13926265)
    Though I personally believe what Google are doing is not ethically/morally wrong, they are most probably 'breaking' our unjust (injust?) copyright laws. The only reason they are 'getting away' with it is because they are the most powerful domain on the net. No-one dares mess with Google.

    A law suit against Google is very bad publicity, and they could subtly drop your page rank and you'd never notice until the visitors stopped coming.. or even remove you completely.

    • Re:Google[black]mail (Score:4, Informative)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:51PM (#13926346)

      hough I personally believe what Google are doing is not ethically/morally wrong, they are most probably 'breaking' our unjust (injust?) copyright laws.

      My research into the subject suggests the opposite. Although the laws are somewhat vague, Google appears to meet all four criteria for fair use and every single district has filed supporting briefs supporting a case with significant precedent, except the district in which the case against google has been filed. I suspect this is because the lawyers involved know they will be unlikely to prevail in the end, but are hoping to win the initial case and force the issue to the supreme court, possibly with an injunction in place. This is because they hope to delay and possible temporarily stop Google's actions while they try to get laws pushed through the courts to make what Google is doing illegal.

      The only reason they are 'getting away' with it is because they are the most powerful domain on the net. No-one dares mess with Google.

      I think you are overstating Google's influence by a lot. First, the people suing Google don't care if they are findable by Google as they are not a consumer facing body. Second, they are a bunch of middle men, what do they care about publicity? Will you stop buying books from those publishers and hurt the authors (who mostly support Google's actions)? No I think you have this backwards. Google is legally going to prevail, and these publishers are just delaying while trying to pass some laws to avoid the future possibility of being cut out of the deal. They fear for their position as middle men and are fighting hard to stop anything that might be progress.

    • Though I personally believe what Google are doing is not ethically/morally wrong, they are most probably 'breaking' our unjust (injust?) copyright laws. The only reason they are 'getting away' with it is because they are the most powerful domain on the net. No-one dares mess with Google.

      About 18% of the books held by the libraries working with Google were printed prior to 1923 and are therefore in the public domain

      From what I gather, these books printed prior to 1923 are considered public domain and
  • ...the organisations taking Google to court?

    "An unknown percentage of the rest still are protected by copyright, depending on whether it was renewed. Google's resumption of its scanning of copyrighted works comes amid heated debate in the library community over participation in the program."

    It's not the % that are in copyright thats important, because the "Association of American Publishers" doesn't represent *copyright* holders, it represents a tiny subset, and not even its full membership.

  • Out-of-print books (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dillon_rinker ( 17944 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @03:58PM (#13926411) Homepage
    The fact that out-of-print books have copyright protection is further proof that Congress is more interested in hewing to the corporate line than adhering to Constitutional principles. How does preventing any further publication of a work for nearly 100 years promote the useful arts and sciences?

    I would make copyright dependent upon making the copyrighted material available for the duration of the copyright. If it falls out of publication for a year and a day, then the copyright lapses. Making the material available online would be a cheap and easy way to maintain your copyright. Those that don't like that notion are free to publish and warehouse physical copies. In order to close an obvious loophole, I would further require that the copyrighted material be available at no more than the original cost, adjusted each year for inflation.

  • Flaunt/Flout--From TFA (Score:4, Insightful)

    by adavies42 ( 746183 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @04:00PM (#13926426)
    Mr. Gorman, who said the American Library Association doesn't have an official position on the subject, described Google's argument that Web users will be able to look at several snippets and then decide whether they want to buy or read the book as "ridiculous." Further, he noted that as a published author, he opposes Google's intention to build an enormous database that includes copyrighted texts. "It's a flaunting of my intellectual property rights," he said. [emphasis added]
    If the president of the American Library Association doesn't know the different between flaunt and flout, I think civilization is doomed.

  • Gatekeepers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Toloran ( 858954 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @04:05PM (#13926488)
    This has probably been mentioned in previous articles but oh well.

    Many librarians I have met (not all, or even most, but some) have this weird mentality of "I am the gatekeeper of knowledge, you must have my leave to access the wisdom of the ages." The basically believe that knowledge is so sacred (it is) that only they are fit to gaurd it and distribute it (very not true).

    When I was younger (elementry school, early-mid 90s) and you needed to research something you had to goto the library (either your schools or the public one), use a computer to look up a book (if you knew what it was) or (more often) ask a librarian to help you find books that would be useful for your topic. This gave the librarians great power because it allows them to deturmine all the information you are going to be using. When you learn and retain something, it becomes a part of you, by deciding what you learn they are in essense chaning you.

    Now (for me, ever since middle school), you want to know more about ancient egyptian art? Google it and find 100s of pages of information (well, realistically you will only likely use about 10 of those pages but you get the idea). Want to know more about the 2000 US election? Google it. Before, if you wanted to find out information about certain topics (primarily recent or highly specific) then you were out of luck because often the libraries didn't have it. However, with things such as google and wikipedia, you now have access to almost any information you want from anywhere you have a computer with an internet connection.

    (Beware, point soon approaching. Be prepared to duck)

    Taking all this into account, it is not suprising that many librarians are reacting so harshly to this. They are all for making information more accesible but not if it doesn't go through them. Its like a company with a monopoly that it has had for ages: They've become used to the power and don't want to give it up.

    The world has been slowly changing. It has become more and more difficult to control information. And as the cliche goes: Knowledge is power.
    • This accusation is patently untrue. I've never thought of librarians as having much power, and they certainly don't have power over knowledge and they certainly are not guardimng knowledge FROM you. Your average librarian's concern is that people seem to have no powers of discrimination so that a Google search is a de facto search for truth when, in fact, it turns up unjuried, unverified, often wrong information as easily as it does something correct. Librarians select books and information based on reviews

  • flouting, not flaunting says diction police of ALA (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Mr. Gorman, who said the American Library Association doesn't have an official position on the subject, described Google's argument that Web users will be able to look at several snippets and then decide whether they want to buy or read the book as "ridiculous." Further, he noted that as a published author, he opposes Google's intention to build an enormous database that includes copyrighted texts. "It's a flaunting of my intellectual property rights," he said.

    Shouldn't that be "flouting"?
  • Compilation works, such as story and poetry collections and songbooks, have mixed copyrights:

    The collection has a collection copyright and each story/song/poem has its own.

    If a story's copyright has lapsed, will Google make that entire story available in the same way it does public-domain volumes?
    • No, they would have to go back and find a public-domain edition that contains the story. For instance, if you search for "Moby Dick", you will see several recent editions that have the copyright restrictions on them. However, Google could find a pre-1923 edition of Moby Dick, scan it, and put the whole thing online.

  • The Kelly v. ArribaSoft argument (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @04:25PM (#13926702)
    One of Google's arguments is that a marvelous Ninth Circuit decision of a few years ago, one of the few to deal with Internet issues, gives them the right to do what they're doing. But Kelly v. ArribaSoft is a weak reed to rest Google Print's case on. True, there are parallels. The thumbnails of art and photos that Arriba was indexing and posting as the case went to trial are like the short excerpts that Google Print will use and the helpful Ariba quickly complied with opt-out requests, including those by the ill-tempered Kelly who sued.

    Both the district and appeals courts stressed the service that Arriba was providing to everyone by linking to web sites where an artist/photographer had made his art available online. The thumbnail itself, the court noted, was of such poor quality as to be of no value, something that isn't always true of a quote. (And one of the worst ways to treat an author is to quote them out-of-context, a practice Google's scheme will encourage.) The artist/photographer had also chosen to post his work online, thus putting it on the market. The Arriba link took interested parties to a site where they could pay the artist/photographer for the rights to a usable image. Arriba was creating a win/win situation for everyone and, once the image was thumbnailed, the full version no longer existed at Arriba's web site. All those factors taken together were sufficient to make what ArribaSoft was doing legal.

    But the Ariba/Google parallel only exists for books that are in print, being marketed online, and paying royalties to the copyright holder. Out of print, books that are only available used or through libraries do not parallel the AribaSoft case. What Google is much more like sending someone with a digital camera to art galleries and museums, ignoring any wishes of the artist. Owning a copy isn't owning the copyright. That's why the "approval" Google has from the libraries is so silly, as are its claims that it is simply making a 'really big' card catalog.

    The reader may benefit. Google and whoever profits from Google's linking may benefit, but no royalties flow to the author due to the linking, nor has the author chosen (present tense) to place the book online or in the marketplace. He may, in fact, consider the earlier work so dreadful, he intends to use copyright laws to their full extent to keep down his embarassment. And despite the squawks of some posting here, we have no legal right to get easy access to what someone else has published. A copyright bestows the right to say, "No more copies will be published." That's why, for instance, an author can prevent anyone from making a movie derivative.

    Arriba is a marvelous case for defending unauthorized linking and for indexing the web itself, as Google does. And as a Ninth Circuit appeals decision for someone living in the Ninth Circuit, it was "controlling" in my successful battle with Tolkien estate lawyers over whether my chronology of a fictional work was fair use--the law in that matter having been corrupted by some dreadful Second Circuit court actions in 1998.

    But Arriba is weak precisely where Google is being challenged most strongly by authors and publishers--Google's right to scan and index the entire text of books that are in library collections but are, for the most part, are out of print. For those books, Google cannot link to a website where the purchase of the book will result in income for the copyright holder. That's the key issue. Google Print may be a winning situation for Google and readers, but the copyright holder doesn't get a cent. Indeed, the very point of Google's action is to blast ahead, not bothering to even look for authors because that would be too much trouble. Authors, on the other hand, are expected to go to the enormous trouble of tracking down every instance of the use of their material by Google and a thousand Google-clones, and opt-out of each individually.

    And I might add that I say this as a "one Mac mini" author/editor/publisher who's placed virtually every

  • Unfortunately this is the way the system works! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DaoudaW ( 533025 ) on Tuesday November 01, 2005 @05:28PM (#13927414)
    There is really no precedent for what Google is doing, so it has become a test-case for the limits of fair-use. We may all agree that it seems obvious that it is fair-use, in fact many lawyers have suggested just that, but until a court of law deems it fair-use Google will be challenged. It will probably go to the Supreme Court within a couple of years and we can only hope that the conservative justices being appointed by Bush will allow it under fair-use. Fortunately, Google has fairly deep pockets so may be able to win the case.

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