Google Books Can Proceed As Supreme Court Rejects Authors Guild Appeal (bbc.com) 211
An anonymous reader writes: The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to Google's online book library -- Google Books -- from authors who complained that the project makes it harder for them to market their work. The Authors Guild and other writers had claimed that Google's scanning of their books should be deemed as copyright infringement and not fair use. The Supreme Court let stand the lower court opinion that rejected the writers' claims. The decision today means Google Books won't have to close up shop or ask publishers for permission to scan.The ruling, Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the authors group, said, "misunderstood the importance of emerging online markets for books and book excerpts. It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision. The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
Short-term benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Books is not a "short-term public benefit", it's a real tangible benefit to the public. I can't tell you how many times I've found important information from Google Books on scientific topics that I otherwise wouldn't have had ready access to - even though interspersed by blank pages. I can always buy the book if I want the additional information in the missing pages - but the key point being, I would never have known that the book existed and provided the information I was looking for had it not been scanned, indexed, and shown up in Google searches.
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I can't tell you how many times I've found important information from Google Books on scientific topics that I otherwise wouldn't have had ready access to - even though interspersed by blank pages.
So.. it was simultaneously important, but also not worth paying the authors anything?
I can always buy the book if I want the additional information in the missing pages -
How often did you though? A potential sale, as slashdot loves to point out to the music industry is NOT a sale.
but the key point being
That you didn't buy anything.
I would never have known that the book existed and provided the information I was looking for had it not been scanned, indexed, and shown up in Google searches.
True enough; there is clearly a problem that does need solving here. But perhaps google's solution here... isn't the solution.
Perhaps being able to search google's scanned books should be a subscription service with some portion of that subscription payment going back to the authors of
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How often did you though? A potential sale, as slashdot loves to point out to the music industry is NOT a sale.
The chance of someone buying a book after seeing a page or two show up on google books is bigger than them buying the same book without seeing that preview.
I'm just not sure a system that benefits you and google but not the authors is the best solution to the problem here.
It does benefit the authors.
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The chance of someone buying a book after seeing a page or two show up on google books is bigger than them buying the same book without seeing that preview.
Says you. I for one am unlikely to buy most books that I've already got free access to all the information I need from them. In fact, that is what the original poster himself claimed... the book had "important information". he got it. he didn't buy the book.
He can argue that not knowing about the book gives zero odds of buying it. But if hadn't been able to just take what he wanted from the book, he'd still be searching for that important information, which he might discover is in that book. And then maybe
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How often did you though? A potential sale, as slashdot loves to point out to the music industry is NOT a sale.
No, it more that a download/viewing isn't necessarily a potential sale.
for example, I might look at google or amazon's showing of a $1000 book, but I'm not going to be buying it, whether I can see it or not.
In all actuality, consider it closer to the original bookstore model - unless I'm ordering in something special, I can flip open nearly any book in the store and look at any page I want to. No limits.
Are they scared we'll decide their book is crap?
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Are they scared we'll decide their book is crap?
No. They are scared you'll just see it as "important information" then take what you need without paying; which is exactly what the post I responded to said he did.
for example, I might look at google or amazon's showing of a $1000 book, but I'm not going to be buying it, whether I can see it or not.
And therefore? They should let you read it, and still not pay? While you benefit from that, nobody else does though.
In all actuality, consider it closer to the original bookstore model - unless I'm ordering in something special, I can flip open nearly any book in the store and look at any page I want to. No limits.
Well.. there actually are pragmatic limits. Several of them. The bookstore doesn't really want you just sitting there treating their retail shelves as a library. You are welcome to browse. But if you brought in your laptop, a scanne
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And therefore? They should let you read it, and still not pay?
They should offer people a reasonable preview so they can decide that it may be worth their money.
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They should offer people a reasonable preview so they can decide that it may be worth their money.
Isn't it ultimately up to them whether they allow a preview or not, and how "reasonable" that preview is?
Just as its ultimately up to you whether to buy it or not based on the information, reviews, and whatever preview they did make available.
How on earth is it up to you and/or google to decide how much of a preview they make available?
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Did you ever go into a large US bookstore in the late '90s/early '00s? If you did, you would see several people reading books from cover to
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Did you ever go into a large US bookstore in the late '90s/early '00s? If you did, you would see several people reading books from cover to cover. The staff did not prevent this activity.
Ok. But "reading books cover to cover" is definitely not the same thing as what I said " if you brought in your laptop, a scanner/camera, set yourself up on a desk and started doing your "research". Taking notes, scanning/photographic pages getting everything you need, and then putting the books back."
See those are quite different, and I never saw anybody doing that in a book store in 90s and 00s.
But sure lets talk briefly about your scenario. It is quite different from google books -- just for starters eve
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I don't care whether the ultra-rich become richer - there's not a fixed amount of wealth, and their success costs me nothing. I care very much about the concentration of power, and wish no more of it to go the the most powerful group in the US. I can, and mostly have, opt-out from using Google. I'm stuck with the federal government, which is so powerful already it's hard to say we're not a totalitarian state (we certainly have the panopticon surveillance, without needing your neighbor to rat you out).
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Re: Short-term benefit? (Score:2)
Read up on Patronage [wikipedia.org].
A lot of the world's fine arts was created under this system. So it's certainly feasible.
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I have purchased a few books based only on the excerpts found in google searches...but of course that breaks your nice little narrative...go shill for a publisher somewhere else.
No, it doesn't "break my narrative" at all. I don't doubt that it happens. Sales are generated. Sales are lost. Who knows whether more or gained then lost as a result? Not me. Not you.
The point I'm making is: it doesn't matter. Its not up to you or me.
If I think McDonalds would sell more apple pies if it let me eat half of one and then decide whether to pay for the 2nd half, that's neat... I can think that all I want. Maybe its even true. But I can't make McDonald's sell Apple Pie under this business model
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Funny. I always thought the government should fund and run things that were a tangible benefit for the public, not a private company that can "Ministry of Truth" whatever content they want out of existence now or in the future.
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" I would never have known that the book existed"
For people born before 1990, there was this thing called "research" which took more than 5 seconds to do, thus its need to be described as an actual activity. The work you were doing was, at the time, leagues beyond what the AIs could do. We'd go to a thing called a "library" where books were actually purchased, thus the author actually getting paid. We'd look through these "books" and find the information we needed.
I'm all for progress, but a paradigm shi
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Re:Short-term benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)
We'd go to a thing called a "library" where books were actually purchased, thus the author actually getting paid.
The number of books sold to libraries is so small that the authors could perhaps buy a cup of coffee with their profits.
We'd look through these "books" and find the information we needed.
Yes, and we also went to record stores to listen to music, and we'd buy folded paper maps, and we'd look up phone numbers in the yellow pages.
As someone else said, this is just Google being greedy - they could have come up with some sort of agreement with the authors that allowed them to do it via a subscription service
So, why didn't the authors and/or publishers set up a system for finding books ?
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Are authors supposed to come up with a system for translating their books as well? Or reading their books via whatever your electric device of choice is?
They already have. Many books are being translated and sold in other countries, and they are available as e-books.
Also, somehow we've managed to find books for a very long time without shoveling money into the gullets of Google.
Not very effectively. I live in a densely populated country, and going to a well stocked library and actually finding a book that I want takes the better part of a day. In addition, when I borrow a book from a library I get the full text, and don't have to pay the author anything. At least when people find a book on Google, there's a better chance they'll end up buying a copy.
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That sound you just heard going over your head...let me explain what it was. First, while some books are translated, last I heard the author's guild doesn't own amazon or adobe. Second, authors will sometimes translate things, but even when they do it's certainly not to every language. That job is generally done by someone of that other language group that wants to share it with others who read that language. The salient point was that the job of the author is simply to create the body of text - not to
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The salient point was that the job of the author is simply to create the body of text - not to distribute it, translate it, or such
That's how it used to work, yes. There's no reason why authors can't find better ways now, especially since the cost of electronically distributing books is so much less than printing paper books.
Google is making money off the book without giving money to the author
Google is providing free advertising. It's probably worth more than the handful of books that were bought by libraries.
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we generally didn't go to record stores to listen to music...we went there to buy records. ;)
We listened to albums in the store to decide if it was worth buying.
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Re:Short-term benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then there was the time-element. It simply took a long time to peruse the material. It was often not possible to search the text of the book to find something relevant, one had to hope that the author and editor did their jobs well and organized chapters and subjects in a logical fashion.
Don't get me wrong, there are still a lot of veracity problems with modern Internet-based techniques, and there are still problems with junk work and authors masquerading as legitimate that are merely trying to push an agenda, but it's a lot easier than it used to be to get to that part of evaluating the work, instead of spending so much time just trying to find the works in the first place.
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And old "research" was lower quality for it (Score:5, Informative)
For people born before 1990, there was this thing called "research" which took more than 5 seconds to do, thus its need to be described as an actual activity.
The high time cost of "research" before everything was electronic meant that research was often lower quality. (By research, I mean "looking up sources" -- not "doing science" in general.) I'm a physicist, and it's very interesting to look back at old papers (which I do often because it's easy thanks to the internet). Old papers tended to cite few other papers, probably because looking up references was time consuming, and there are only so many hours in a day. E.g. the paper I'm working on cites over 100 other works. Many older papers don't even cite 20 other works.
For example, I was interested in a specific topic (a finite-difference time-domain solution to the Schroedinger equation), so I started digging. It turns out that the technique was "introduced" no less than four times -- basically once a decade since the 1950s. Each paper which "introduced" the technique did not cite previous work on the technique. That's both a dick move and a waste of time and effort. People should have been refining the technique instead of wasting time by rediscovering it. You also see this in even older work. E.g. the "Fokker–Planck equation" is also known as the "Kolmogorov forward equation" because Kolmogorov didn't know that the equation had already been developed.
I wouldn't have been able to learn about the history of the technique if not for electronic records. This research still doesn't take 5 seconds to do. I spend days doing it and discover much more than anyone in 1990 could.
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Everything is relevant (Score:2)
I don't know about your field, but in mine -- unless you're doing something absolutely new (unlikely) -- there's always plenty of relevant works (many more than I cite). That's kind of the point. Maybe 20-25 years ago you only _thought_ there were 20-25 relevant papers. That doesn't mean you were right.
I'd go further and say that all the easily available information allows you to make connections you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm using a technique used to model ear
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" I would never have known that the book existed"
For people born before 1990, there was this thing called "research" which took more than 5 seconds to do, thus its need to be described as an actual activity. The work you were doing was, at the time, leagues beyond what the AIs could do. We'd go to a thing called a "library" where books were actually purchased, thus the author actually getting paid. We'd look through these "books" and find the information we needed.
I'm all for progress, but a paradigm shift needs to be done in such a way that it doesn't destroy the future. There will be little purpose for authors to do the work, if you can then yank the snippets you need (likely out of context, because hey - who has time to actually read the whole paper?) without giving them any money. As someone else said, this is just Google being greedy - they could have come up with some sort of agreement with the authors that allowed them to do it via a subscription service, or such. Instead, they decided to give away someone else's work for free.
Yes, and research using only physical books and the citations in the back is what I did in graduate school. But, you know, what, I like having both print and electronic versions of books. It's a nice, new tool that helps and makes things easier. And, I can find lots of obscure things in an electronic library that would not even be available in a physical library.
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"We'd go to a thing called a "library" where books were actually purchased, thus the author actually getting paid. We'd look through these "books" and find the information we needed."
Really? I graduated high school in 1983 so yes I am old but I remember using the library as being an exercise in frustration. I was interested in aviation, chemistry, cars, and computers. The books at my local and high school library where few in number and very outdated. If I wanted to read fiction it was fine. I wanted to rea
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How do you think Google acquired the book to be scanned?
Buy the book? (Score:2)
You can only do that, #1, if you can find which book has the info you want & #2, if it is available somewhere new or used.
I think that authors need to set up their own online stores and sell their own copies if they intend to make money off their out of date books. Of course, many authors have signed away the right to do that.
Re: Short-term benefit? (Score:4, Informative)
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Between self publishing on Amazon and Google books scanning, the role of the publishers is challenged.
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They also don't want to hear it because the idea that you "can't market everything" gives them power to decide what actually gets seen by only using their marketing resources to promote what they think is the most profitable or which they most agree with.
They aren't just losing money, they're losing the power to control their environment. And that may be more scary to them than simple lost revenue. Even these fools would eventually be able to figure out how to use new technologies, and they would have mad
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The book authors (and newspapers) are under the mistaken impression the Internet is like a street. They see their books/newspapers as stores on this street. They feel Google, by indexing their publications, is putting a Google sign in front of their store - siphoning away some of their profit and brand recognition. That's why they keep trying to get Google to pay them.
The reality is that very little Internet traffic comes from hyperlinks a
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Here's a plan for you. Why don't you hire some big guys to do some work around your house. Then at the end of the day, stiff them. Tell them that they're merely rent seekers and mock their request for pay with phrases like "for reasons."
Your analogy is crap. It's more like I hire some guys to do some work, my wealthy neighbor takes a few pictures and posts them on Twitter and the builders sue him for stealing from them.
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Re: Short-term benefit? (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
The Campbell court held that hip-hop group 2 Live Crew's parody of the song "Oh, Pretty Woman" was fair use, even though the parody was sold for profit. Thus, having a commercial purpose does not preclude a use from being found fair, even though it makes it less likely.
The transformative nature of computer based analytical processes such as text mining, web mining and data mining has led many to form the view that such uses would be protected under fair use. This view was substantiated by the rulings of Judge Denny Chin in Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., a case involving mass digitisation of millions of books from research library collections. As part of the ruling that found the book digitisation project was fair use, the judge stated "Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new areas".
Maybe you don't think anything commercial *should* fall under fair use. But currently the courts disagree and commercial things can be covered by fair use.
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Because a lot of material published is absolute tripe and you won't know it until you actually buy the book.
How many books have you read, and of those books which authors would you immediately recommend?
Being able to preview the book via Google Books allows you to do more than judge a book by it's cover and avoid a poor financial investment.
Re: Short-term benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why buy the book when you already got your answer from the Google scans?
Because he didn't. He was able to read enough to realize that the book is a good discussion of the topic he was researching. You see, it actually takes time, careful reading, and detailed analysis to understand a subject. You seem to be under the impression that he wants a simple-minded, one phrase answer, when in reality he is trying to carefully do this thing known as "thinking", something your response shows you are clearly incapable of doing.
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If you can get all of the information out of a book that you needed from a small snippet, you were not going to be buying the book in any case - you would go to the library and photocopy the page (which is, except in rare circumstances, most certainly fair use.)
The only difference is now, you have a much better chance of being able to find out that the snippet of information exists in that book, whereas before you would likely never know that that information even existed in that book.
panspermia (Score:3)
Now we need open standards for multiple archival sites to steward and prevent the complete corruption or loss of the Google archive as the world churns.
Most libraries are eventually destroyed in time.
Dissolve the Berne Convention (Score:2, Interesting)
Copyright without registration isn't copyright at all. If nobody knows what is copyrighted and who owns the copyright, how are you supposed to find out?
Re:Dissolve the Berne Convention (Score:4, Insightful)
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Copyright without registration isn't copyright at all.
Not true. Creative works are copyrighted by default. The author/artist does not need to take any action for their work to be protected. Registering with the USPTO gives you additional protections, and is usually necessary to actually file a claim, but the registering can happen after the infringement.
If nobody knows what is copyrighted and who owns the copyright, how are you supposed to find out?
If you don't know something is public domain, then you should assume it is not. Nearly all books have copyright notices. In practice, it is usually not that hard to find out when works were created.
Very Real Potential Harm (Score:4, Insightful)
On behalf of everyone (Score:3)
On behalf of everyone who has ever set foot in a Library, or tried to obtain a book but was no longer in print, and the publisher won't make it available in any format whatsoever, I say...
Go fuck yourself.
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Every once in awhile you will find a gem in a used book store.
I found a book on navy strategy written in 1944 and from the stamp was part of a US subs library. It had notes written in the margins asking things like, "how does this apply now that we have nuclear weapons?"
The other book was on fighter design from 1943 written by the founder of Republic aircraft.
No one is going to publish those books today but they could be really interesting to people like me.
spin (Score:3)
They're unhappy if Google (or anyone) puts their entire works online, and also unhappy if Google puts just snippets of their works online. What do they want, to be able to pick and choose exactly what passages get to be indexed and put into search?
The heart of the matter is that this is a dispute over the money to be gathered from selling creative works, not the incentives for creating that work (which many people incorrectly buy the story that losing patent/copyright protection will strip away -- I never met an author who wrote because they had copyright protection). Authors will still continue to write, artists will still continue to record -- they will simply get less margin on each book, while actually probably getting even more exposure and marketing than they would on their own (or without Google).
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That's not unreasonable. Although, frankly, I don't want to do that myself. I want the publisher to choose the market-tested snippets and index those.
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Well, a couple contradictory theories:
The people whose copyright they violated by making another copy? Suppose an author hated a book they had written earlier. It would be impossible for them to buy and destroy every copy.
Competitors who would have to reproduce the electronic archiving, as opposed to having the LoC owning the electronic copies and people competing on search algorithms.
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Great idea. In fact, the source of any information should be able to choose exactly what information is available through search results. Like if a politician is arrested for solicitation of prostitution, they could choose to not release that in search results.
Starving Artists... (Score:4, Insightful)
Authors want everything to go their way, but the reality of the power balance is that they are producers of creative works, not marketers of them. (by and large). Time to admit that the pendulum has swung to where the people/entities who can aggregate and find information are even more valuable than the ones who produce the elements of that information.
Good God. What Universe are you living in? The power balance has NEVER favored content creators in almost any medium, and has always favored producers and aggregators. The exceptions are hugely successful artists probably three or more standard deviations above the mean in terms of demand for their work.
Re:Starving Artists... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's really sad how important the gatekeepers are for content production (and this includes things like the iTunes app store: good luck getting people to buy your app).
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The thing is, the broader the market access the internet provides and the ability to search Google provides could give authors the chance to unshackle themselves from the publishers. This is why the publishers freaked out about ebooks originally and worked with Apple to price fix them above the cost of printed material. The publishers are deathly afraid that authors will direct publish and eliminate the middleman job of publisher (who also gets the lions share of profit).
If anything the work Google is doing
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For right now, it's very difficult to get a book in front of a large audience without the help of a publisher. The publisher has all the connections, all the advertising techniques and all the knowledge which authors lack.
It really is similar to writing an app for the iTunes store: even if your app is good, usually the one with better advertising will become more popular.
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Too bad it doesn't work that way in reality [theguardian.com]
Self-publishing also comes under fire, he said – but this is "even less of a way of earning money from your writing if you're any good than conventional publishing".
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The problem isn't that self-publishing doesn't work. The problem is that right now the people that self-publish are not getting proper editing done. That and companies like Amazon are allowing their systems to be abused by spammers. These are all solvable issues that are not directly related, but people like you would rather throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Even the simplest actions like Amazon exerting simple editorial control for their 30% in the form of having the publication checked for basic gramm
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I never met an author who wrote because they had copyright protection
Then you've met damn few authors. Most authors have these things called bills, which require money to pay.
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What do they want, to be able to pick and choose exactly what passages get to be indexed and put into search?
Please! don't give them ideas like that!
"Harm" (Score:2)
[The authors group said that the court] failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision
If I run a shoe store and somebody opens a competing shoe store next to me, that will reduce my profits and possibly even put me out of business, but that person hasn't "harmed" me. If I sell copies of data and somebody else starts offering competing copies of data, that may well reduce my profits or put me out of business, but they haven't "harmed" me. They are just competing. (Of course, under the legal system, what they are doing may be considered "harm," and it may be illegal.)
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[The authors group said that the court] failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision
If I run a shoe store and somebody opens a competing shoe store next to me, that will reduce my profits and possibly even put me out of business, but that person hasn't "harmed" me. If I sell copies of data and somebody else starts offering competing copies of data, that may well reduce my profits or put me out of business, but they haven't "harmed" me. They are just competing. (Of course, under the legal system, what they are doing may be considered "harm," and it may be illegal.)
Bad analogy to start with. It's more like if you are running a shoe-store and your next-door competitor steals 30% of your stock.
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Show of hands... (Score:4, Funny)
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How many people out there have read an entire book by searching for every page on Google?
I actually bought a book that I found through Google Books. I only needed maybe 5 pages out of the entire book and it was such a PITA to search out each individual page i broke down and bought it. Turned out that the authors were a bunch of idiots and the book was wrong, but they have my money and so therefore Google books was a net win for those jackasses.
Hmmm... (Score:2)
....It failed to comprehend the very real potential harm to authors resulting from its decision.
How can a potential harm be real harm? Until the harm is actually done it's just all hot air.
The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
This won't effect American culture. It probably will effect American publishing companies and force them to find better ways to survive than artificially inflating the prices of ebooks to $9.99 or higher when the paperback is $6.99. You know, stop being thieves and maybe we'll have sympathy for your plight?
Article haiku (Score:5, Funny)
Google sells ads on your work
Sharing economy
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Wtf this is the second article in the row that is summarised with a haiku in the comments.
Straight-face? (Score:3)
"The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
How in the world can someone possibly say that with a straight face. I would bust up laughing before I was halfway through that line.
what she said (Score:2)
"The price of this short-term public benefit may well be the future vitality of American culture."
Sometimes people say "black is white". But that doesn't mean there's any merit to such a claim. The only reason I can see for that quote to be mentioned is to provide a target for ridicule.
Authors Guild Response Translation: (Score:2)
Author's Guild Reponse auto-translation:
Google has lots of money and we wanted some. We are angry the court didn't recognize we are entitled to some of Google's money. We think depriving authors of part of Google's money will irreparably harm American Culture because they can't have money for all of Google's work to preserve that culture. Congress must act to eliminate this activist court ruling or we will get angry and stamp our feet more!
I can't help but wonder.. (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, Things like this make me wonder:
In the old days (pre internet), the only way to get a book was in the dead tree variety. Back then, the world still recognized that free public access to paid periodicals, reference materials, and even works of cultural fiction resulted in a more well rounded, better educated, and more cultured public.
To facilitate that noble goal, exceptions to publisher exclusivity for public libraries came into being. As long as the physical books were never duplicated, just kept in good repair, and purchased from the publisher at onset, these operations were and still are perfectly legal and have provided tremendous public good.
Now, we find ourselves in a pickle:
These days, it is possible to purchase a "book" that has no physical substance whatsoever. Ebooks are here to stay, and this is what I wonder.
If a person wanted to buy all those ebooks directly from the publisher, set up a digital lockout system to prevent simultanous viewing (to better approximate the book being physically checked out) do you suppose these author's guild types would consider the creation of such a digital library above board?
Recent history with the motion picture association and the recording industry of america suggests that the answer is a resounding "FUCK NO." These people have lobbied hard to get congress to evaluate the contents as being provided as a service with a highly restrictive license, not as something that can have steward/ownership transferred. In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
As a consequence, I feel obliged to tell these poor, wounded darlings the following:
Either allow public access ebook checkouts for digital libraries (that bend over backwards to prevent concurrent access, and probably even additional copy protection you did not have to pay for, out of courtesy to you, free of charge) or shut the fuck up when somebody with deeper pockets than you (and can fight you in court) offers a similar modern public service.
No, that doesn't mean "you have to be this big to make a deal with us"-- the days of that shit are over. The cost to reproduce a digital download are less than a cent per copy. There are no overhead costs beyond the initial production, and the library will be footing all subsequent bills for data retention and bandwidth for public access. The way the laws covering libraries in the US are worded, anyone can open one.
Your lust for money is what is destroying american culture.
Open access is what helped create it.
I wonder, but very much doubt about the prospects of a modern lending library with digital versions. I have the firmly bases suspicion that you would consider such a modern version of a classic cultural staple to be a dire threat to your financials, because of your addiction to exclusivity, and recent binging on extended copyright terms and laws.
I also wonder, what do you intend to replace the public library WITH, given that attendence of these august organizations is declining in the digital age, and that as a consequence, they are doomed to posterity.
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Nothing new about that, too. (Score:3)
In fact, these people have lobbied hard to make any such 3rd party, after market transfers "illegal,", by forbidding them in an absurd license agreement.
And there's nothing new about that. They have done it with every technological improvement in publishing media ever.
For instance: Look aat the labels on very early 45 records. You'll see a license warning telling you you don't own this record, you're only licensing the right to play it under certain circumstances.
It took the government and the "first sal
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These days, it is possible to purchase a "book" that has no physical substance whatsoever. Ebooks are here to stay, and this is what I wonder.
If a person wanted to buy all those ebooks directly from the publisher, set up a digital lockout system to prevent simultanous viewing (to better approximate the book being physically checked out) do you suppose these author's guild types would consider the creation of such a digital library above board?
Absolutely. That's how an increasing number of library ebook deals are structured - essentially, the library pays per checkout.
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If a person wanted to buy all those ebooks directly from the publisher, set up a digital lockout system to prevent simultanous viewing (to better approximate the book being physically checked out) do you suppose these author's guild types would consider the creation of such a digital library above board?
Doesn't matter if they like it or not. Libraries have already done this. My local library has had exactly such a system in place for years now. The Author's Guild, Inc. stays the hell away from them. County library systems know this ground very well and very much have the will of the people on their side.
And of course, they're poor. Unlike Google.
That's all you need to know about this now dead suit.
Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out. (Score:4, Informative)
The rent-seeking was built into the Constitution by design.
In this case, merely offering up the relevant passage someone searched for did not violate copyright law, as it was akin to a catalog. They wanted a cut of Google's deep pockets just for searching their books. The court declined to entertain this.
Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not what the publishers are complaining about in the summary. They say that it's harder for publishers to market their authors' works because Google is already marketing it for free as search results. This means that authors no longer need to spend any money on marketing if they don't want to. Basically publishers are victims of market efficiency.
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This means that authors no longer need to spend any money on marketing if they don't want to.
Good luck getting anyone to buy your book if they don't hear about it, though.
Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out. (Score:5, Insightful)
Publishers hate the on-line revolution and the ability of authors such as myself and millions more to self-publish.
What the publishers don't realize is that Google is giving them free publicity. I'd guess that Google's efforts increase sales, not decrease them. Google just publishes sample pages. Like what you read? You'll have to buy the book, and you just might do that!
But no, publishers want things to be like they were 50 years ago, when they were the kings of the book world, and they controlled everything.
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If publishers would only catch up they could make a reasonable amount of money from google books via POD. On many occasions I've found what I seek on google books, wanted to buy the book in question... and been blocked because the title is out of print.
Now imagine if the publishers teamed up with google and a print-on-demand service. Google finds the book but it's out of print, so you request a copy, publisher gives the ok, POD service prints a cheap softcover, book gets sent to customer, and everyone get
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We have now somehow managed to more than 5-fold increase "limited" while the at the same time cut the distribution time down from a couple of years to a couple of seconds.
Re:Middlemen do not like being cut out. (Score:5, Interesting)
Correct. You are not seeing danger to "culture" from the VHS tape or the MP3 or the scanned book. I mean the recording industry has not dried up and blown away like a dead leaf.
This isn't going to end culture, what it is going to end is *their business model*.
And I agree that a business model to support artists and writers is important, but as long as those items have intrinsic value to humans, humanity will see that they continue to exist. What doesn't have to exist is the specific method that the middlemen use to extract value.
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Yes, they are full of shit. T
Mind you, the threat to them personally might be more dire. They have to show that their company is not only making revenue, but that it is making revenue *growth*. Otherwise their stock price suffers and they lose their jobs.
So, it is fair to say that unless they can extract as much as possible from people, they are personally at risk of not making year over year growth.
And my answer to that is quite simply that it is too damn bad. Culture is better when it isn't an indust
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