On the Google Book Scanning Project and the Library We Will Never See (theatlantic.com) 165
For a decade, Google's enormous project to create a massive digital library of books was embroiled in litigation with a group of writers who say it was costing them a lot of money in lost revenue. Even as Google notched a victory when a federal appeals court ruled that the company's project was fair use, the company quietly shut down the project. From an article published in April this year: Despite eventually winning Authors Guild v. Google, and having the courts declare that displaying snippets of copyrighted books was fair use, the company all but shut down its scanning operation. It was strange to me, the idea that somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25-million books and nobody is allowed to read them. It's like that scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they put the Ark of the Covenant back on a shelf somewhere, lost in the chaos of a vast warehouse. It's there. The books are there. People have been trying to build a library like this for ages -- to do so, they've said, would be to erect one of the great humanitarian artifacts of all time -- and here we've done the work to make it real and we were about to give it to the world and now, instead, it's 50 or 60 petabytes on disk, and the only people who can see it are half a dozen engineers on the project who happen to have access because they're the ones responsible for locking it up. But Google seems to be thinking ways to make use of it, it appears. Last month, it added a new feature to its search function that instantly connects you with eBook data from libraries near you. From a report: Now, every time you search for a book through Google, information about your local library rental options will be easily available. Yeah, that's right. Your local library not only still exists, but it has eBooks, which are things you can totally borrow (for free) online! Before, this perk was hidden somewhere deep within your local library's website -- assuming it had one -- but now these free literary wonders are all yours for the taking.
for free (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought it's only when you're trying to sell something that these issues arise.
Re:for free (Score:5, Informative)
You thought wrong. It's a widely held fallacy about copyright, though. Copyright covers any unauthorized reproduction of a work, whether it's for sale or not. The only exceptions are for parody or fair use (which means such things as small quotes in a review of the work).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: for free (Score:1)
Books schmooks. Who's got time for books these days? Personally, I'm been trapped navigating a graph which encompasses all known knowledge, after starting with a single Wikipedia article.
Information presented in a logical (topological?) order is for n00bs.
Re: for free (Score:2)
Uhh..., "All known knowledge" -> "All knowledge"
Re: (Score:1)
Yep, but I'm referring to knowledge rather than potential knowledge :D
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Parody is actually a form of fair use; it's legally considered a form of criticism, which is one of the things fair use is intended to protect. Fair use is actually a very complicated legal issue that has to be decided on the particulars of each case. It depends on a balance of four different factors (by statute):
scrivener's dilemma (Score:2)
Proof by first derivative. Works every time. No dilemma ever.
Er, um, hold the presses.
No Google books: authors control most revenue, no soup for Google.
Partial Google books: one author rats out the other (economically) by signing up. Author who signs up wins, author who holds out loses. Plenty of canned alphabet soup for Google.
Full Google books: Google creams almost the whole of the economic surplus due to better consumption matching, a
Re: (Score:2)
Fair use is far broader than that - 'transformative use' - (such as using a book as input to a machine learning algorithm) is one of many additional fair use defense.
Re:for free (Score:5, Insightful)
As an author, yes, I would like to be paid when my works are distributed.
The problem is that Google wanted to distribute the work from authors for free.
I do know that the idea that people should be paid for their work is controversial on /., where many commentators believe that information-- meaning other peoples' work-- should be free, and authors should be happy to starve, because, hey, it's exposure [theoatmeal.com].
Well, actually, isn't the problem that they want to sell it / use it for commercial purposes? If Google simply wanted to put this on the web for absolutely free, with no links to anything else, couldn't they?
Google is the most valuable company in the world [independent.co.uk]. They may want to distribute others peoples work for free, but they themselves plan to make a huge profit from doing so.
It's merely the authors who don't get paid.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright length is the main issue, not a differing business model. There's a lot of content out there that the author's are dead and income are the least of their worries.
Dead [Re:for free] (Score:1)
Copyright length is the main issue, not a differing business model. There's a lot of content out there that the author's are dead and income are the least of their worries.
So, Mr. Anonymous Coward, what you're basically saying is that since dead authors don't need to be paid, you think it's ok if living ones don't get paid either.
Yeah, great.
Re:Dead [Re:for free] (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
If an author hasn't made anything in the handful of years before their work goes out of print (and that's a smaller handful if it's not selling), they're not going to m
Straw man (Score:2)
As an an author, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster did not make comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported inference.
Re: (Score:2)
As an an author, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster did not make comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported inference.
He might, if he could understand your horrible spelling and grammar.
Re: (Score:2)
Kindly enlighten me as to the problem grammar.
Re: (Score:2)
Kindly enlighten me as to the problem grammar.
Shirley == you MEAN SURELY which is still a waste of a word (adverb). aint aint a word.
Re: (Score:2)
As an an author, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster did not make comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported inference.
The anonymous coward poster was making a comment on my post, which most explicitly was about living authors. Since my post was about living authors, you should be responding to anonymous coward's post, not mine:
As an an anonymous coward, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster you are responding to made a comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported statements about dead authors.
Re: (Score:2)
Here's my proposal how to fix the major flaws of copyright while ensuring that authors get paid:
Replace copyright with payright. Here's what it means:
The author gets a right to a clearly defined slice of revenue (e.g. 20% by default) from every commercial use of their work. If you register your work in a central registry, you get to set the percentage yourself and commercial users will have contact you. If you don't register it, statutory default applies and commercial users will just need to hold your slic
Give it away for free [Re:Dead [Re:for free] (Score:2)
Here's my proposal how to fix the major flaws of copyright while ensuring that authors get paid: Replace copyright with payright. Here's what it means: The author gets a right to a clearly defined slice of revenue (e.g. 20% by default) from every commercial use of their work. If you register your work in a central registry, you get to set the percentage yourself and commercial users will have contact you. If you don't register it, statutory default applies and commercial users will just need to hold your slice of revenue in escrow until you contact them.
So, you're saying that I can put up a site that makes the work of all the bestselling authors in America available for free, and the bestselling authors will get nothing. Because in your view they don't own their work, and aren't allowed to decide what their work is worth, or even if it is worth anything at all.
Why do you think this is good?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
One thing authors often do is sell some sort of first publication rights to get some cash sooner rather than to wait for the royalties. One thing magazines etc. do is to buy first publication rights so they can ensure that they can publish before anyone else, rather than having the December issue come out with a featured story that the competitor had in their November issue.
So, this would reduce the desire to publish an author's works and reduce the amount of stuff published, while adding overhead to th
Re: (Score:2)
First publication rights would still exist. The rules I've described above would apply only to works that have already been published w
Re: (Score:2)
And we're back to the question of how we assure that authors have a good chance to get paid. With free eBooks readily and legally available, who's going to buy a copy when they can wait a few months and get a free one? Either we have a reasonably long period of exclusivity, or we need to find another way to pay authors.
Re: (Score:2)
And we're back to the question of how we assure that authors have a good chance to get paid. With free eBooks readily and legally available, who's going to buy a copy when they can wait a few months and get a free one? Either we have a reasonably long period of exclusivity, or we need to find another way to pay authors.
I'm all for experimenting with other ways of making money. Most of them are currently blocked by copyright bureaucracy. Why should the law prefer selling ebooks as if they were physical goods over other business models?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in favor of experimenting until we find a better way. I'm not in favor of cutting off the current way we pay authors without finding and implementing something better first. Not just books, but all copyrighted materials are sold as if they were physical.
Currently, the system allows the following:
Re: (Score:2)
Take another look at the bigger picture of the current copyright system:
Re: (Score:2)
Publishers are not necessary in the copyright system. You can always self-publish. Back when books were all made of dead trees, there were "vanity publishers". Currently, it's really easy to self-publish through Amazon and perhaps Barnes & Noble. The advantage, to an author, of using a regular publisher is that the publisher will provide services like editing and good formatting and proofreading (not necessarily doing it well), publishers have publicity channels ready to go, and publishers will oft
Re: (Score:2)
Selling PDFs is not that much more expensive than selling dead tree editions. We've had people connected with publishers post on Slashdot before. The bulk of the cost of a dead tree with ink on it is amortizing the same expenses ebooks would have to amortize. The additional cost of a hardcover book is mostly a premium to read the book before the paperback comes out. The demand for books is fairly inelastic. I'll buy lots of them, in some form or another, but not that many more than I can read. Other
Re: (Score:2)
Pardon me, I meant that PDFs aren't that much less expensive than dead tree books.
As I said, people who know the figures for costs of books have posted them on Slashdot. The economics weren't all that accurate, but publishers need to make a lot of money on individual book sales to cover fixed costs unless the book is a best-seller or something.
There are people whose business it is to know the deman
Re: for free (Score:3)
No, Google never wanted to distribute those works for free. (Except the public domain ones.) That was the Authors Guild's idea.
See my comment further down the thread, and the link therein.
Re: for free (Score:3)
No, you're wrong. Even all the way back in 2004 [blogspot.com], Google was talking about making books easy to search, not making them available for free. Making them available was the Authors Guild's idea.
Re:for free (Score:5, Insightful)
To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs
"But if it was bought —
then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. You saw Griphook's face when the tiara passed under his eyes. He disapproves. I believe he thinks, as do the fiercest of his kind, that it ought to have been returned to the goblins once the original purchaser died. They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.
No credit [Re:for free] (Score:2, Informative)
Amusing quote, and what's even more ironic, in the context of this discussion, is that you didn't bother to credit the author:
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Chapter 25).
So, your worldview is apparently that not only should authors not be paid, they shouldn't even be credited.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Really? You presume everybody and his dog is reading and enjoying the same books you do.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: for free (Score:2)
How much do (you believe) I owe you for reading your comment?
Re:for free (Score:5, Insightful)
The key piece of this picture that no one (yet, in any of the comments posted thus far) as even mentioned that what we are talking about are books that are out of print. These are books that you cannot buy (unless you can find an old copy, and may be exorbitantly expensive if so), and make the author no money at all. Zero.
This is about 25 million books. Further it is estimated that half of these books are out of copyright under every iteration and perversion of copyright law and thus are already in the public domain - they belong to the public as is and was the intent of copyright law from the beginning.
And the Google-Author's Guild deal actually provided a way to provide some revenue to authors of out-of-print books. Nearly all books go out of print after several years, never, ever to even be printed again so nearly all authors face this issue.
So this is a lose-lose-lose situation (for Google, the public, and author's of out of print books).
That so many books can be in the public domain and yet be unavailable is largely the result of the constant expansion of copyright at the behest and for the benefit of corporations that own publishing rights that has plagued society throughout the Twentieth Century.
Re: (Score:2)
You missed another part of copyright law.
If you can find and publish a text or song where the providence of such is in question, you can then claim for yourself the copyright.
That's a problem in these cases. No one has actually said to have given up their rights to them. We don't know with whom the copyright resides. So if Google were to go in and being publishing these "abandoned" books Google could then claim them for themselves without having secured the necessity transfer of the claim.
This has precedent
Misrepresentations left and right. (Score:2)
Completely irrelevant - copyright law doesn't care if the book is out of print or not.
Re: (Score:2)
You are proposing that copyright caries a compulsory right to grant licenses in perpetuity.
Yes, it actually does. That's the whole point of copyright; that, in exchange for a time-limited protected monopoly on the authors' work, the work is granted in its entirety to the public once the copyright period expires.
Re: (Score:2)
Umm, no. The link you originally included talked about the most valuable *BRAND* in the world, not the most valuable company in the world. (Also, it was from February.)
An up-to-date list of the list of companies by market valuation, the true definition of "valuable", is at:
http://dogsofthedow.com/largest-companies-by-market-cap.htm [dogsofthedow.com]
As I post this, Apple is #1, and Google is #2, about $110 billion lower in market value.
Re: (Score:2)
Choice [Re: for free] (Score:2)
I've bought books because of Google Books service that let me look inside a book and see that it's going to be useful for me. Shutting down GB means closing this channel for you as an author. A stupid move, I would say.
I agree. But it should be your choice to decide what and how much of your work to give away for free, not somebody else's.
Your work, your decision.
Re: (Score:2)
i never met a plumber who only got paid if/when someone used the toilet.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with it (nor is that statement meant to imply that I don't), I'm just clarifying the point the AC above was likely trying to make.
To plumber did the work once, the plumber got paid once. T
Re: (Score:2)
The fallacy is, for that concept to work, then all books must have some initial purchase price (covering the months or years spent on it) to acquire them from the author. It's not like the author can write a book, publish it, make $150 in sales and then Google takes it and gives it away for free forever.
The plumber has a set rate for a fixed piece of work. The author has no up-front payment unless they sell it to a publisher, which is becoming less and less common these days. So the entire attempt at the
Re: (Score:2)
Now, how do you make a living at making software?
I get paid by the hour to write software for the people who will ultimately be using it.
No, really, that's how I make a living writing software. The people who want the software literally pay me to write it, which is how artists, musicians, and writers used to make money before copyright. That it's becoming less and less common today is a result of copyright.
For the record, it's still pretty common today, as well. Think plays, musicals, concerts, pretty much any live show, for-hire art and writing... th
Re: (Score:2)
Before the plumber installed the toilet, there was no toiled; then the plumber installed the toilet, then there was a toilet. Before the author wrote the book, there was no book; then the author wrote the book, then there was a book. The plumber got paid to install the toilet. Follow?
I invent the toilet. A plumber installs the toilet. You now have a toilet when you didn't before. The plumber gets paid to install & I get paid thanks to my toilet patent. Nobody gets paid per flush.
I ink a book. A distributor sells the book. You now have a book when you didn't before. The distributor gets paid to sell the book & I get paid thanks to my copyright. Nobody gets paid for additional readings.
Follow?
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not saying I necessarily agree with it (nor is that statement meant to imply that I don't), I'm just clarifying the point the AC above was likely trying to make.
Follow?
However, you invented the toilet once and the author wrote the book once. Just sayin'.
Re: (Score:2)
Point is AC's point was pointless.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's not. If you give it away for free, the authors can't sell it.
Before anyone descends up me with their "information wants to be free" meme, the people creating "content" (for lack of a better word) spend time and effort to do it. It's perfectly reasonable that they should be compensated with more than a hale and hearty "thank you". Copyright as current constituted has all sorts of opportunities for abuse, and is abused all the time.
But, at the root, it's not a bad idea, i
Have you taken History class yet? (Score:1)
Throughout much of history artists and musicians got full pay up-front for their work instead of this BS about getting paid only after some middle man feels they've siphoned away enough of the work's value.
If you need an entertaining lesson on the history of this, at least go watch "Amadeus" and learn a bit about how money-grubbing Mozart was.
For thousands of years, life sucked (Score:3)
For thousands of years, authors, artists and musicians didn't expect to get paid for their work, and they did it anyway.
And for thousands of years peasants starved to death in years when the local harvest was poor, and died of disease when a plague passed through. And, more to the point, had their stuff taken away by anybody who passed by who was equipped with swords, spears, arrows, and armor.
Your point is that ancient societies were somehow better than ours? That societies for thousands of years condoned slavery, so we should, too?
Re: (Score:2)
So, why is everyone afraid to compete with Google? Ocrs are easy and cheap now.
Zug Zug! More work?... only 200 gold to train a peon.
Oh, wait... nemmind.
It'll be back after they figure out how to monetiz (Score:1)
This is an old article; has anything new happened? (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw this go by back in April and was made sad by it. Now I am being made sad by it again. I wonder how hard it would be to crowdsource the same work. Like, just have everybody who thinks this is a tragedy do 10 books, and see how many that adds up to. The Google OCR API is available for use, and I think they may even have open sourced it so you don't have to run it in the cloud.
Re:This is an old article; has anything new happen (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder how hard it would be to crowdsource the same work.
Project Gutenberg has been at it since the 70's. But they currently only have 54.000 books, not a whole lot compared to Google's 25 million books.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Take two sheets of glass, tape them into a V shape with cardboard to hold them up, place the book open on the V, take a picture from below with your cell phone camera. Repeat for each pair of pages.
Re: (Score:2)
Gutenberg is curating and only scanning things that are out of copyright. Very useful work, but not the same thing. I'm talking about having a database and essentially gamifying the process, with the goal of seeing how many titles we can get, rather than the goal of getting the stuff people think of to add.
AI silly! (Score:3, Interesting)
Worth It To Them (Score:1)
They were able to scan the books and data mine all the text. Why would they want someone else to be able to do the same?
Face it (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright Insanity (Score:1)
This and many other wrongs have happened because publishers, the RIAA, the MPAA, and especially Disney have been able to bribe lawmakers and buy extremely insanely long extensions of copyright. Works that should have long ago been in the public domain are being kept under copyright to the great detriment of our society. These same entities listed above are also doing everything that they can to eliminate Fair Use, and Right of First Sale. All in the name of price gouging and insane levels of uncontrolled
Re: (Score:3)
RIAA established 1952
MPAA established 1922
Disney Corp founded 1923
Berne Copyright extension of copyright to authors death + 50 years - 1908
Re: (Score:2)
In 1922, 1923, and 1952, when those US entities were established, the US had not yet signed the Berne
They got 1 terabyte in and... (Score:3)
Why not campaign for better Copyright laws (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
The amount of money available across all the entities that benefit from copyright dwarf the assets of alphabet.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why? I mean what's in it for Google? Or do you insist they start a new department called Google Charity?
Re: (Score:2)
Or do you insist they start a new department called Google Charity?
Technically they already did [google.org].
It will be remembered in history. (Score:2)
So is it possible Google is shooting to secure a place in history?
Re:It will be remembered in history. (Score:5, Informative)
Christians burnt the Library of Alexandria (Score:3)
Muslims preserved the knowledge of Greek and Roman cultures while Christians were busy burning it. In fact by the time of the Muslims conquering Egypt the Christians had held sway for centuries in Egypt and the library of Alexandria was long burnt.
Boo the creators... (Score:2)
Down with the creators seeking to control their creations! How dare they?..
The fallacy of the "new Alexandria" (Score:5, Informative)
Getting to see the books is not what Google Books is for. It was never what Google Books was for. [teleread.org] You've bought into the fallacy promoted by the Authors Guild, who came in after the fact and tried to wangle their lawsuit against Google Books into an orphaned-works library without actually having any authority to do so. Google shrugged and went along with it, because why not, but it was never what they had intended.
From the very beginning, Google Books (nee Google Print) was intended to populate a search database so people could search within paper books as easily as they could search within the web. If the book was still in copyright, then finding that book to read was the searcher's problem. (Interlibrary loan works a treat.) Google was very straightforward about that in early blog posts and publicity about the project. Don't blame them for falling short of the Authors Guild's goals. Those goals were never theirs to begin with. See the link in the first paragraph for more information.
Re: The fallacy of the "new Alexandria" (Score:2)
And also, this one [teleread.org].
Re: (Score:2)
The article actually talks about that precisely.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: The fallacy of the "new Alexandria" (Score:2)
If publishers thought they could get away with closing down the libraries, I don't doubt for one second that they'd try it. They just have the little problem that the concept of public lending libraries pre-dates the modern "where's my money?" era by such a degree that it's effectively grandfathered in. (Same for second-hand bookstores. But boy, you should have heard them yelp when Amazon started listing used books next to new!)
If we take the question seriously, lending books for free in libraries isn't as
Re: (Score:2)
Does that matter? Was every librarian they convinced to let them scan their books on the same page? Do Be Evil aside, should they sit on such a treasure trove? At a minimum, it seems to me, an rsync of scans (and ideally the OCR'd data) should be set up with the Library of Congress.
Re: The fallacy of the "new Alexandria" (Score:2)
Wow, an Anonymous Coward saying something that makes sense. Now I have seen everything. :)
What is stopping Google from operating as a librar (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been wonderful for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Google wants to profit, but not pay writers. (Score:1)
The problem is that they want to *give* it to the world, instead of paying writers for their work. The US court has agreed for some weird reason, but foreign courts have not, and rightly so. Writers want to get paid for their work, just like you! They just happen to get paid in royalties, not hourly wages. Google wanted to be the only one to profit (from ads I might add).
So yes: the library can be available to all, but once Google is willing to pay the writers.
I know how Google must feel (Score:2)
So, uhh, Archive.org anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Meanwhile, archive.org is scanning a thousand new books every day [archive.org] and nobody's writing news stories about it...
Re: So, uhh, Archive.org anyone? (Score:2)
Actually, I'm writing stories about it [teleread.com].
I remember discussing this years ago. (Score:2)
Dark Archives (Score:2)
Most people don't know that there are a LOT of dark archives out there. They're used to back up journals and rare books to ensure that they should something happen (publishers go out of business, fires, etc.)
I saw a talk once about a dark archive for music research. (I think it was at Research Data Access and Preservation, but could've been ASIS&T). They allowed people to submit jobs to run against it, but it was important that the results couldn't be used to recreate the music (possibly in conjunction
Overdrive got there first (Score:2)
Google isn't innovating here. Overdrive has been around for quite a while and provides a very nice search interface showing which ebooks are available at your selected libraries. Also considerable integration with local libraries appears to be happening.
Re: Overdrive got there first (Score:2)
Actually, in providing a way to search inside printed books, Google is providing a very useful innovation indeed.
ownership of ideas is immoral (Score:2)
Imaginary Property is theft. Culture belongs to the People - it is not the personal property of degenerate capitalists.
It must be very obvious to everyone now, that ownership of ideas makes the whole world needlessly stupider, and should be ended now.
Until these badlaws are removed we must honor those heros like Alexandra Elbakyan who are expropriating scientific knowledge from the rich horders and and freeing it for the enlightenment of the whole people.
Re: (Score:2)
The second part of this post states:
"But Google seems to be thinking ways to make use of IT"
"Last month, it added a new feature to its search function"
How do these statements relate to the library of books that we cannot see, that is the subject of the first part ?
If you don't understand how these are related, then you don't understand what Google Books is about. Google Books was never intended to give you a digital copy of the book. Google Books was designed to index paper books and returned those along with the search results. Google Books wasn't designed to be a digital library but rather to allow you to search the paper books at your local library as easily as the web. This new feature is exactly what Google Book's original purpose was. It's like the digital