Comments on: The ABC’s of GBS: Part 3Google Library, The Lawsuits, and Is Charkin Barking Up the Right Tree?

By: Analogy Boy

Analogy Boy — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 03:34:46 +0000

Remind me to take Dirtboy’s car for a joyride for a couple of weeks. I won’t give anyone else rides in it; I’ll only let other people see the outside, and I’ll tell them that they should go buy the car from Dirtboy if they want it. Since I’m helping out Dirtboy by sending him car buyers, and since I’m not letting anyone else drive his car, it’s apparently all ok.

Ignore the fact that I stole the car in the first place. Focus on the fact that I’m not loaning the car out to other people.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 22:36:37 +0000

Google, or rather the libraries for whom it is an agent, already possesses the compulsory license, as I noted above.

By: Dirtboy

Dirtboy — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 20:01:36 +0000

Indexing books is as much “fair use” as I can possibly think of. GL is not providing third parties with a usable version of the books. It is simply providing potential readers with the means to find that book based on their interests and needs. Once upon an analog time, we had to shift through card catalogs in libraries to find books of interest. Those cards did not index books in their entirety, but did provide only that information necessary for the user to decide if the book was worth opening (although most of the time the cards said too little and the book was not what the card made it appear). GL will provide an expanded version of the card catalog, which will “only” differ in that the results are more detailed. This does not provide third parties with more than snippet of text. And laws allow for publication of short quotes from copyrighted material so long as they are not substantive. Google is doing book publishers a favor because GL will make their books much more accessible to readers – readers who will have to buy the book or check it out from a library.

If Charkin wanted to replicate this activity, he should have taken a picture of the computer, pasted it to a sign with a short snippet of content, and walked around the expo sign in hand. People could have then seen what Google had to offer at their booth and thus been encouraged to check it out.

Publishers are like spoiled children. They have had the sandbox all to themselves for a millennium and now they are rabid at having to share it with someone. The new kid on the block isn’t stealing anything… it is pointing at what publishers have done and saying, “Hey, like it? You should come over here and check it out.”

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 11:31:04 +0000

Richard asks, “What are we as a consumer to do then?” My answer would be “Push for changes in the laws.” Copyright laws need to be reevaluated and changed to keep up with the changing needs of our society, and not just the changing desires of our largest corporations. If we want to create a compulsory license for Google to make as many complete digitized copies as they need on their back end as long as they only provide snippets to the public, let’s do that. If we want to create a new fair use exception that says that those complete back-end copies are fair use, let’s do that. There are ways to balance competing interests that should benefit society as a whole and allow people and companies to follow the law while doing what they generally want to do. Sadly, we’re not finding those balances even in relatively simple areas like file-sharing of music. No wonder we’re unprepared to find that balance for an area like Google Library, where Google pretends that the full-copy back end is magic and the snippet-based front end is all that matters. Even when a column like this one focuses explicitly on how Google is starting their back end by making complete copies, folks like the first commenter immediately talk about the snippet-based front end as if the back end is magic.

By: CaptainBooshi

CaptainBooshi — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:06:27 +0000

Sorry, I submitted too soon. To finish:
Although I have to admit the legality of it is still dubious, the situation is not helped by histrionics and exaggerations, as seen here.

By: CaptainBooshi

CaptainBooshi — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:04:10 +0000

Actually, to make what he did exactly what GL is doing, he would have to walk up to the booth, take the laptop and make a perfect copy of it, give the laptop back to Google, and walk off with the copy. Then, if anybody wanted to look through the laptop, he would show very small portions of any files relevant to the questions they asked, and say that if they wanted to know anymore, they would have to go to Google.

Much less malicious than you’d like to admit.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 20:34:57 +0000

Michael writes: “Google is only indexing web pages which are made public at no charge, and they’re doing it by asking the owners of that page.”

But Google isn’t only doing that. It is also excerpting part of the web page and using the snippet to make something new, a search page served from their own site. That is the reuse of someone else’s copyrighted content to make a derivative work, and the only reason Google can do so is that the snippets make only fair use (”fair dealing” in some jurisdictions) of the original content.

The point about the original full-text copies of the books is disposed of readily: Google is dealing here with U.S. libraries, which explicitly have special rights (under U.S.C. Title 17 § 108) to make archival copies of the works they hold. Google is returning the full-text copies to those libraries and as far as I know to nobody else, except where the works in question are in the public domain.

Furthermore, the implicit license to copy a web page that is provided by putting the page on a server is itself pretty limited. You can’t, for example, copy the whole page into your own by framing it or otherwise: some copyright holders aggressively defend their rights against that kind of infringement.

So I continue to think that snippets of text, whether from print or online sources, are legitimate fair use of copyright content.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice.

By: links for 2007-06-21

links for 2007-06-21 — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:45:27 +0000

[...] The ABC’s of GBS: Part 3Google Library, The Lawsuits, and Is Charkin Barking Up the Right Tree… (tags: books google copyright) [...]

By: Richard Ahlquist

Richard Ahlquist — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 15:37:00 +0000

@Michael, you have a very good point. There is a substantial difference. What are we as a consumer to do then? I would love to be able to search the great works of the world but cant because there is no way to search them all in one place.

Shall I wait till copyright holders can all agree upon a system much like the movie industry did with Blue Ray and HDDVD? What a boon for the consumer, I can imagine the decades it would take to settle on a system, and then have each publisher decide to go with their own, custom system and charge everyone to search. That would be helpful too.

This is the most selfish generation in the history of the world. You have one side who wants to charge to share their intellectual property and another side who wants to consume that intellectual property in the manner and time they want.

@Evan, you too have a good point. Following by the letter of the law they do not have a right to do what they are doing. So lets look at it this way.

I can go in with a notepad and a pen and take notes about passages I may need for say a term paper. So that in the future I wont have to search the whole volume for the content I want. Are you trying to tell me that the copyright holder would have a problem with me doing this? What if I typed my notes on a laptop so I could search my notes easier? What if I included direct quotes in my laptop? Area gets a bit more grey. Can I pay someone to provide that service for me? (remember paying someone for the service is not the same as paying them for the copyrighted content)

Now say I am blind, and the works aren’t available in braille, but I have a terminal with voice synthesis capability and a braille keyboard. Are you saying it is the direct intent of the copyright holders to prevent this differently abled person from ever being able to access their work? Or are you just saying that the copyright holder deserves to make more for making their book available in this different format?

They may not have the legal right, but as with all media and all intellectual property the world has moved on, much like when Gutenberg arrived on the scene. Perhaps its time for publishers to pay for the worth of the creation, rather than quantity it has sold?

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 11:29:55 +0000

@John Cowan: There’s a huge difference between GL and web search. With web search, Google is adding each page by asking for a copy of that page from the page owner, who presumably has the right to make copies of that page. (That’s how the web works at the simplest level — a browser sends an http request for a page, and the server sends a copy of the page.) Google is only indexing web pages which are made public at no charge, and they’re doing it by asking the owners of that page. With GL, Google is adding a book by borrowing it from someone who does NOT have the right to reproduce the book, making a couple of complete copies of that book for themselves and the library, and NOT asking the copyright holder who does have the right to make copies.

Google allows web sites to opt out of being added to Google web search by having a “noindex” tag that Google respects. Publishers feel they already have the equivalent in books — the copyright notice. It’s unclear why Google refuses to respect it.