Alexandra Alter, writing for the New York Times:
A United States appeals court ruled on Friday that Google’s effort to build a digital library of millions of books was “fair use” and did not infringe on the copyrights of authors.
The ruling affirmed a decision that was reached two years ago in a lower court. In that case, the court rejected the claims by the Authors Guild, a writers’ organization, that Google’s book scanning project is a commercial venture that violates authors’ copyrights and drives down sales by making portions of their work available online free.
From the Google Books Wikipedia page:
The Google Books initiative has been hailed for its potential to offer unprecedented access to what may become the largest online body of human knowledge and promoting the democratization of knowledge. But it has also been criticized for potential copyright violations, and lack of editing to correct the many errors introduced into the scanned texts by the OCR process.
I’ve got a number of titles in there. Doesn’t bother me. But I do wish the process was opt-in instead of opt-out. In other words, I wish Google would assume I don’t want my book scanned and ask me for permission, rather than force me to discover that a book I wrote is part of this program and then jump through hoops to get it removed.
Not certain how this works, but I believe this project brings a revenue stream to Google, that this is not purely a work for the good of humanity. Anyone know the details of that?
The appeals court is wrong, Google is wrong. It is not fair use. They are doing it to make money. Which is not an evil thing, unless you’re doing it by taking food out of the mouths of others. This should be appealed.
Google is so full of pious crap here.. nobody requested this service to humanity. Democratization of knowledge? Just another distortion of the meaning of words. The money is free speech mentality.
I don’t think they make money off of it, they link to many other places to buy the books where available. There are not any ads on any of the pages. The only thing they may do is use the information that you liked a book or purchased a book and show you an ad for a similar book or from the same author. Which wouldn’t matter because if you are using Google for that then you most likely are logged in already and they already know what you like or are looking for.
I am glad Google is doing this!
Well, this should put a new spin on online “collections” of copyrighted music and film.
But I do wish the process was opt-in instead of opt-out. In other
words, I wish Google would assume I don’t want my book scanned and ask
me for permission, rather than force me to discover that a book I wrote
is part of this program and then jump through hoops to get it removed.
Thus ensuring that any product whose owner can’t be tracked down, because they’re dead and their estate is not trivial to find, or because amalgamation and bankruptcy have broken the chain of ownership, is effectively un-archivable?
Orphaned works are a huge issue in the out-of-print world, at least; I agree with the Court entirely, so long as what’s published for anything of dubious copyright is mere index-y snippets and search results.
“Opt-in” simply means “nothing is really ever going to be scanned, here’s hoping a physical copy is still around in about 150 years when we can assume the authors have been dead for 70 years and finally scan it”…
Why am I not surprised by the fact that Dave is suspicious of the efforts of a company that’s not called Apple?