Google tries its book project at Princeton
The Google scan project has some heavy sledding to do before it gets there. It now going to try its digital publishing idea at Princeton Univeristy. And it is swimming against the tide. Publishers hate the idea of Princeton, or any place of learning, joining the Google book project. It is arguable that it part of the project are unlawful in the United States. And it will be argued.
If it works — and that, matey, is a big if — it will mean the end of books as we know it.
On January 24 I wrote here that one of the reasons Google was getting it wrong was because it did not have a competent reading machine.
Since then I have spent three hours or so with a Sony Reader. OK, it is far from perfect but it works well enough to show the future and the future is digital.
Bill Gates says printing is dead. Bill Gates is right. It is just that he has not given anyone a sense of the timing.
Mine is newspapers will effectively be gone in 10 years, a lot of book publishing — currently a farce and a joke of great dimensions with Britain leading the pack for stupidity in the number of titles published — say 10 years after that.
The full extent of the effect of Bill Gates forecast will not come about for, say, another 35 years.
Tonight I had dinner with a guy who has been in type-setting and printing for thirty odd years. We had dinner in a Dutch restaurant in Bangkok where we often go. He reminded me of the move from letterpress (all that ink and mess) to litho and electronic type-setters — opening price $250,000 — to the use of the Apple II for typesetting and of the Macintosh for total page layout to books on demand. It happened in a span of about twenty five years.
Now comes the news that Princeton libraries have (is that grammatically correct? I don’t know and let us not be picky-picky) joined the Google book-scan project and no-one is talking about the true problems facing this idea.
First is time. No one is going to scan in a library overnight. True, scanning machines get faster and faster but this is not going to happen this year or next.
Google said on Monday Princeton had agreed to work with it to digitize about one million public domain books — works no longer covered by copyright protection.
That is good and smashing and go for it and the cheering you hear is me.
Now, for a quick Reality Check. The library concerned has more than six million printed works.
A Google spokeswoman said her company and the 250-year-old Princeton library system would work together to determine which portions of the collection would be digitized.
To save them a lot of trouble I will do it for them. And I will put it in bold type so there is no misunderstanding.
As the law stands copyright extends to 75 years after the death of the author.
The author does not (although this was once true) have to copyright a work. Nor yet stick one of those damn silly letter ‘c’ in the circle in the front. Not at all.
This is black letter law. Copyright subsists until 75 years after the author’s death unless the author is willing to give away the copyright to the work.
And I will tell you from long and bitter experience that this rarely happnes.
Google has began the book-scanning project with a core group including the New York Public Library and academic libraries at Harvard, Oxford, Stanford and the University of Michigan.
Then, six months ago, the University of California became the first of a second round of libraries to join, followed by the University Complutense of Madrid, the National Library of Catalonia and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of Virginia, and the University of Texas at Austin.
All of the above are concentrating on works that are out of copyright and, my view, their position is legally unchallengeable.
Michigan and Texas libraries have agreed to scan works that are still under copyright.
Up with which publishers cannot put. If it happens they will die sooner.
In October 2005, five big U.S. publishers, together with the Association of American Publishers, sued Google seeking to block its plans to make libraries’ works searchable online.
The case has yet to come to trial. I doubt it will.
Google can argue ‘fair use’ but I doubt that this will fly. It would be like claiming in a rape case that you only put it in a little way.
For it to work properly sales of digital books have to become seriously worthwhile and contain a way of reimbursing the author. This has not yet been mentioned by either side. Until that is sorted out basically what you will be reading will be very, very old books indeed.
You want to read The Mabinogion in the original Welshfor Lady Guest’s translation is useless?
Go for your life.
You want to read the latest John Grisham novel or parts thereof? No chance until a deal is struck. And that will not happen for some time. Bill Gates is right. This is the future. But not the very near future.
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February 6th, 2007
Glad to see another who’s against this farce. This is definitely not fair use. If the publishers want to go digital, they have the right to decide whom they allow to digitize/scan, etc–make that derivative work. Google can’t take it upon itself to assume they have that right under any stretch of the fair use ideology. Even if they only let others see snippets, the fact remains they ‘ve got the whole thing there for themselves, and once it’s out there, people will get ahold of it. Long experience with everything else digital has poven that.
February 6th, 2007
Just because some books exist in Google’s database doesn’t mean “it’s out there, [and] people will get ahold of it”. Someone would have to crack Google’s security systems to do that — and to my knowledge, Google hasn’t yet been cracked in this way.
If fair-use doesn’t stand for paper-based works, what do you say about search engines indexing web content? It’s exactly analogous: Google indexes your copyrighted website (book) without your explicit permission; they display snippets of your copyrighted work; they link users to your original source material; and they give copyright holders a means to ‘opt-out’ entirely.
I see no reason to think paper-based works differ from digitally-based works in this respect. The only real difference is that websites have historically always been indexed by search providers, whereas paper-based publishers have historically had physical control over their properties.
In other words, the only “difference” is that the expectations of paper-based publishers differ from those of web-based publishers — yet the law does not dictate outcomes based on what someone may expect the law to dictate. What is true for one party is true for all parties.
February 7th, 2007
Few books sell many copies and most books never have a substantial amount of readers.
Digitizing and indexing books allows access to works that otherwise few people would ever find.
As Tim O’Reilly stated:
“Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.”
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2002/12/11/piracy.html
February 7th, 2007
Paper based media do differ–they’re paper-based. That was the medium the publisher decided to have them printed in. If they’d decided to have them digital, that would be a different story. But because it’s a different medium, transferring them to the internet makes the new material a derivative work. The right to make derivative works resides with the copyright holder.
Codes have been cracked, maybe not Google’s, but it certainly wouldn’t take long–the simple fact that their employees would have access to it, with their ever increasing business, is scary.
The right to opt out, as we’ve seen with YouTube is really not working. It’s a total farse. As soon as material is taken down, it’s put back up again. Come on. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the internet is not a safe haven for copyrighted material.
I’m not opposed to having public domain material up. But the whole idea that the world has “the right” to all knowledge printed in books for free is misguided. People put a lot of work into books they publish and deserve the copyrights they hold, not just the money. That’s another misguided idea. They have the right to decide how their material is used. Let them keep it and make those decisions themselves.