Or is that, Glorious Google?
Two Congresscritters–Demopublican Pat Schroeder and Republocrat Bob Barr–are attacking Google’s Print Library Project (discussed here) in Reining in Google. They claim they are “joining together to fight a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit and in turn denying publishers and authors the rights granted to them by the U.S. Constitution.”
Woo, look at the scare words–a big $90 billion company! Ummmm, I hate to break it to you–but you guys spend that much about every two weeks…. Compared to you, Google is a mom and pop shop.Whine our friendly Congresscritters,
Internet behemoth Google, plans to launch their Library project in November. [These geniuses don't even realize you don't put a comma after the opening clause here.] It plans to scan the entire contents of the Stanford, Harvard and University of Michigan libraries and make what it calls “snippets” of the works available online, for free.
What I found amusing were these lines: “Not only is Google trying to rewrite copyright law, it is also crushing creativity.”
Yeah, only Congress has the right to rewrite copyright law and crush creativity! Who do these upstarts think they are?!
And: “Just because Google is huge, it should not be allowed to change the law.” Ummm…. hey fellas, you do realize you work for Congress, right? How about shining that light on yourselves?
I also like this comment: “Google’s position essentially amounts to a license to steal, so long as it returns the loot upon a formal request by their victims.” Hey, if only the IRS would adopt this policy!
Google’s idea is this. The ‘fair use’” provision in copyright law allows Google to scan copyrighted books and put them on their Web site without seeking permission.” They will only offer snippets–to get the full work, you have to buy it legally. Any author can “opt out” of this if they just notify Google they don’t want their works online. In my view, Google’s gambit is courageous, brilliant, audacious, bold, and visionary. Yeah, they are taking a risk, but they have a shot at succeeding, and the payoff will be enormous.
It seems fairly clear to me that most authors will not opt out of the Google Library. I would love for my books to be available on the Google Library. Why? Because more people will stumble across my books as a result of a Google search, who would otherwise be unaware of it. Will it hurt sales of my books? Hardly at all–maybe an occasional browser will find a quote or fact he could not have obtained without buying the book in the 20th century type of paper book world; but then, most such people would simply have been unaware of my book’s relevant passages in the first place. And no doubt some of the people who do stumble across the book and find it of possible relevance will buy a copy. And, regardless of all this, it increases dissemination of my ideas–the book might be cited now in another book where it otherwise would not have been. For these reasons, I am sure that well over 90% of all authors would want their books up on the Google Library. And eventually, cantankerous, misanthropic, holdout authors will be like technophobes today who have no fax machine or email address–they will be marginalized and swept away. And this is what dinosaurs like Schroeder and Barr fear: that most authors want the Google Library, and the holdouts will sound increasingly like Luddites.
P.s.: My old friend, Objectivist Robert James Bidinotto, has a post endorsing the Schroeder/Barr piece.
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The comma was there for dramatic emphasis.
See, it reads like this:
“Internet BEHEMOTH GOOGLE!! [pregnant pause while the ominous music plays (dum dum DUM!), letting the fear of behemoths really soak in for a second] plans to launch …”
Bob Barr is such a mixed bag. Good on a number of issues, horrible on others.
This is a terrific idea, and I don’t see the copyright law problem.
- Josh
Congress sees the Internet in general and Google specifically as a threat to their power. It seems as though everyday Google provides some cool, new tool that empowers ordinary people. Congress simply can’t have empowered subjects. Look for a Microsoft-type lawsuit, soon, so that Google may start paying its tribute to the power elite inside the Beltway.
Here was a reply I tried to post over at Mr.idinotto blog (it hasn’t appeared for some reason):
Mr. Bidinotto, I have a hard time seeing the arbitrary difference you have erected between a book and a website. For all practical purposes, a website is a digitized book and a book is a website in printed paper form.
In order to be of any use, a search engine must index, scan or otherwise copy the contents of a site/book/blog/widget in order to be successfully queried in a meaningful way.
I do not believe that you or the congressmen have clearly defined what you do or do not really like, aside from the fact that it has not be done before to this scale.
In fact, based on your previous comments I think you might want to file a class-action lawsuit against all commercial search engines due to the fact that they have not asked each and every webmaster for permission to scan, copy, index and display the relevant information being queried by a user.
Also, if you have a chance, check out what Google actually does with Print and excerpts (http://print.google.com). Have you seen the amount of words/phrases you can see in a copyrighted work? It’s nowhere near the apocalyptical levels the congressmen portray or you that you insinuated with “Google, of course, hasn’t said whether quotations would be limited to a few hundred words from a book.”
Bidinotto has I think cut off the thread. HE seems to think the “snippets” google will show might be as long as an entire chapter of a book; this is without foundation.
George,
Ah, an even less subtle version of the fnord, then? That would explain a lot about newspaper headlines.
Xellos
This is like the piano roll problem – player pianos could play works, but it technically was a copyright violation (and who defines “fair use” – if it exists to allow the 1st ammendment to work, then many of the criminalization of breaking digital protection schemes ought to be unconstitutional).
Google might digitize the whole book, but only show a “fair use” section. I don’t know.
But this goes to a more fundamental problem regarding property rights. A similar idea might be that of an easement. If I have to cross a section of your property to get between two commons, or from my property to a commons, ought I not have a right, or ought you be able to build a fence preventing such traffic, or sue me for trespass or something else? And do you have the right to the air above and the minerals and water below?
Who decides? And how?
I don’t have an answer, only the concern that what emerges will likely be bad for everyone. Unless Google sends their collection offshore in a jurisdiction that doesn’t have our nonsensical IP laws.
I have seen the fnords!
Tim, Stephan…
Bidinotto most certainly did not cut off the thread. It just took me a few hours to okay the comments (they don’t post automatically, since I screen for spam and worse). You’ll find your views, in their full, radiant, erroneous glory when you click here.
Question to my old friend Stephan: Hey, fella, why did you cut out the link you had originally posted to my article?
;^)
–Robert
Robert, sorry, when you told me on your thread I had posted overlong and you were going to say a few words and let me have the final word, I assumed you were closing the thread. Or at least, that I has used up my available bandwidth, so I decided not to impose. Why Tim has technical trouble, I don’t know.
AS for your link, it is still there. See the last sentence of my original post: the word “post” links to your piece. Or am I missing something?
SK
BTW, Google claims:
So apparently, Google’s “snippets” will not only be chapter length (as Bidinotto feared), nor even page length, without the author’s permission. I agree that there is a strong argument that this is fair use.
For an interesting analysis of “fair use” in the Google Print context, see this thread started by William Patry. I tend to side with his view of fair use in this case (as a matter of positive law), but notice how utterly devoid of principle all these arguments are–because they are just trying to decipher the intent of a bunch of bureaucrat-legislators who have decreed some artificial rules, and trying to inform their analysis with groundless “mainstreamish” normative principles.
Further commentary on this topic:
Richard Epstein chimes in with a predictably utilitarian analysis, in Networks and Copyrights: A False Analogy.
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