No More Information Piracy: Say Goodbye to Direct Quotes, Footnotes and Book Reviews

November 8, 2005 5:32 PM by Tim Swanson (Archive)

Google to remove index, decommercialize engine:

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif – In an effort to comply with an interpretation of copyright law, Google Inc. announced at a press conference today that it will no longer compile, develop or in any way, maintain a search engine open to public query.

“Our bluff was finally called," stated Eric Schmidt, chief executive and chairman of the Internet firm. “We were hoping that no one would notice that it was illegal to search and index publicly accessible content, but apparently copyright law is quite clear on the matter. While we feel that our digital method was arguably similar to that of a traditional paper-based library, we were literally holding our breath each day knowing that it was only a matter of time until someone connected the dots."

Hilary Rosen, spokeswoman for the Authors Guild told reporters following the meeting that “this was a victory for authors, publishers and the copyright system. We have weathered yet another storm of apocalyptical proportions and have defeated an 800-pound gorilla trying to strong-arm its policies into the marketplace. Information and intellectual pirates alike should follow Google’s lead by shutting down illicit and illegal information exchanges."

While this did not happen, such baseless accusations have unfortunately been made.

Living in a lawsuit paradise

If you have not tried Google Print yet, I would encourage you to do so. In general the current system is separated into two parts, those works still under copyright and those that are not.

What has a number of authors and publishers up in arms is that Google is scanning their copyrighted works without their permission. Google then adds these scans to an ever-growing online database which can be publicly queried by a user. Much like its website-search counterpart, the book-search allows a user to search the content of the book via keywords. The results are then displayed according to copyright status. If a book is still under copyright, only a few sentences surrounding the keywords are displayed. If the book is not protected via copyright, then its entire contents are then displayed for full-viewage.

Some of these features already exist today in bound books. Footnotes offer a formal space to discuss a particular citation or point, from which references to other works can be directly referenced and quoted. Glossaries in the back of a book as well as detailed indices do similar tasks. One must not forget the use of an annotated bibliography, appendix or other auxiliary mechanism that sorts out works cited in the book. Plus, card-catalogs and peer-reviewed journals also link and quote material from referenced sources.

Ignoring all these established low-tech methods of cross-referencing material, perhaps the biggest industry of citation use is overlooked, that of book reviewers. Judgment aside, the job of a reviewer is to explain the contents of a book in a useful and meaningful way, sometimes vis-à-vis directly quoting passages to illustrate the message between the hardcover. Yet the same antagonists that have lashed out at Google Print have not thrown stones at book reviewers guilty of similar tactics.

If book reviewers can get paid to read and cite partial passages, if researchers can get paid to read and cite partial passages, if students, grandpas, widows and yeomen can get paid to read and cite partial passages without fear of a lawsuit, then why can’t Google?

Must you now personally ask an author or publisher to directly quote a book in a term paper, essay, bathroom wall, chain letter, podcast, instant message, singing telegram, pigeon carrier, message-in-a-bottle or any other communication medium?

If the argument is truly against scanning documents without formal permission, then perhaps authors and publishers should sue the largest infringing group or perpetrators: those possessing a brain capable of reading, remembering and regurgitating information. After all, we may commercially exploit and profit off such information (as an aside, why is it that publishers only want to share in the profit and not the loss of an idea; i.e. what if an ‘intellectual pirate’ was losing money, should a publisher also lose as well?).

To rephrase what I have written in the past, I have a hard time seeing the arbitrary difference some antagonists 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. And that is precisely what Google Print does, and in fact go one step further by creating a copyright filter that prevents unauthorized access to protected material.

Obscurity, an author’s best friend…

Mark Twain once opined that “[t]he man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." By preventing Google and others from scanning and indexing the world’s book collection, FUD-filled antagonists of the world are failing their missions as effective marketers. Not only are they preventing possible product awareness, which could lead to sales, but they are limiting the access to useful and informative (perhaps even entertaining) books.

Regardless as to whether copyright law exists or is enforced a certain way, Google Print helps everyone. It gives more exposure to a book that would otherwise go unnoticed. If it would have gone unnoticed, the author or publisher would not have made any royalties. Now they have the opportunity to sell a hard copy of the book and now we have the opportunity to read it.

[Note: some inspiration for this post came upon reading comments from Mr. Bidinotto’s blog post on the subject. Notice how neither Mr. Bidinotto or Robert Jones seem to have actually used Google Print. It does not do what they claim it does.]