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Google, library books, Usenet, and copyright
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 20:19:59 -1000
_______________ Forward Header _______________ Subject: RE: [IP] .Google, library books, Usenet, and copyright Author: Edward Hasbrouck <edward () hasbrouck org> Date: 14th December 2004 8:39:22 pm On 14 Dec 2004 at 8:08, "David Farber" <David Farber <dave () farber net>> wrote:
Author: "Matthew T. Blackmon" <matthew () blackmon org> I am concerned that Edward has not read Harvard's own comments on Google's presentation of books as regards copyright...
*Harvard* is providing Google only with books out of copyright, but isn't the only involved. According to the NY Times, "Each agreement with a library is slightly different. Google plans to digitize nearly all the eight million books in Stanford's collection and the seven million at Michigan." Google claims it will limit the portion of each work that can be viewed (and saved, copied, printed, etc.) in one session. But that's what Amazon.com said, and e-books assembled (apparently) from Amazon.com have already showed up on Kazaa and the like, as reported in the NY Times: http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000229.html For more on Amazon.com's "copy protection" (not), see: http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000054.html
Author: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry () piermont com> The system is designed to let people search and find texts, not to read them.
I think the system is designed to generate ad revenue for Google -- and to do so cheaply, since Google doesn't plan to pay the authors any portion of those revenues. Google is a for-profit corporation.
The mere placement of ads next to search results can hardly constitute a violation of fair use.
I'm not objecting to "search results". I'm objecting to full-text content, as is delivered by the (1) "Cached" links alongside search results, (2) "Google Groups" Usenet archives, and (3) e-books and excerpts exceeding "fair use".
Mr. Hasbrouck also complains that Google's republication of Usenet archives with ads attached does not constitute "fair use", even though it is fairly obvious that without such a system the archives would be entirely unavailable
That's not clear at all, at least to me. I suspect that if Google and itsa commercial predecessors hadn't assembled a library of Usenet archives for its profit, a non-profit library would have done so.
and even though there is no obvious economic loss to the people who's postings are made available.
The loss is the deprivation of any potential revenue authors could make for themselves through advertising, licensing, or electronic distribution of their works. The situation is similar for books. See: http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000057.html For "cached" Web content, the largest impact for freelance writers of content licensed for distribution on the Web may be the inability to generate revenue for successive time-limited licenses. If I license an article for exclusive display on the Web for 30 days (actually a common clause in a print magazine contract), I should be able to license it to the same or another publication for a new term, after the original license expires. Or add it to my own Web archive, and get some ad revenue from views of my archive. But it's almost impossible to do that when people can simply retrieve the article from Google's "cache" (for whihc Google gets ad revenue, none of which does it share with me), even after the time-limited license for Web distribution has expired and it has been removed from the originally licensed Web site.
Mr. Hasbrouck also expresses a bizarre notion of "fair use" in which a use is not "fair" if it makes a profit
Whether usage is for profit is legally relevant (IMHO porperly so) as one of the factors in detemining what consitutes fair use. law aside, part of my anger comes from the fact that Google is trying to represent this new program -- which it hopes and expects, if it is fulfilling its duty to its shareholders, will become a profit center -- as a public service, while making no attempot at all to share any of the potential profit with those who have created the content that makes it possible.
the paramount concern must be the preservation of intellectual property, rather than the public interest.
That is *not* my view. Google is acting in its commercial interest, not the public interest. There *are* successful models of collective licensing (including those used for distribution of a share of profits from music played on the radio in the USA, and in some other countries for sharing revenues for photocopying of books). Google has made no attempt to establish such a system. Some off-list responses have mentioned that Google won't archive Web pages that contain specified headers. But this assumes that she who owns the copyright to the content controls the html, which is rarely the case for freelance writers except self-publishers. That's one of the reasons that copyright law in the USA was changed from a default that required an affirmative copyright claim, to a default that work is copyrighted from creation. "Opt-out" is fundamentally contrary to current copyright law -- and properly so, I believe. If Google provided a specification for "archive" headers on Web pages and Usenet posting instead of "no-archive" tages, I might include them -- especially if they included a "Copyright Clearance Center" type of specification that archiving is allowed only on condition that a specified amount per copy, or specified percentage any (advertising or other) revenues from the distribution of archived copies be paid to the owner. I'm not a copyright absolutist. I would support a shortening of the current term of copyright in the USA. And I don't support vicarious liability for abetment of copyright infringement. (*Most* Napster users are/were copyright infringers, but IMHO that shouldn't make Napster liable for their infringement.) My primary objections are to (1) Google's substitution of an "opt-out" for the legally required "opt-in" system of licensing, (2) Google's failure to make any provision for sharing its revenue for any of these 3 programs (cached Web pages, Usenet archives, and books still under copyright) with the authors or other copyright holders, (3) the use of Usenet content in ways that the original posters years ago mostly never imiagined, and can't reasonably be construed to have implicitly licensed, and (4) Gooogle's self-righteous pretension to being a "public servant" when what it is really doing is generating profits for shareholders from stealing and distributing content many of whose creators and owners would be happy to license it for a small fraction of Google's profit from it. ---------------- Edward Hasbrouck <edward () hasbrouck org> <http://hasbrouck.org> +1-415-824-0214 ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Google, library books, Usenet, and copyright David Farber (Dec 14)