Ok, so Google was sued and reached a settlement with the Writers' Guild. What were they sued for? Making excerpts of books available for search, allowing those interested in buying them or checking them out from a library able to see excerpts prior to making a decision.
I am not sure what the issue is. From what I can find, Google isn't posting the entire book online unless it is out of copyright. In my mind, making excerpts available in a card-catalog style view in order to know what you are buying/checking out is no different than book excerpts on Amazon or ebay. Or the dust jacket or back of the book. Or the excerpts provided online by my local library. They are not, so far as I can tell with my limited knowledge of law, violating copyright, unless for some unfathomable reason the author is not getting royalties on physical or digital books purchased through their sources. If that is the case, then that is a problem, but for some reason I don't think a corporation is going to so blatantly violate copyright by selling illegal books. I have been wrong before, however. Lets be realistic here. Our world is getting more and more digitized as the years go by. Network access is becoming more ubiquitous and more information is becoming available in a non-tangible form. Authors fighting to keep their works out of the hands of the evil interweb are like the MPAA fighting to keep music on physical media. It is a losing battle, and instead of spending so much energy trying to keep it from happening, they should be partnering with these online entities to ensure that their rights are maintained in the transition! It is hard enough keeping reading alive, lets do what we can to make it more accessible rather than less. Lets find a way to keep our rights through the transition rather than finding ways to keep books away from those that are trying to find them, buy them, and read them...
1 comment:
You're right about the original case being about digitizing books and displaying snippets. But the Settlement goes much further than that. It gives Google the right to display whole in-copyright books, sell access to them and eventually to sell them as e-books and print-on-demand paper copies. These rights are granted by default for all books that are classified an Not Commercially Available.
Guess who makes that classification - Google - and the database contains loads of misclassified books. Although copyright holders can object, they can only do that if they spot the mistake.
This is a commercial agreement, not the settlement of a court case. It should not be foisted on authors who don't even know they are affected. Let Google keep to the same laws of copyright that everyone else has to abide with.
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