Amazon: Google Books deal an 'unprecedented' copyright hack
Amazon came out swinging Tuesday against Google's proposed settlement with book authors and publishers.
Amazon's opposition was made public last week when it joined the Open Book Alliance, but the company filed its own brief with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Tuesday arguing against making the proposed settlement final. In its filing (click for PDF), Amazon notes that it has also scanned books, but has not taken the controversial step that Google took in scanning out-of-print but copyright-protected books without explicit permission.
Way back in 2004, when Google began scanning books from libraries, it believed it had the right to scan the entire text of a copyright-protected book under fair-use laws so long as it only displayed a snippet of the contents. Authors groups and publishers vehemently disagreed, resulting in a class-action lawsuit and the proposed settlement at issue in this case.
Lawyers for Amazon wrote "Amazon also brings a unique perspective to this court because it has engaged in a book scanning project very similar to Google's, with one major distinction: As to books still subject to copyright protection, Amazon has only scanned those for which it could obtain permission to do so from the copyright holder."
The brief goes on to complain that the settlement "is unfair to authors, publishers, and others whose works would be the subject of a compulsory license for the life of the copyright in favor of Google and the newly created Book Rights Registry." Amazon wants Congress to intervene in the dispute over fair-use provisions in copyright laws, saying the use of a class-action settlement to obtain these rights "represents an unprecedented rewriting of copyright law through judicial action."
Amazon, of course, has a lot at stake when it comes to the future of books. One of the largest sellers of regular books in the world, Amazon has also turned its attention to the digital book market with the release of the Kindle and a digital book store of its own.
Google has supporters in its fight to get the settlement approved during an early October fairness hearing before Judge Denny Chin. Sony, the American Association for People with Disabilities, the European Commission, and several others have filed briefs of support with the court. And on Tuesday, U.K. publisher Coolerbooks agreed to join Google's Partner Program, allowing it to offer Google's scanned copies of public domain works not at issue in the settlement.
Updated 2:52 p.m. PDT: Google plans to hold a press conference tomorrow morning with settlement supporters from civil rights groups and advocates for people with disabilities, which we'll cover.
And three library groups reiterated Wednesday that while they do not oppose the settlement they wish to ensure "vigorous oversight" is enforced by the court.
But judging by the court docket, the opposition is out-filing supporters. Those interested in flooding Judge Chin with additional reading material have until Friday to do so.
Tom Krazit writes about the ever-expanding world of Internet search, including Google, Yahoo, online advertising, and portals, as well as the evolution of mobile computing. He has written about traditional PC companies, chip manufacturers, and mobile computers, spending the last three years covering Apple. E-mail Tom. 
It is apparent the judge in this case is out of his depth in this case, so the more people, groups or companies who challenge Google, the better.
This should be a lesson on credibility. Never trust a company who says they will "do no evil." This plan by Google is about as bad as it gets, trying to usurp hundreds of years of copyright law. Let them spend money, like everyone else has over the years, to ask for permission to copy material. If permission is not forthcoming, they have no right to steal the intellectual property owned by others.
They break the law not by offering up ad connected snippets, but in making an illegal digitial copy in the first place, without specific written permission from copyright holders.
You want to challenge subject by subject, the issue of this settlement? Throw your gauntlet down right here, right now.
Interestingly enough, companies that challenge Google are competitors that do not have to do anything with the settlement.
That's the legitimate way to subvert copyright law, not these shenanigans.
You should not talk about things you do not understand. Napster was found liable only because the PRIMARY use of the service was for copyright infringement (and thus, DMCA provisions didn't save it).
Google stores digital copies of works they scan on their servers, but they do it to make those works searchable, something that in all likelihood is within the fair-use bounds of the law. And the primary use of the book-search service is not for copyright infringement, because it does not provide you with access to the full text for books that are still under copyright.
Hundreds of years of copyright law? Do your research FIRST, before you toss around falsehoods.
You want to challenge subject by subject, the issue of this settlement? Throw your gauntlet down right here, right now.
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Sorry I didn't get back here sooner to take on your insipid challenge.
Copyright is guaranteed in Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution, dated 1789. It was based on Queen Anne's Statue (England, 1710).
These laws were established to stop the rip and rape policies of evil-doers like Google.
My research is fine, so I can only think you work for Google.
Newspapers, individual bloggers,... and now even books. They somehow think that they have the right to copy someone else's work without permission, served with their collection of irritating ads, of course.
Now, what good is a book if you cannot even find it?
On the other hand, by making these books available online, even in a limited form will benefit Amazon's used book sellers, and those on eBay by providing people with the hint that there is a book about, say 18th century typographic techniques out there...
Please, please, enough of this paranoia please.
Google is making all information accessible.
They are not taking ownership of that information.
So, if I have a book that is still under copyright, *but* it is out of print and unavailable on the market, how does Google 'harm' the copyright owner?
Don't get me wrong, I think they crossed the line as well, but I am also tired of the heavy handed actions of many copyright owners and with Congress continuously extending the expiration date, it is obvious the laws are increasingly leaning to the copyright owner.
If Google can help balance the keel, then have at them!
Google also will be selling ads and making money off that author's work without their permission or knowledge.
However if you found the snippet useful there may be a chance you buy the full version of the book, meaning the author would earn money he never would of earned if the book was not made searchable on google.
An may be if publishers kept track of the authors in the first place it would be easy to get there permission and to sign them to a deal. However they did not because they knew they could legitimately keep the royalties from the books and thus make more profits, if they accidental lost touch over time.
As for the books copyrights, etc etc, I'm not sure which way I would tend to lean. On one hand, you have the authors, and while I see the need for the Copyright early on in a books release, I don't understand why it should be for a lifetime.
As for the Publisher's, we need to be realistic about their interest here. They want to protect the Copyright only because they will make more money doing so.
Too bad we don't have a system that would give the Author so much for the book based on popularity, and so much to the Publisher based on popularity and printings, and once those numbers are reached, it's open season for the book.
As for me, I tend to think the Author's and Publishers Greed are a bit much, and if they have already made millions on a book, why not open it up so more and more people can use it, read it, and learn from it? I mean, one thing the US Govt is always wanting is a well educated Public, well, if you give someone a lifetime copyright, that's just knowledge that some people will never get.
Too bad our world hasn't evolved to do the greater good for Man, instead of the greater good for our Pocketbooks.
This is the same thing that is happening to The Pirate Bay. Stealing copyright material BS, etc.....
Here's a little video that might explain my idea/thinking better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-gzC7_OPOs&feature=related
If it's not worth selling, then by definition it's not worth reading or making available for searching. The desire to read a particular book or to scan that book for later searching or reading means that book has some potential value to someone. Google is recognizing this potential value even if it only pads the number of search results. What Google is doing here is benefitting from the works of other without directly compensating the owner of that work.
The potential upswing of the number of readers for a particular book should be a beneficial consequence of working with Google, not the sole compensation. Also I agree with the opposition's stance, Google should not be able to rewrite copyright law that benefits Google simply by declaring a class-action settlement with the authors... That's what you pay Senators for.
Not worth selling is an economic term for profit based company. It's entirly different from how enjoyable the book may be, or how worth reading it is. You know this since you pretty much said it in the latter part of your post.
The key thing here is that the IP creator isn't benefiting at all from a non published book. They typically sign over publishing rights so if the company sits on it, it's not like they have options. The Google deal just opened up optiosn for IP owners when the Company representing them stonwalls them on getting their work out.
No doubt there is both good and bad, but I'm glad we are just doing nothing, that wasn't working at all.
Copyright is essentially infinite now, it needs to be reigned in to something that is fair to the copyright holder but still does what it was intended to do(grow a robust public domain).
20-30 years should do it.
I do agree that it would be great if the government would take the responsibility for digitizing all the books and making them available (with the right owners properly compensated of course). Unfortunately, it seems like the government has many other problems to deal with at the moment, and books are not their biggest concern.
Amazon, Microsoft, Internet Archive, on the other hand, are simply Google's competitors that have little to do with the settlement but hope that it won't go through.
Amazon asks for explicit permission to scan books not because they are good, but because they scan books to sell them and cannot do it legally under fair-use laws. Google, instead, scans books to make them searchable, which may well be considered fair-use.
Also, the settlement is about out-of-print books, and Amazon does not scan those, because Amazon is about selling stuff, and out-of-print books are out of prints for a reason: they do not sell!
Of course, if Amazon wants to sell a digital edition of Harry Potter, they will ask for a permission first. It will cost them, $10000, but then they will sell 10 million copies of the book and make money.
But the settlement is not about blockbusters. It is about books that are out of print, books that make little or no money. No one can afford to spend $10000 looking for an author of an obscure manuscript, simply because there is a good chance that it will never make a single buck.
So, Google and Amazon are competitors. Amazon is about selling books, and Google is about making books accessible, not only books that make money, but all the books! And then, Amazon, that is not even a party to the settlement, says that they are against it? Why would they be? Is it not because they want to be the only big fish in the pond?
"Google is about making books accessible"
So which is it? To make a book searchable, which if done right only helps you identify the title you want but doesn't help you get TO the content, or to make it "accessible," which implies I can read the whole thing on Google, and don't need to buy a COPY because I've got access to their COPY.
It's called COPYRIGHT for a reason -- only the author has the RIGHT to make a COPY, which he licenses to a publisher, and so on. You want to make a COPY, go get the RIGHT to do it first. Your desire to have a searchable copy of MY work should not outweigh my desire to retain control over my own work. If it's really valuable to you to be able to search my work, shouldn't I be getting compensated for my addition to that value?
EB,
It is both, and no, it does not imply that "[you] can read the whole thing on Google". If you try the service, you will see that you can read the whole thing only for books for which copyright has already expired.
Instead, by making books searchable, in addition to displaying the author and title, like you correctly said, it also makes them more accessible by displaying links to places where you can buy the book, places like Amazon and other retailers.
In theory, it could also display libraries next to you, where you can find the book, which I think would be great.
Copyright is good, because it provides people with incentive to create. However, copyright does not cover all the uses of the creation. There are fair-use provisions. Think about it this way, it is all about benefiting the society in the long run. If you do not provide incentives, people will not create. At the same time, if you do not provide limits (like fair-use rules or expiration on the copyright), the society will benefit less than with the limits in place. This is the reason why rights expire in the first place, so no, they are not absolute rights, to exist out there forever. Instead, they are about a reasonable compromise.
Now, by making books searchable (and, as I just explained, more accessible), Google (or any party for that matter) benefits the society and does not in any way reduce the incentive to create. In fact, I think that authors will only benefit from the fact that people can find their books.
It is true that in the process Google will make some money, but so what? They make money because they do the work of scanning and then running all those services. If there were a lot of volunteers to do the same, competition would drive margins to 0, and Google would not be making any money. It is like with everything else, it is the market.
So let us me understand. Google, authors, and publishers decided to do this deal, this settlement. Amazon, Microsoft, and Internet Archive - all Google rivals I must say - that do not have anything to do with the settlement say that they are against it.
I suggest that we also ask the opinion of other random people and companies. I am sure that once MS promises to feed their employees ice-cream for a year, Ben & Jerry's will join the opposition.
I mean, it is like changing the results of the president election in the US, only because Iraqi insurgents do not like the guy. It does affect them indirectly, them in many other people in the rest of the world. We should let them all vote. If I suggest that, I am sure that supporters will out-file the opposition :))
For those complaining about how Google is 'trampling' the rights of copyright holders, you should probably read the settlement first. The settlement is about how much google will PAY COPYRIGHT HOLDERS for the right to scan their books. They are not stealing anything from anyone. Rather, they are paying to scan out of print works that are not being monetized at all and will then pay royalties on all revenues received back to the copyright holder. If you are a copyright holder of an out of print work and for some reason you feel that you could do better and you don't want them to scan and sell your work, you are fully able to opt out at anytime.
The settlement also requires google to pay royalties into a fund for any works where the copyright holder has 'abandoned' the copyright or is unable to be located. No one loses their copyright, no one is forced to allow google to scan and use their work, and it allows copyright holders an easy way to earn money on material that is out of print, and is earning nothing at all.
Ironically, Microsoft and Amazon had similar book scanning projects in the past, but abandoned them because they felt that they couldn't earn any money from it. So, since google is the only company willing to scan these out of print books, these companies feel it's better for the public and copyright holders to have NO ONE scan the books, rather than one company.
Keep in mind the settlement is not exclusive. ANY COMPANY is allowed to make a similar deal to scan out of print books and pay royalties if they choose to, so where is the harm exactly? Copyright holders get revenue for works that are out of print, they can choose not to participate if they don't want to, and the public gets easy access to work that they could only get access to by finding the same work in a public library where the copyright holder would get nothing in return.
Yeah, Google is seriously evil for trying to do that...
Yes, Google is going to make money off of advertising because of it. Authors and publishers are just too short sighted and think no one else should be able to make any money from something that has to do with their work even if it means they will also be making more money as well.
In general, it would be great to have a copyright reform that would adjust incentives and clarify what counts and what does not count as fair-use. It seems like many forgot why copyright exists in the first place.
However, given that there is no chance that this government will get to the copyright reform any time soon, at the moment, it is about a good deal (the settlement) vs no deal at all. And the only people I see arguing against the deal are either those who do not understand what the deal is about (people who mistakingly think that Google is making someone else's works available for free), or competitors (Amazon, Microsoft, Internet Archive), or people who misunderstand what copyright is actually about and think that by making books searchable Google breaks the law.
What many seem to forget that citing a paragraph from a copyrighted book in a school essay is Ok, even though the student is copying the paragraph. Writing down (copying) the title of the book (no matter how long) on one of those library cards is also Ok. These use cases benefit the society more than they hurt the creator, if at all. Therefore, it is true that copyright rights are important, but they are no unlimited like many seem to suggest.
Fact is google the only one that considers it worth while an probably already work how it going to make money in the long term from it. If Microsoft and gang are to short sighted to do that this there problem.
But they could sign the exact same deal with the publishers and authors with in five minutes if google wins it court case. Reason they are against google is that they do not know how google plans to make money from an cannot figure out way for them to make money and so they gang up and try an stop something which they cannot figure out.
The question about google's intent, and whether they are evil or not, should not be the focus of the court. While Amazon obviously has a vested interest in this settlement, they are right that a judge should not be allowed to re-write copyright law.
They have advantages, they have drawbacks. The advantage is that life goes on for the company even when they are on the losing end by settling it all at once. The drawback is that the consumer typically gets a cupon or discount or some other relativly worthless thing as a result. Lawyers though seem to hit paydirt.
To put it simply, it is a logical fallacy to assume that the information brought to the table must be bad information just because of the person who brought it to the table. It's an ad hominem argument. Who the person (or company) is has no bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of what they have to say.
Regarding the case at hand, I really think there's a lot of misinformation going on. For example, the idea that current copyright laws go on "forever" (i.e., they take too long to 'die'). Well... so what? What *right* do any of us have to books that one person has written and sold to a publisher? Even if the author is dead, a company *paid* for the copyright to that author's books. It is up to the company whether they want to put the book out there or not. If they don't, and we can't get a copy of it, then, yes, that sucks for us. But this whole idea that we somehow have a "right" to that information is completely misguided.
As a writer, I have a serious problem with the idea that all information ought to be available to everyone. If I write something, even if I sell it so that it is available to the public, that in no way makes it the public's property. Yes, the book they bought is their property. The ink, the paper. But what I wrote is mine. And if I choose to sell that to a company, then it belongs to that company. If that company chooses to sit on it, then tough noogies. They choose to sit on it.
If a carpenter designs the most comfortable chair in the world, patents the design, and then decides that he doesn't want to sell it, then that's completely up to him. You can't say, "Hey! Since you won't do anything with it, I'm taking it from you, anyway!" And if you should decide to do that, then you ought to be prosecuted for it.
In Google's case, I don't know if they've broken copyright laws. That is for the courts to decide. But some of the comments on here regarding copyright laws and the seeming "right" to information really bothers me. Maybe, in the end, these people are right. Maybe everyone has a "right" to any book I write. But if that's the case, I'm certainly not going to be writing anymore, because (to put it crassly) I'm not about to write something just to have it stolen from me or whoever I sell it to. Which is how I see it.
How about parties affected by the settlement, in particular, authors and publishers?
"To put it simply, it is a logical fallacy to assume that the information brought to the table must be bad information just because of the person who brought it to the table."
No one automatically assumes that the information is necessarily bad, one should just understand that neither it is to be automatically trusted or given the same weight.
In law, there is this notion of 'legal standing'. If you are not affected by a wrong-doing, you cannot automatically sue on behalf of the victim. The reasons for that are simply about what is practical and what isn't. If everyone would be allowed to have a say on any matter whatsoever, the court would never be able to finish the hearing. No, if you are not a party to the case, like Amazon, why would your right to speak win over mine, or that of anyone else?
If you are willing, the rules of the settlement apply, you get paid, but you do not get to sue Google.
If you are not willing to be part of the settlement, you opt out, the rules of the settlement do not apply to you and you can sue the company separately.
I agree that opt-in vs opt-out is an interesting question. I am not sure what the law says, but I think it is up to the judge to decide. The opt-in system also has problems, since some parties may be not aware of the fact that they are entitled to some sort of compensation due to a decision on a class-action case that they could be part of. Going to court separately is usually not an option, since the loss to every single participant is usually very small, while the associated litigation can be prohibitively expensive.
Soon, there will be arguments over history. When the majority of people get their information from one place, whether that's Google's repository, some other company or consortium, or even a government, then who's history will be recorded? A simple example is WWII. Should we record the Japanese version of events or the Chinese version? How about WWI? The Turks or the Armenians?
We have already seen examples in the United States of educational authorities changing the text of literary works of art to make them "politically correct" on exams and tests. Information is power, power corrupts. It only human nature.
We are watching history unfold right before our eyes.
In a ideal world multiple digital libraries would be set up. But at close to 500million dollars a piece we are lucky one company it doing it at all.
Funny to see how biased is opinion is, just have a look at his history posts (bashing Microsoft on all counts and defending Google on every point, even China).
And no, I bash Microsoft only when I find they deserve it (not there has been a lack of opportunities), and no, I would never trust Google absolutely, or any other corporation for that matter. But while I believe that what they do benefits the society, they have my vote.
An I agree people all around the world need to sit down an have a proper discussion about copyright.
I'm not sure how this will all turn out, so much of it is gray area, but what I do know is that in the long run, the discussions surrounding these events will help determine the direction of digital copyright law.
Personally I think US copyright law is out of control and has been slowly changed and structured over the years to favor large interests. I also feel that the emphasis should be placed on the side of open information rather than on protection, though I understand the importance of fair compensation and credit for one's work.
- by rteichman September 3, 2009 8:26 AM PDT
- You have to ask, if it is only for snippets, why did they scan the whole book? Something does not add up. Second, if Google is doing this for the common good, then the data should be made available to everyone in an open source manner. Regardless, the owner of the IP should have say in how their property used.
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- by apple-pi September 3, 2009 6:17 PM PDT
- rteichman,
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- by knowles2 September 4, 2009 3:36 PM PDT
- fine may be you can spend the 500 million dollars it would take to do it.
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (69 Comments)It is very simple. To make the book searchable, the whole book needs to be scanned (i.e., you need the text of the book to search through it). Once you search for a phrase and it is found, only the snippet with the phrase will be shown (unless the book is no longer under copyright, in which case you will be able to access to the whole text of the book).
Second, there is "common good" and "common good". Making it possible to find a book by typing-in some keywords is good. Making it "available to everyone in an open source manner" would also be great, but often is not possible, simply because Google has no right to make someone else's content "available" without a permission from the rights holder.