Advocates: Google Books can bridge digital divide
Much of the discussion around Google's proposed book settlement has centered on copyright law and competition. Advocates for access got their say Thursday.
A coalition of civil-rights and disability groups in favor of Google's book-scanning project held a press conference Thursday to marshal support for improving access to knowledge, the key benefit of Google's deal with authors and publishers to create a new kind of digital library. They fear that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain digital access to knowledge previously stored in libraries at expensive universities or rich communities could be hampered by the opposition to the settlement from some authors and privacy advocates.
Companies and organizations are rapidly lining up on either side of the proposed settlement, reached last October, after Google was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission from rights holders. The deadline to submit comments has been extended to next Tuesday as the result of the last-minute realization that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had planned to take its servers down for maintenance over the holiday weekend, though the deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement remains Friday.
Those opposing the settlement have perhaps protested most loudly over the past six months, but Google put together a group of organizations who stand to make huge gains, if the settlement is approved--and not the monetary kind--to make their case on Thursday.
Blind people, for example, have access to a special library run by the Library of Congress that converts print books into formats readable by the visually impaired, but that library--in existence since 1931--only has 70,000 texts, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind. If the settlement is approved in October, it will give "print-disabled" people "access to more books than we have ever had in human history," he said.
Advocates for the blind found themselves on the opposite side of the Author's Guild, one of the parties to the Google settlement, earlier this year, after the guild protested that the text-to-speech reader on Amazon's Kindle could hurt the market for audiobooks, prompting Amazon to give control of the feature to authors.
Settlement supporters like Lateef Mtima, a professor at Howard University, compared the possibility of opening up access to the books to his experiences growing up in Harlem in the 1960s, then transferring to Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school for gifted science and math students. His fellow students at Stuyvesant had already been exposed to a great deal of the literature covered in English classes at the school, making Mtima realize that he had to catch up to be competitive.Providing digital access to literature and textbooks would allow libraries at all schools to simply maintain PCs, rather than having to devote resources toward acquiring and maintaining books, several supporters argued. Many communities in poorer parts of the country don't have the resources to maintain libraries competitive with those in richer communities, and lack of access to knowledge makes it harder for students in those communities to learn, according to Wade Henderson of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights.
Whether or not Judge Denny Chin is swayed by these arguments remains to be seen, since opponents who believe Google overstepped its bounds by scanning copyright-protected books will likely make the case that two wrongs don't make a right. Still, they underscore exactly what is at stake with Google's library project: a chance to transform the way the world accesses knowledge with an extremely difficult undertaking that few companies or organizations outside of governments are thought capable of matching at the present time.
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. 
Libraries want to cease buying printed books? Wonderful. Just make sure if they have 100 computer screens that they pay for 100 digital copies. They pay for each hard copy they circulate, same goes for each digital copy available on a screen. No piracy in libraries!
Audio for the blind? Outstanding! Audio books go for about $20 plus per copy. Make sure the copyright owner gets the money for all copies used, not just one copy networked on 100 players.
Copyright came into being so that writers would have a financial incentive to continue to create works. There is nothing in the Google plan that furthers that aim. Let Google pay up first rather hope their plan "could" make more money for authors. Let THEM prove it is a better way in advance.
Google doesn't care about intellectual property rights, they just want to scan more fodder to use as bait for selling ads.
There is a difference between an audio book read by the author or a voice actor and text to speech software. If you own the rights to read the text, you own the rights to have a computer read the text for you.
... great, it is like saying "if you think it is such a good idea to employ single mothers from a poor neighborhood, your should pay each at least $100 an hour", when no one else is willing to help at all.
Here is a good fact for you: no one is willing to digitize older books with little commercial value, because it costs a lot to scan a book, and there is a good chance you will never make any money on it. If the company is made to pay extra to ask each copyright holder in advance, no older or less mainstream books will ever get scanned. They will literally rot into obscurity.
"Libraries want to cease buying printed books? Wonderful. Just make sure if they have 100 computer screens that they pay for 100 digital copies."
... of course this presumes that someone (and who it will be if not Google?) will scan the books first...
"Audio for the blind? Outstanding! Audio books go for about $20 plus per copy."
... except that right now, how many books have audio version available for them? 0.01%? 0.1%?
"Copyright came into being so that writers would have a financial incentive to continue to create works. There is nothing in the Google plan that furthers that aim."
... but is there anything in the Google plan that harms writers? I mean, notwithstanding those very hypothetical cases like, "oh my God, they scanned my book and no people can actually find it online!".
"Google doesn't care about intellectual property rights, they just want to scan more fodder to use as bait for selling ads"
... and it many seem not to understand what intellectual property rights are about. Yes, they are about incentives for writers. But why? Because, more generally, they are about benefiting the society in the long run, and the settlement does benefit the society. You want a proof? If a book is scanned and made searchable, people can find it. If it is not scanned, no one but an old librarian knows that it even exists!!!
Brin and Page need to be brought up on Federal RICO charges for trying to pull off this massive intellectual property theft.
I have a better idea, lets also bring up RICO charges against every pupil in an elementary school who quotes "Mary had a little lamb".
Do you know nothing of fair-use laws?
... ehh, and who exactly will pay for scanning books? It does not have to be a commercial company, but the money still must come from somewhere.
@sundeeps: Because no one come over and say they want to do it. Just a reminder, the Google Books deal is NOT exclusive.
BTW, microsoft started this however they were pulled back due to the legal threats.
" Is google going to scan all the books or just the most popular ones or rather the ones which it can make money."
The settlement is about out-of-print books, they are out-of-print for a reason: they do not make a lot of money.
I do not think that it necessarily should be only 5 years, but it should be something reasonable. Make it 20 or 50, but 50 years after the author dies? Common!!!
Not only do you need to know when the author dies before you know whether the copyright has expired. It also seem to have this weird affect that those who happen to live longer enjoy better copyright terms! It is like, if you write a book when you are eighty, you have roughly 50 years of "incentive", while if you write the same book when you are 20, you have roughly 110 years!
You Should Not Think Only In Terms Of Written Works.
The Price Of Some Meds Is Outrageous.
Five Years Is More Than Enough To Squeeze The Consumers.
You Want The Squeeze To Continue ?
Create Something Else.
- by InklingBooks September 7, 2009 2:23 PM PDT
- CNET continues to puff the settlement with little concern for the underlying issues. If you'd like to read this debate unfiltered by CNET, you can find both the objecting and supporting statements filed with the court at:
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
-
- by apple-pi September 8, 2009 7:13 PM PDT
- "I kid you not. The German objection linked above is 25 pages long and, as I write this, it's one of 33 objections. In contrast, only three "Briefs supporting the settlement" have been filed and their total page count is 8 pages, although Sony does claim that it plans to file something "no longer than 15 pages" by last Friday."
- Like this
-
(21 Comments)http://thepublicindex.org/documents/responses
Pay especially attention to the objections filed by the Germany government. They describe how this settlement violates virtually every copyright law and treaty in existence. This statement from page 13 is a good summary: "The opt out mechanism stands on its head the most fundamental and essential
underlying principal of international copyright law and the laws of Germany -- exclusivity.
Under both U.S. and German copyright law, no one may use an author's intellectual property
without permission."
http://thepublicindex.org/docs/letters/germany.pdf
Arguments against the settlement are typically weighty, principled, and well argued. Arguments against tend to be brief and trite, typically some variation on "Yeah, free books."
I kid you not. The German objection linked above is 25 pages long and, as I write this, it's one of 33 objections. In contrast, only three "Briefs supporting the settlement" have been filed and their total page count is 8 pages, although Sony does claim that it plans to file something "no longer than 15 pages" by last Friday. Sony's argument thus far is that the settlement "may have a profoundly positive impact on the market for e-book readers and related devices"--a variation on the "yeah, free books" theme.
The Google settlement is not a complicated issue. It is theft of copyright pure and simple, with the greatest harm falling on writers around the world too old or too ill in health to be aware that they needed to opt-out by last Friday or they'd be (and now are) forcibly opted in without their knowledge or consent.
The real problem is that that for the better part of the last year most of the tech press in this country has done little more than echo Google press releases, with CNET being a typical example.
... oh, God, since when do we measure the validity of an argument by the number of pages? I have better idea, let's measure the quality of out constitution by weight!!! the heavier the book, the better it is!!!
"The Google settlement is not a complicated issue. It is theft of copyright pure and simple, with the greatest harm falling on writers around the world too old or too ill in health to be aware that they needed to opt-out by last Friday or they'd be (and now are) forcibly opted in without their knowledge or consent"
... this is the most stupid and paranoid piece I have read yet. The "theft" presumes that their rights are gone, while they not! The paragraph presumes that authors (or their heirs for that matter) cannot opt out the book from the program, which they can, at any time, before or after this this week, next year, next century. The "opted in" part is only about their book being made searchable and making money for them if it is out-of-print (that is, not making money for them at all).
"The real problem is that that for the better part of the last year most of the tech press in this country has done little more than echo Google press releases, with CNET being a typical example."
The real problem seems to be that some who do not know or understand much about the issue in question, are not intelligent enough to go and read on the subject before posting outright lies.