European laws present challenges for Google Books
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--As Google closes in on a November 9 deadline to submit a revised settlement in the Google Books case, it continues to pull out all the stops to reassure the world it has the best of intentions.
The controversy over Google's settlement with groups representing book authors and publishers rages on, almost a year after it was first reached. After Google was sued in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission, it reached a proposed settlement in October 2008 that would give it unique rights to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, exciting some librarians but raising the ire of many within the publishing and literary communities.
Nevertheless, Google has made painstaking attempts to engage with its enemies in the publishing world. Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Books, has traveled the country meeting with opponents and supporters, patiently explaining Google's position and preaching the value of a publicly available archive of digital books.
On Thursday, Google hosted a group of four librarians from Europe, where Google has signed partnership agreements with five libraries to discuss the benefits of the project. The settlement is obviously a U.S. matter, but the contentious issues in the settlement do not exactly apply to Europe, because Google says it has not scanned out-of-print but copyright-protected books published in Europe.
Therefore, in Europe Google has only scanned public domain works held by its library partners and books for which it has negotiated scanning rights with rights holders. Still, the settlement process is being watched closely by European authors who have had books published in the U.S., as well as European librarians who are a little jealous over the resources their American counterparts could enjoy under the settlement.
"It's like everyone in the U.S. gets to use cell phones and I'm stuck with a landline," said Sarah Thomas, Bodley's librarian and director of Oxford University's Library Service. "It's a tremendous barrier to advancing knowledge."
Make no mistake: getting this settlement finalized is easily one of Google's highest priorities of the year. There are financial incentives--Google will host links to book stores and place ads on the search result pages--but this is also a core part of Google's mission to organize the world's information.
Even the hardiest Google opponents agree that a digital library of the scope Google is proposing will have tangible benefits for the world. This is especially true for the European libraries, which store books dating as far as the 17th century that are crumbling with the advance of age. Few people are able to see those books because of their value and the remoteness of their location, but putting them online could allow the world to read books they would have once traveled thousands of miles to see, allow researchers from around the world to study their contents, and preserve the knowledge for future generations.
But some, such as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, are wary about a single company controlling such a library. "The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected on the Internet," The Guardian quoted her as saying last week.
In any event, at the moment European libraries are on the outside when it comes to unlocking the knowledge stored in the millions of out-of-print but copyright-protected books on their shelves. Google's argument all along in the U.S. has been that it was allowed to scan those types of books under fair-use laws, which was disputed by authors and publishers in 2005 but authorization to do so is a key part of the proposed settlement.
Copyright laws vary across Europe, but the concept of fair use generally does not exist, and most books are protected by copyright for 70 to 80 years after the death of the author, the librarians said. Historical works are in the public domain, but that's just a fraction of the overall number of books stored in libraries throughout the world.
Out-of-print books will only be available as limited previews to searchers with links to stores at which they can be bought, but those books will be part of a database that is available to researchers and librarians through an institutional subscription. Researchers outside the U.S. won't have access to that database, which means U.S. libraries and universities would have an advantage.
"We ask our researchers what they want, and they say, 'we need a Google Books European settlement. We need access to books that are out of print but are still in copyright,'" said Klaus Ceynowa, deputy director general for the Bavarian State Library in Germany.
Manuela Palafox, head of digital editions at the University of Complutense of Madrid, Spain, took it a step further. "The most important thing in Europe is to review our copyright laws. We need to adapt it to the digital age."
This, of course, is part of the opposition to Google's settlement in the U.S. Instead of leaving it up to Congress to reform U.S. copyright laws to settle once and for all whether digitizing out-of print but copyright-protected books should be allowed, the settlement is granting that unique sweeping right to a single corporation, and forcing others who may want to digitize these books to cut licensing deals with an organization funded by Google and staffed by directors picked by the groups representing authors and publishers.
So while Google works feverishly on a new settlement in the U.S. ahead of a November 9th deadline, its legal battles may be just beginning. Chinese authors are reportedly gearing up to oppose Google's efforts, and its mission of organizing the world's information may be stymied if European copyright laws forbid the digitization of a huge swath of books published in the last century.
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. 
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/eu-may-clear-way-for-googles-digital-book-project-1805790.html
How this is going to impact on exclusive publishing rights and the like I don't know but it seems a bit too easy.
One thing that's also not often mentioned is that Google is planning to sell digital copies of as many of these books as possible itself rather than linking to external buyers:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/google-starts-new-chapter-in-the-battle-for-ebooks-1804446.html
http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=2110325
The thing is, Humans dislike change. I'm downright certain that not everyone supported the American revolution.
After all, the Internet was made to facilitate the free flow of information. If a government doesn't like it, tough.
Bloody knee-jerk reactionary assumptions.
Figures. What's next?
It may take 20 or 30 years until real free information is provided by authors and content creators follow the Creative Commons strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_commons) instead of private corporations. When that happens I wonder how much knowledge and creative ideas will be lost because corporations will still demand their tax for the content they think they own. Or perhaps such information will be available but just considered illegal contraband if not tagged with a money stream back to the corporations that hold the copyrights.
I hate the concept of copyright law in general.. it extends royalties for a work that the holder doesn't actually perform. It prevents innovation and block new ideas that may "borrow" from the ideas presented. If left unchecked I am sure that copyright law would extend to royalty payment demands whenever a concept, tune, or work of content is used in any medium including singing a tune, writing a sentence, or sketching a symbol.
Just wait until some idiot is allowed to copyright "the" or copyright the process of "seeing".
When will it end?
Suppose your feeble wisdom was good enough for you to write a great piece of science fiction or a mystery novel. Normally this would earn you millions of dollars. However, without protection, some schmo rips you off by taking your book, and distributes free copies of it.
So now, your time spent writing the next great novel is wasted and you're broke.
The model isn't broken, its just that someone is trying to game the system.
Also note that its not European authors who are siding with Google but 'librarians'. They would love to have digital copies of their books for research. They're not the ones who will lose $$$ or their rights thanks to Google.
As for having the exclusive rights to scan I still have mixed feelings about it, I understand Google's point of view in regards to the work involved in scanning al these books but we also have to consider that corporations, specially in these days, are dynamic, they merge, sold, bought and Google direction intents today may be ok but we do not know what will happen in the future and having a corporation having exclusive rights to something is always risky.
And if any of your fools don't like that and go AHEAD and write a book and then see for your self, how profitable that it.
OPT OUT is always a bad concept.
i think the open source movement and free software movement should be also introduce in the sharing of knowledge and academic books... toward open knowledge and open publications.
There should be a limit to "Open Source".
Change is good, but their needs to be a control factor.
Maybe OPT-IN is the correct model for authors.
- by aintnorainbowdorothy October 28, 2009 2:47 PM PDT
- There should never be a single entity allowed to do something as differentiating as scanning all the books published the world over. Google is acting as if it is the only entity that can do this. Amazon, with the Kindle, Sony with it's eBook reader, the Nook from Barnes and Noble are examples of companies that could do the same, although B&N doesn't have the wherewithall to do the job. Microsoft or IBM certainly have the capabilities. And don't forget, those two companies have the money in hand to buy Google, either singly or jointly.
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(17 Comments)Google wants to own the world and I for one disapprove. Their motto is a joke. The idea of being the single source for digitized books makes it obvious that it does 'evil', just by wanting to be the single source. And that brings up the wonder of will Google digitize, say, Beowulf in the original language and then the many iterations of it as it was translated during the years after it originally appeared? I sincerly doubt it.
I say let any company with the wherewithall and the want to be allowed to digitize all the books ever written.
Google is evil, just as Microsoft is thought to be or IBM is.