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The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

fortune.com

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Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#11

Post by fapjacks »

kybernetikos wrote: post #8

So I'm confused about this. Do Google actually own all of the books they've scanned? If I scanned millions of other peoples books and kept the scans, wouldn't I be in breach of copyright?

You don't have to own a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use. Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool over a lot of eyes lately.

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#12

Post by kybernetikos »

fapjacks wrote: post #11
kybernetikos wrote: post #8

So I'm confused about this. Do Google actually own all of the books they've scanned? If I scanned millions of other peoples books and kept the scans, wouldn't I be in breach of copyright?

You don't have to own a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use. Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool over a lot of eyes lately.

Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#13

Post by gweinberg »

kybernetikos wrote: post #12
fapjacks wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to own a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use. Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool over a lot of eyes lately.

Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?

Whether you bought a copy of the book or borrowed it is pretty much irrelevant. Particularly if your computer is on line.

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#14

Post by Zikes »

kybernetikos wrote: post #12
fapjacks wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to own a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use. Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool over a lot of eyes lately.

Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?

Google scans, stores, and indexes billions of web pages, with obvious and fairly incontestable public benefits. How are books any different? The contents of an article, a blog post, and a NY Times Best Seller all get the exact same copyright protections and considerations.

What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page to your hard drive.

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#15

Post by haberman »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #9

I'm bewildered that such enlightened people as Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin don't grok the value of this resource to writers. Just an anecdote: the other day I heard a story about an FBI agent tasked with eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Malcom X. Due to the nature of the assignment, his job was to listen very carefully to everything he had to say. The agent wound up coming around to his perspective. This stor…

I have another similar story! This one kind of blows my mind.

In 1978, Corpus Christi College in Oxford, England was being renovated, which involved breaking down a wall that had been standing for centuries. When they broke open this wall, they found that there was a leaf from a manuscript dating to the 16th century. It had been stuffed in there as a sort of building material.

On this leaf was music, which was quickly identified as being a fragment of a piece by Thomas Tallis (c.1505 - 1585) called Gaude Gloriosa. The piece is known because it survives in other sources. It's pretty popular among music from the period and several recordings of it have been made in the last 50 years.

But what was unexpected is that the text on this leaf was not the same text as we have in the other sources. This text was in English instead of Latin. Clearly the composer had reworked his piece to fit a different text. But what was this other text? Nobody knew, and the pages they found in this wall were highly incomplete, so they only had a small fragment of this alternate text.

The mystery wasn't solved until just last year (2015). A British scholar named David Skinner typed the fragmentary text into Google, and out popped an excerpt from a book. It turns out the author of the text is Henry VIII's sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr. 37 years after the discovery of the leaf, and almost 500 years after the actual event, Google allowed scholars to connect the dots on this mystery.

(I'm not 100% sure whether the search that revealed the mystery came from Google books or the regular Google search, since the scholar who did the search didn't specify. But since the complete works of Katherine Parr are on Google Books (https://books.google.com/books/about/Katherine_Parr.html?id=...), it seems likely that it was a Google Books search.)

By the way, this whole story is being published in an upcoming paper called: ‘Deliuer me from my deceytful ennemies': A Tallis Contrafactum in Time of War. The abstract is available here: http://www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites... (scroll to the bottom)

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#16

Post by notahacker »

Zikes wrote: post #14
kybernetikos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?

Google scans, stores, and indexes billions of web pages, with obvious and fairly incontestable public benefits. How are books any different? The contents of an article, a blog post, and a NY Times Best Seller all get the exact same copyright protections and considerations. What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page to your hard drive.

The web pages are open public access in machine-retrievable format though. Google purposely doesn't index content that supplies a robots file or header requesting it not to be indexed, and certainly doesn't borrow human accounts to allow Googlebot to also index registered-members-only online content.

I'd argue that Google ought to have a similarly strong presumption that work distributed only in a non robot-parseable format and only for a fee isn't intended to be indexed in a publicly accessible database, unless the copyright owner expressly indicates otherwise. Especially if they haven't even paid the copyright holder the regular fee to read the work

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#17

Post by Oletros »

Someone1234 wrote: post #7
Oletros wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But Google then takes the digitised books and utilises that content for profit (every time you click buy, Google gets a cut of the sale) Google doesn't use the books scanned for profit. If they sell a book is because they already have it in Google Books, is not one of the scanned

They do definitely profit. They either gain referral fees, or they refer to themselves (Play Store) and thus get effectively free advertising (that would cost them money otherwise). When you click a link to Amazon for a specific book from a third party website, Amazon pays that website money for that referral. It is no different here except that one Google department sometimes sends it to another Google department.

> Fiction: Google is paid by booksellers like Amazon to include links on Google Books pages.

> Fact: We provide links to booksellers on Google Books pages because we want to make it easier for users to buy books and for publishers to sell them. Booksellers don't pay to have their links included in Google Books, and Google doesn't receive any money if you buy a book from one of these retailers.

http://www.google.es/googlebooks/perspectives/facts.html

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#18

Post by douche »

Someone1234 wrote: post #4
state wrote: post #2

Seems like this article is sort of preaching to the choir around here. I'd be interested to hear if anyone on HN agrees with the Author's Guild or can make their argument in an interesting way.

I'm going to make an argument for the Author's Guild even if I disagree with them... Google is taking books and digitising them. That within its own right isn't illegal. But Google then takes the digitised books and utilises that content for profit (every time you click buy, Google gets a cut of the sale) and what's more the court has withheld the author's ability to decide how they want their books to be advertised/…

> Google is taking books and digitising them. That within its own right isn't illegal. But Google then takes the digitised books and utilises that content for profit (every time you click buy, Google gets a cut of the sale) and what's more the court has withheld the author's ability to decide how they want their books to be advertised/presented.

How different is this than if I make a website, review their book, and provide an Amazon affiliate link?

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#19

Post by rememberlenny »

haberman wrote: post #15
Eric_WVGG wrote: post #9

I'm bewildered that such enlightened people as Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin don't grok the value of this resource to writers. Just an anecdote: the other day I heard a story about an FBI agent tasked with eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Malcom X. Due to the nature of the assignment, his job was to listen very carefully to everything he had to say. The agent wound up coming around to his perspective. This stor…

I have another similar story! This one kind of blows my mind. In 1978, Corpus Christi College in Oxford, England was being renovated, which involved breaking down a wall that had been standing for centuries. When they broke open this wall, they found that there was a leaf from a manuscript dating to the 16th century. It had been stuffed in there as a sort of building material. On this leaf was music, which was quickl…

This reminds me a lot of the entire Digital Humanities revolution with computers. There is a lot of inconsistency with museum records. Especially for art that is collected for cultural value from certain time periods, the authors are misrepresented.

John Resig does a lot of writing/research on the misattribution of woodblock printings and their sources. Through digitizing the works and being able to use simple image recognition tools, museums across the world are able to iron out inconsistencies.

Re: The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning

#20

Post by criddell »

epistasis wrote: post #3

>In the “friends of the court” brief, it says the law was never intended to “permit a wealthy for-profit entity to digitize millions of works and to cut off authors’ licensing of their reproduction, distribution, and public display rights.” This "cutoff" language is part of what makes the Author's Guild argument fall down. The authors still get all the normal licensing rights as before, so the argument appears wrong…

> What the guild is actually trying to say, I think, is that this new use is something Google should have to pay for.

That doesn't make sense to me. Books are no different than any other material, are they? If Google indexes this page, should they have to first get permission and pay somebody (us or maybe HN).

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