The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by Oletros » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 5:14 AM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #26

Oletros wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/go…

Except Google links to their own store in the US (Play Store) which they definitely do profit from directly. Click the "Buy Book" link here: https://books.google.com/books/about/Harry_Potter_and_the_So... Unless Google are claiming they make no cut from Play Store book sales, which is laughable.

And, as I said, they are not profiting of the scanned book because they own the rights to sell the vook in their store.

Unless you're trying to ay that Google can only link to stores that are not their own, which is laughable

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

#42

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 7:44 AM UTC

thedanfilter wrote: post #37

dragonwriter wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a similar way, I could _borrow_ books from the library, take them home and digitise them, then return the library book while retaining the digital _copy_. I'm pretty sure this is not allowed under copyright law. Its, on first glance, a violation of the copyright owner's exclusive rights to create copies, sure. Whether its actually infringement or not depends on whether it falls in one of the exceptions to the ex…

I'm not so much disagreeing with what you have said, as obviously the various courts this has already been through hold a similar position on the matter, however, I would like to emphasise two points: 1) Google continue to possess _copies_ of books that they do not own. Hence my suggesting they purchase the books (i.e. I don't think that partnerships with libraries is enough). To offer the service of Google Books the…

Actually, while the amount of the source work used is an express.fair use consideration, more.of the source work can way in favor of fair use or against fair use depending on the circumstances, and many things that involve whole works (e.g., time shifting) have expressly been held to be fair use. It is simply false to say that fair use is usually a very small portion.

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

#43

Post by saurik » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 8:35 AM UTC

derekp7 wrote: post #39

lelandbatey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your example quite a lot. I feel like if Google where providing a service that only indexed books, but did not provide any content, the authors guild would not have a leg to stand on. In this altered Google Books service, let's say I search for the following phrase: Then they were looking at the familiar environs of the ISS Flight Control Room, which was at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The director of miss…

The thing is, often times (and I'm assuming it is based on concessions with book publishers) they only show a very small amount of context for the quote -- just enough so you can make a decision if that was really what you were looking for (essentially what falls under common fair use guidelines). And they do have links to purchase the book.

They normally show you multiple pages surrounding the search result. I have often been able to use the result of a Google book search to never need to buy my own real copy.

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

#44

Post by apress » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 3:24 PM UTC

jim-greer wrote: post #24

criddell wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

Fair use allows for this kind of thing, but is fuzzy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use The web is a little different. One factor is that robots.txt is effectively an opt-out. But no, in general indexing a site doesn't require permission.

Publishers can opt out of the book indexing, too (kind of like robots.txt) https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html

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

#45

Post by SixSigma » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #43

derekp7 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, often times (and I'm assuming it is based on concessions with book publishers) they only show a very small amount of context for the quote -- just enough so you can make a decision if that was really what you were looking for (essentially what falls under common fair use guidelines). And they do have links to purchase the book.

They normally show you multiple pages surrounding the search result. I have often been able to use the result of a Google book search to never need to buy my own real copy.

Same here. I've used it to find the source of sentences for referencing in my academic papers. And read a page either side to make sure the context is appropriate.

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

#46

Post by Oletros » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 4:09 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #43

derekp7 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, often times (and I'm assuming it is based on concessions with book publishers) they only show a very small amount of context for the quote -- just enough so you can make a decision if that was really what you were looking for (essentially what falls under common fair use guidelines). And they do have links to purchase the book.

They normally show you multiple pages surrounding the search result. I have often been able to use the result of a Google book search to never need to buy my own real copy.

> They normally show you multiple pages surrounding the search result.

Yes, when the copyright holder has given permission

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

#47

Post by Zikes » Wed, Feb 10, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #25

derekp7 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all the copyright holders have to do is put a robots.txt file at the beginning of the book, and all is good? And really, there is no law that I'm aware of requiring Google (or anyone else) to honor robots.txt.

I don't think robots.txt has any legal standing, but I do think the fact that Google is willing to respect requests not to index content from everyone except print publishers of paid content is indicative of bad faith on their part.

robots.txt actually has little to nothing to do with copyright, and more to do with "unauthorized computer access" which is protected by the CPAA.

It's a guard against accidental access or publishing of sensitive data - which isn't necessarily copyrighted but has other legal protections - as well as placing an unwanted burden on the server.

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

#48

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 2:28 PM UTC

jacobr1 wrote: post #29

notahacker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Especially if they haven't even paid the copyright holder the regular fee to read the work They have though. All the works scanned were either purchased by google in hardcopy form, or scanned in partnership with libraries that had purchased the books.

If I borrowed from a library and kept a complete scan of the book when returning it, copyright law would still apply. Libraries as far as I know do not have the right to authorise third parties to copy entirities of others work.

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

#49

Post by kybernetikos » Thu, Feb 11, 2016, 6:54 PM UTC

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.

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

Web pages are intended to be copied by the user - it's pretty much impossible to use them otherwise. Books are not.