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Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

bloomberg.com

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Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#61

Post by detaro »

nkurz wrote: post #60
detaro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement. Tons of people do it. What you do with the scans afterwards matters more.

Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement. At least in the US, you are overstating the certainty. While I agree with you that it should not be infringement, prior to this ruling, the legal status of scanning books you own for personal use was not clear. The qualified expert opinion I got regarding personal scanning was from a law school professor specializing in copyright (and who actually partici…

Interesting and surprising given that companies exist that offer it as a service, but I stand corrected.

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#62

Post by nkurz »

detaro wrote: post #61
nkurz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement. At least in the US, you are overstating the certainty. While I agree with you that it should not be infringement, prior to this ruling, the legal status of scanning books you own for personal use was not clear. The qualified expert opinion I got regarding personal scanning was from a law school professor specializing in copyright (and who actually partici…

Interesting and surprising given that companies exist that offer it as a service, but I stand corrected.

They exist, but are well aware of the risks. And sometimes they find it wise not to test the legal boundaries:

  Any book you cannot scan?

  Unfortunately, WE CANNOT SCAN ANY PUBLICATION BY McGraw 
  Hill. They do not allow us to scan their publications. When 
  we receive any publication by McGraw Hill from customers, 
  we will return it back by charging actual postage fee."
http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php#8a

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#63

Post by shmulkey18 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #56
gshubert17 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask where you scanned your books? I've used 1dollarscan.com before for some book scans, which worked pretty well.

1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist. I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.

What kind of guillotine paper cutter did you purchase? How many page books can it cut through?

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#64

Post by conover »

skybrian wrote: post #53
ap22213 wrote: post #43

I'm not sure that I agree with this ruling. Although Google says that they're using it for one specific purpose, I can imagine that they'll use it for other things like improving their search and ad technologies. If that's the case, then wouldn't Google's work be considered derivative of the original content? Why should the authors involved not be able to re-sell those digitalized versions to other companies (especia…

It's also possible that someone who reads a book might learn something from it and go on to make a lot of money based on what they learned, without compensating the author. Should this be different for machine learning?

Textbook authors hate them!

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#65

Post by Silhouette »

detaro wrote: post #51
an0nym1ty wrote: post #28

>Google has scanned more than 20 million books since 2004 without the permission of the authors. I am blown away how this is ruled legal, but in many cases scanning books as an individual is considered copyright infringement. As though they don't reap financial benefit from expanding the scope of the data they control? It's their entire business model...

Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement. Tons of people do it. What you do with the scans afterwards matters more.

Book scanning is essentially a variation of format shifting, and debate about the legality of format shifting has been going on for as long as modern digital technologies have existed. For better or worse, it is definitely a grey area, and definitely subject to variation between jurisdictions. Large scale rightsholders have been doing some unpleasant things to try to defend their profits against the push to legitimise/legalise format shifting in Europe, for example.

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#66

Post by heimatau »

joering2 wrote: post #47
heimatau wrote: post #42

I think it's important to mention that Google only returns 'snippets' of the text. The entire book is searchable and indexed but Google book-scanning project prevents use to read the entire book. The court ruled this is fair use since it enables the searcher to find out if the searched book has substantial information regarding their research/searching.

One could wonder if the same rule would apply to music. Would it be okay to have 30 seconds of any song available free online, just so that you could search for a lyrics of the song you heard on the radio, and then match it with 30 sec audio clip to find out whether the song is the one you were looking for.

30 second clips (which would be about 14% of most songs) wouldn't be the equivalent. Since google is only providing less than a handful of pages in a ~300 page book (1%).

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#67

Post by nommm-nommm »

mangeletti wrote: post #16
baldfat wrote: post #4

As a former librarian I say YES! The typical librarian actually doesn't fight for the access of materials but fights to enforce copy right stricter than the copy right law even calls for. At my college I took down the sign that said "No Copying of Books" at the photo copier and I put in place the actual copy right law. I can't tell you how many visiting librarians were "shocked" I did that. Well we also allowed bottl…

This is awesome. I can remember clearly, in junior high school, the librarian informing us that we were only allowed to copy six pages of a book for homework assignments. I don't really have a strong opinion on much of this (one way or the other), because I'm not well enough informed on the topic, but I remember feeling weird about it, becaus the library aid made us feel like criminals for wanting to copy more than 6…

Libraries are not becoming obsolete.

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#68

Post by ChuckMcM »

shmulkey18 wrote: post #63
ChuckMcM wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist. I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.

What kind of guillotine paper cutter did you purchase? How many page books can it cut through?

This one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BQGK1FQ/ although I replaced some of the clamp hardware as it didn't hold glossy magazines as well as I would have liked.

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#69

Post by petra »

gshubert17 wrote: post #26
ChuckMcM wrote: post #13

Ok this is pretty cool, I've been waiting for the 2nd Circuit to decide this. Now to see if the Supreme Court will take it up. I believe that this would also clear up a service that scans your books and sends you the digitized version. That would seem to be fair use of my own library as well. I spent about $1200 getting roughly a 1/3 of the volumes I've collected over the years digitized at 600 DPI so that I could ha…

May I ask where you scanned your books? I've used 1dollarscan.com before for some book scans, which worked pretty well.

Actually , if you're outside the u.s. and you're interested in buying a book that's not availble electronically from Amazon, the cheaper way is usually send it from Amazon directly to 1dollarscan, and they send you the scanned ebook by email.

Re: Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project

#70

Post by yohui »

gojomo wrote: post #40

This is a great win for fair-use, and matches Google's original rationalization for why their scanning was justified. Note, though, that Google in the middle years of this dispute sought to acquiesce to a class-action settlement with the Author's Guild. That would have more-or-less abandoned the (strong and ultimately successful) fair-use argument, and set up a system where Google and the Author's Guild were economic…

Reading the article, I do not see how rejecting the settlement between Google and the Authors' Guild improved the situation vis-à-vis censorship and privacy. I also do not see how approving the settlmenet would have prevented others from reaching a similar arrangement with the Authors' Guild, since Google was not granted exclusive rights. Nor do I see how the settlement would have threatened fair use: it would only have released Google from the burden of continuing to fight on behalf of fair use in this case, not that someone else could not have taken up the fair use argument.

Practically, the result of rejecting the settlement seems to have been a slowdown in the pace of digitization, and that readers are left with still no way to easily access orphaned works.

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