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‘Book publisher steals Google laptops: An eye for a copyright’
June 6, 2007 | 10:50 am
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By David Rothman
“Angered by Google’s attempts to copy their works, publishers have decided to strike back against the ad broker by stealing its technology. Late last week, at New York City’s BookExpo America, the CEO of Macmillan Publishers pilfered two laptops from a booth where Google was promoting its Book Search service, part of an effort to convert the world’s books into digital format.” – The Register. Also see item in Macmillan CEO Richard Charkin’s blog.
Update, 7:05 a.m., June 7: A Charkin rebuttal to TeleBlog commenters, plus a follow-up in his blog to the article in the Register. Please note that his beef is over certain aspects of the Google library project (“digitises…copyright books without permission and without payment”) rather than Google Book Search itself. GBS just happened to be a handy target.
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Comments:
What a childish display.
Clever.
Hardly clever. It’s at best stupid and at worst deliberately misleading. It’s a false analogy that furthers the misapprehension that Google is stealing books and giving them away for free. Google Book Search is intended to provide *pointers to books* when searching for information; it only displays a small amount of context (3-4 pages) to aid the user’s decision on whether or not the book is relevant. And *then* they point you toward the publisher to *buy a copy*.
GBS is intended to fight the author’s greatest enemy: obscurity. It exists as part of the ‘long tail,’ and that will put more money in authors’ pockets. Participating publishers have already noted increase in sales.
Could a dedicated reader use GBS to read a book for free? Likely so, with a lot of effort. I wouldn’t want to slog though a book in that way myself. I’ll go so far as to claim that people who will do so *aren’t going to buy it anyway*, so there’s no lost sale there, is there?
What a pity that nobody reported the thief.
The beef is not with Google Book Search. Google asks permission before putting a book up. The problem is with the Google Library project where Google digitises in copyright books without permission and without payment. This is, in the opinion of most authors and publishers, a theft of intellectual property. Hence the ‘heist’ and hence the lawsuit against Google. Wherre Google works with copyright owners there can be real benefits all round. It is when they decide they know better than the law that things go wrong. Incidentally, there was no need to report the thief – he reported himself – and returned the laptops immediately on request.
Well, the demonstration did play well to the “copyright is just like physical property” crowd (of whom there are a fair number around, especially in the publishing and entertainment industries.) But for those who see copyright as a limited monopoly– which better reflects its legal and historical basis in this country– it seemed more like a stunt with dubious relevance.
That said, a more precise analogy would be harder to stage at BEA than just picking up a laptop. Let’s see– I suppose you could have gone around and digitized all the BEA booth and presentation material (which is both public and presumable copyright), made a search index of it, and offered up snippets and pointers to the general public (but excluding any presenter or booth who asked not to be in the index). Though that would both be more difficult to arrange, and also leave much of one’s audience going “Cool. So, what’s the problem with this again?”
Google Library Project ~= Google Book Search. GBS can’t exist without the library project, and the library project is useless without GBS.
Any claim that the issue is over the library project independent of GBS is disingenuous, likely intentionally so.