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Google Books battles: Copyright, not Google, is the real villain, says Stanford fellow
November 17, 2009 | 2:52 am
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By David Rothman
“So far, Google has scanned 10 million books. Two million are old enough to be free of copyright, and another 2 million are still in print (Google has made separate agreements with the publishers of those books). The other 6 million are in copyright but out of print, many of them orphans. Thanks to the madness of recent copyright extensions, that category is certain to get bigger all the time. Congress has tried and failed for years to pass legislation dealing with orphan works… Congress and its enthrallment to entertainment lobbyists created this mess. Reset the balance of copyright to something fair for authors and consumers, and all the objections to the Google Books settlement evaporate.” – Larry Downes, nonresident fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, in a CNET opinion piece.
Related: An unpopular view of Google Books, by Downes.
Disclosure/reminder: I own a speck of Google stock as a long-term retirement investment, though you’d never know it from some of the posts I’ve done on the proposed Google Books settlement.
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Comments:
Copyright law is for the purpose of protecting artists and ensuring that they get money for their work, in principle at least, right? So what’s with the weird copyright laws in the US? Shouldn’t books and so on enter the public domain when the author or authors die? Last I heard, you can’t collect money for your work when you’re dead.
True, Ben, but your heirs can. And since they have no personal pride invested in the book they are far more likely than the original author(s) to treat the copyright as a kind of free lottery ticket — worth hanging on to in case Hollywood discovers the book, but not worth spending any time on making it available to the public.
I was always taught that rights had to be earnt through obligations. Copyright seems to be the exception.
I quote: “Shouldn’t books and so on enter the public domain when the author or authors die?”
Yes, and when you die, shouldn’t your home, your car and your savings revert to the State rather than going to your heirs? Heirs, I might add, that would include an aged spouse. After all, you can’t work anymore. That’s not hypothetical. High estate taxes are intended to do just that. The really rich exploit loopholes and evade them. The merely hardworking are the ones who get robbed.
What an author earns from his writing isn’t a paycheck for last week’s labors, so it isn’t something that should stop with his death. It’s an investment as much as buying a home, saving money, or building up a business is. And that investment should continue to earn money for those the author chooses to reward and it should do for some reasonable time after death. The fact that Hollywood/Disney bought a too-long extension to copyright doesn’t mean that protection for ordinary people shouldn’t exist after death.
I loathe Ayn Rand’s shrill and selfish attitude as much as anyone, but there’s a good reason her ideas remain popular year after year and seem to have grown even more popular recently. She does provide ammunition to use against those who’re equally shrill and selfish on the other side of the political spectrum, the takers, those who consume without producing, people who read but don’t write, people who like to listen to music but can’t create music anyone else wants to listen to. They’re the people who want everything to be online for them for free.
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And a quote from the second poster: “And since they have no personal pride invested in the book they are far more likely than the original author(s) to treat the copyright as a kind of free lottery ticket — worth hanging on to in case Hollywood discovers the book, but not worth spending any time on making it available to the public.”
I’m sure examples of this exist, but they’re rare. Most have enough pride in a book their father, for example, wrote that they’d love to see it remain in print. They simply don’t know how. As a publisher as well as a writer, I get contacted by such people all the time.
And the larger and more successful literary estates are typically the precise opposite of that description. They’re more interested in seeing the works stay in print generating income and in protecting it from real or alleged copyright intrusions than the writer himself was. And most are wise enough to be suspicious rather than elated when Hollywood comes knocking, as the Tolkien estate’s recent difficulties collecting the money due them from the film trilogy illustrate.
One of the chief arguments against the Google settlement are the sorts of ‘takers’ that pipe up in support of it. Their views of property seem to have changed little since they were two years old: “What’s mine is mine. What’s yours is also mine.”
“So far, Google has scanned 10 million books. Two million are old enough to be free of copyright, and another 2 million are still in print (Google has made separate agreements with the publishers of those books).”
I don’t believe the part of this statement about books still in print is correct. Google has scanned millions of in-print books without the permission of authors or publishers, which was the point of the lawsuit that the Google book settlement purportedly addresses. Some publishers may have given Google permission to display parts of in-print books, but such agreements are uncommon, and Google has not asked permission before scanning in-print works, a violation of the rights-holders’ copyright.
I don’t know of any countries whose copyright law allows works to move to the public domain upon the author’s death. The U.S. is not unusual in this regard. American copyright law *is* unusual in the length of time copyright remains in force after the author’s death.