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Case for Google Book Settlement: Pro? Speak up!
September 15, 2009 | 8:50 am
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By David Rothman
TeleRead Co-Editor Paul Biba and I are both skeptical of the Google Book Settlement, at least as it exists now.
I worry about reduced competition, just as I do about Amazon. Nothing against Google. In fact, via a long-term investment for retirement, I even own a tiny speck of the company.
Meanwhile, in the interest of balance, I’d encourage you to come forward if you think we haven’t carried enough pro-Settlement news. Tell us about news stories and other items backing you up!
Writing in from Oregon, Kate Halleron says she is neutral; but she does point to a news release headlined National Federation of Blind endorses Google Books, as well as a Reuters story, Google to share scanned books with rivals. I know some librarians are wildly pro-settlement. Speak up! Personally, I agree with Kate that we could have carried more of the “pro” items. We’re stretched thin and try our best.
In her correspondence, Kate says: “I’m not a lawyer, and haven’t actually read the settlement, so don’t really have a notion whether it’s ‘fair’ or not. All in all, I think increased access is almost always a plus—whether the financial terms for the authors are reasonable is not something I’d be prepared to tackle. Culturally, I think this could be as much of a game changer for literacy as the Gutenberg press.
“I’m ‘just’ a voracious reader—I’m already having lots of fun with Google’s PD epubs, and am looking forward to the day when ‘everything’ is available online. I do find TeleRead’s coverage to be overwhelmingly negative on this, though—you are entitled to your opinion, which may be far better informed than mine. I do think you ought to at least publish the news of dissenting voices to yours—you do sometimes blog news without comment, I’ve noticed.”
Detail: Paul is not a copyright specialist, but he is a retired corporate lawyer who, if nothing else, is interested in the Google issue from a property rights perspective. I’m very, very pleased to see his posts on this topic, given the high stakes here and his intense interest in these issues.
Screenshot credit: Image of Google Book Search from Danny Sullivan.
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On the tiniest of scales, as a writer I’ve begun to grasp what it must have felt like to be a Jew in Germany during 1933 and 1934. As your rights were stripped away, all most of those you had thought were your friends could do was gush about the economic benefits they were getting from the new Nazi rule–the decline in unemployment, the new spirit in the nation, and that sort of thing. What was being done to you simply didn’t enter their minds. Your seeming friends, you discovered, were shallow, empty-headed people who rarely thought about anything but themselves. To some extent, you question whether they even think at all or just go with the flow.
The Google settlement has already, by its terms, effectively stripped away the U.S. copyright of virtually every writer on the planet who’s authored a book since 1922, assuming he or she didn’t opt-out a week and a half ago. Since the vast majority of those writers (or their heirs) did not hear about that, their copyrights have been taken away without their knowledge or consent. All that is required is for a district court in Manhattan to approve the theft. It is a theft that violates virtually every copyright law on the planet, as well as international treaties such as the Berne Convention, signed by 164 countries including the US. It really is that simple.
In comparison to that, whether those benefiting from the theft is just Google or whether Google allows others to join is robbing the labors of others is irrelevant. To their credit, Amazon and Microsoft has rejected Google’s offer to feast on the spoils. As a corporate evil-doer, Google really is in a class all by itself. This is nothing new. We’ve already seen that in their eager willingness to provide the Chinese dictatorship with a censored Internet. They anticipate what the Chinese government wants and implement it without having to be asked.
And what sort of support can you drum up? A Kate who, by her own admission, has not even bothered to do a minimal amount of reading about this issue. All she can do is gush a bumper sticker slogan, “increased access is almost always a plus.” How would she feel if the state of Oregon made it illegal for her to lock her door at night, “increased access” to food and shelter being important for helping the homeless? Somehow I don’t think she’d be quite a enthused as she is about the locks that copyright provide an author. And, if she were to work for months on a project, only to receive a mere $60 for her labor, would she have any trouble deciding that was “fair or not”? I think not. It’s only when someone else is getting shafted that her marvelous tolerance and flexibility comes to the fore.
I commend Teleread for wanting to be even handed, but this isn’t that sort of issue. Nor is there any need for it. Until the last few weeks, when events such as court filings like that by the Federal Republic of Germany forced them to change slightly, the mainstream news media was tilted so heavily in favor of Google, they were almost lying down. I know a New Zealand copyright lawyer, who, depending on the fluff in the press, thought the settlement didn’t apply to NZ authors. Only about a month ago did he discover otherwise. Press coverage has been just that bad.
No, Teleread shouldn’t fret about being on-sided. It should be proud of being one of the few sources of accurate information about the settlement. And if someone wants to defend the settlement, force them to actually read it, along with the various copyright laws (national and international) and the objections filed with the court. Let them earn their right to their opinion.
G. K. Chesterton sometimes referred to what he called “moral imagination.” It was the ability to envision the world in moral terms, seeing evil people as truly evil and seeing the goodness or suffering in others, however much they may be maligned or ignored by society. That’s what you’re talking about here.
I’m neutral on the settlement, because I don’t know (and I think nobody really knows) just what the world will look like if it happens, three years down the road.
But most of the comments, blogs, columns, etc., that I’ve seen on the settlement seem to delight in picking on Google as the bad guy. And this is particularly ironic when you think about how many of the anti-settlement groups are funded by Microsoft, who had its own book-scanning program in competition with Goog, until they gave up; and when you think about Amazon filing a friend of the court brief attacking the settlement, when Amazon admits it has its own scanning operation in progress (about which, that was the first I’d heard).
Remember there are three parties to the settlement — really only two, with a judge mediating. There is Google, which had scanned a bunch of books for libraries and wanted to ‘monetize’ the results, and there was some sort of Author’s group who piped up and said, ‘Hey! You can’t do that unless WE get OUR cut!’
It’s this latter group that I think is the bad guy here. If there are orphan works, then this group is just going to collect cash from Google (that Google collects from advertisers and book-sales) and keep it for themselves. Great.
But it’s also this latter group that I think would, in the real world three years down the road, turn out to be the good guy. Because, in spite of all the talk about ‘monopolies’ accruing to Google under this agreement, I presume that this Author’s group would not object to any other party, like me, or Amazon, or Barnes & Noble, putting those same books online and offering the extortionisticals, erm, trade group, the same deal.
Think about it. All you’d need to do is buy one PDF copy from Google books, crack whatever encryption is on it, and print from that. Or run Abbyy Finereader OCR on it (with undoubtedly far, far better results than Google is getting!) for your various flavors of etexts. And deal with the Authors’ Group.
Heck, I could easily envision said Group even having a simple application form online for anybody wishing to do this for one book, ten, or ten thousand. So long as the Group gets their pound of flesh, they shouldn’t have a beef with it.
But as I said, I don’t know really, what things would be like, if the settlement proceeds as planned. I don’t think anybody else does, either. There’s just been a lot of fear floating around. Some of that fear has been fanned by enemies of Goog. Some of it might be justified. Some of it is just the fear of the unknown, and change. And some of it results from fear of losing control (cf the comments by the Library of Congress last week).
While I disagree with just about everything Mike has said the one thing I haven’t heard from opponents is realistically what SHOULD be done to address the issue/logjam of orphaned works.
Do reasonable people really think that when Congress gets involved with copyright law again that the outcome is going to be better for consumers and authors than what the Google Settlement proposes? Do you really think that Congress will be able to withstand the pressures of corporate influence in crafting revisions to copyright law?
The simple fact of the matter is that the vast majority of these so-called orphan works currently have ZERO value. For the vast majority of the books involved even if we already knew who the current rights-holders are and where to send them a royalty check – they would still have ZERO value.
Personally, while I do have a few concerns with the Google Settlement I think most people will benefit far more from this than either the status quo (which benefits nobody) or anthying that is likely to make it thru the “U.S. Congress Inc.”
The problem, for me, is that Google is basically saying that anything out of print for a year is an ‘orphaned’ work, and that they can exploit it for commercial gain until someone tells them to stop.
Sure, they SAY the book rights registry will look for the author, but they have a vested interest in NOT contacting the author, who may tell them “no”. How hard do you think they’re going to look?
I’d be greatly in favor of moving copyright back to a formalities-based system, where authors register copyrighted works and have to pay a fee to re-up every few years. However, that violates the Berne convention and few international agreements.
I don’t know what congress would come up with, but we make our living based on copyright. Orphan works are important to everyone, but there’s a different between something truly orphaned and something temporarily out of print. I’m NOT happy with Google claiming that everything not currently on a bookshelf belongs to them by default. We’ve had a number of books go out of print, and some of those are currently back in print and earning a nice royalty for us. That would be far less likely to happen if Google has it’s way.
Finally, we like to negotiate our OWN contracts, not have terms fed to us by litigants who DON’T represent our interests. Google say’s they’ll pay 65% of their income from selling our books to the books rights registry (whoever that ends up being). The book rights registry can deduct whatever expenses it feels like, then pay me whatever is left over. Why on earth would any sane author sign a contract that allows a nascent bureaucracy to pay them out of leftover monies? How can any reasonable person believe authors will actually get anything?
The problem is that the Authors Guild doesn’t really represent authors – they stand to make millions for SELLING OUT authors in a scam that reeks of collusion. This is a joint-venture between cooperating companies, not an adversarial settlement, and it’s certainly not the way to write far-reaching legislation.
There are some good points brought up here so far (passing over the comment that invokes Godwin’s Law in its very first sentence). I’ve just published a post of my own in favor of the settlement here. Basically, while I don’t see the settlement as ideal, I see it as the best viable proposal I’ve seen in a long time to bring millions of out-of-print books out of an obscurity that benefits neither readers nor authors.
There are, as folks have pointed out, other ways of doing this, but I don’t think they’re particularly viable in the current pre-settlement world. I plan to discuss them in more detail in the followup to my post, and would be happy to hear further comments as well.
I’m sorry, but this needs to be said: comparing individuals who don’t oppose the Google book settlement to nazi sympathisers is unconscionable. Copyright is not a universal “right” in the traditional sense. It is a legal construct.
I have some major problems with the settlement, particularly I don’t think the two groups claiming to represent all rights holders actually can, and I think the terms limiting ‘damages’ to an author who discovers their work has been misused, to the author asking Google to remove it is ridiculous. I think the risk on using an “orphaned” work should be on the entity using it, in this case Google. So if Google uses a work under the premise that they were unable to contact that author, and that author or rights holder later discovers and objects to the use, the rights holder should be entitled to truly fair compensation. Additionally, I can easily imagine an author letting a work go out of print from one publisher while negotiating a new edition under a different publisher. In that case, Google’s intervening digitizing and distribution of the work impedes that negotiation by removing the author’s one bargaining chip, which is exclusivity. The Author could be out a substantial amount of money, and that risk should be on Google, not the author, including the risk of a lawsuit to recover actual damages.
That said, drawing a parallel between this settlement, and the atrocities visited upon European Jews at the dawn of the Holocaust is a disservice to the millions of Jews who lost much more than a limited bundle of rights in their creative output.
In general, while there are details of the Google Book Settlement that I find troubling, I am in favor of it.
Lets be honest, copyright laws, particularly those laws that were inspired by the Berne Convention, are hopelessly out of date for the digital world. In fact, requiring the registration of copyrights as original US copyright law did, would have greatly reduced the issue that has essentially made the Google Book Settlement necessary. Under the original copyright law of the US, truely orphaned works would enter the public domain after a period of no more than 14 years. Authors and their estates also had little incentive to renew the copyrights of works that were out of print and had no immediate likelihood of being republished. Under current law, a work can remain out of print for decades, or even a century before it enters the public domain — perhaps forgotten and lost before it could be entered into a digital archive for future generations to potentially discover.
Thousands, if not millions of copyrighted works are out of print, many if not most of them have been out of print for some time and will likely remain out of print — if we are lucky only until the copyright expires on them.
Ultimately a copyright collective is needed for books; such collectives already exist for other types of copyrighted media (particularly music and the performance arts). Ultimately we might quibble about the details on the final form that such a collective might take, but without such a collective, it is nearly impossible to republish works where the status of the rights holders are unkown.
Originally, the copyright law of the United States was designed to serve the interests of the the public at large. Copyright was seen as an incentive to produce and publish. Now since the Copyright Act of 1976 (and maybe the 1909 act), the purpose of copyright seems to be less about the public interest and more about the interest of the copyright holder. This by the way, is why Mr. Perry’s analogy about a law requiring people to keep their doors unlocked is flawed; the right to hold and protect physical property is a natural right where as copyright is actually a license granted by the state.
The Google Book Archive or something very much like it, has the potential to benefit the general public in a way that few innovations have since the invention of the public lending library. This archive can not only make information available to the public, but also allow it to be searchable in ways that were impossible even 20 years ago.
Just a final thought; Mr. Perry, after starting his rant (I am sorry comment) with perhaps the most ridiculously exagerrated analogy that I have seen since the last time the Nazis were invoked, talks about how the rights of virtually every author since 1922 have been stripped away. I wonder, if those authors, writing in 1922 but likely have long since died, would have prefered to have their books published and available to the public in 2009, or would they have wanted tight control of their works and for them to remain out of print?