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A European view on the Google Book settlement
September 23, 2009 | 8:08 am
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By Paul Biba
Here is an excerpt from Publishing Perspectives’ Liz Bury on how the settlement may affect Europe:
But regardless of the posturing, the fact is that Google has forced Europe to look at its own record on digitization, and it has been found wanting. There is a glaring lack of any commercial rival to Google in book digitization in Europe. Without an alternative to consider, all parties must, at the very least, consider Google’s proposal.
Who else will pay to digitize, for example, the 50% to 70% of collections at the British Library estimated to be orphan works? Or, for that matter, across all of Europe’s libraries, where as much as 90% of all collections may be orphaned or out-of-print? Considering this fact alone, French Prime Minister Francois Fillon this week signaled that he will back a potential deal between Google and the French national library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
This may be a hint of things to come: European Commissioners Viviane Reding and Charlie McGreevy, hosts of the Brussels talks, believe that European copyright laws should be reviewed and harmonized across all EC states. A path could yet be smoothed for a European-wide settlement.
A clear policy statement from the EC would do much to push the UK and the continent further into the digital future. What’s more, not only would it pave the way for Google to proceed, but it might also create the opportunity for the creation of a European counterpart, if not a direct competitor to Google, something that could potentially benefit authors, publishers and all interested parties in the long term.
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Google book settlement, Paul Biba, TeleRead, Europe
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Comments:
There seem to be two sorts of people in the world:
* Those who’re easily rushed along by contrived fear or excitement. Most journalists fit that category.
* Those who aren’t. I’m clearly in this group.
Most of the statistics are of dubious validity. 50-70% orphaned in the UK? Not likely. What studies have been done show far smaller figures. 90% orphaned or out of print in libraries? Why does that matter? We have libraries so we can get out of print books. It’s a bit like arguing that there’s a water shortage because most of the water in town is in a reservoir.
Most books go out of print because few people want them. Nothing will be gained by displaying them online that can’t be done by lending them to rare few who’re interested via interlibrary loan. I’ve checked out books that have sat on the shelves since the 1920s without a single checkout. Nothing was lost because they hadn’t been in digital form. Little will be lost if they’re never in digital form. They’re still sitting on the shelves, neglected and forlorn. If you want to read it, it’s there.
Keep in mind that there’s absolutely no warrant in copyright law for regarding the copyright of an out-of-print or hard-to-find author any differently from any other. How would you feel, as the owner of a rare, no-longer-being-manufactured car, if you were told that no laws against theft protected your vehicle, that others has an inalienable ‘right’ to drive it when and where they choose? You be outraged of course. Well, it’s the same with copyright. Rareness, and not-available are irrelevant. Otherwise the rarest of all books, one that has never been published, would have no copyright protection and anyone could publish it, claiming the ‘public interest,’ over the protestations of the author.
Studies have shown that, in a crisis, some 10-15% of the population is easily panicked, and another 10-15% calmly evaluates the situation and responds appropriately, with the rest essentially freezing and doing nothing.
The same seems true of a broader and often contrived social crisis. Some panic, some think, most do nothing. A century ago the crisis was eugenics and the ‘menace of the feebleminded,’ which mostly infected liberals and progressives. During the 1930s, it was the “crisis of capitalism,” which led many to think that the world’s only hope lay in authoritarian governments. It’s why the left in the U.S. was gah-gah over Stalin and why Joseph Kennedy was enthralled by Hitler.
More recently we’ve had fears of a population explosion in the midst of plummeting birth rates, a scare about a New Ice Age and resource depletion that flipped into fears of global warming and too many resources to turn into carbon dioxide. All are, at best dubious and, at worst, something that’s easily handled, particularly by the 10-15% of us who aren’t alarmists. In any case, the first step is to get the hysterics to shut up.
There’s no rush. If you want a book, you can get it. I got on loan a copy of a book so rare, only two copies existed in the billion-plus volume collection of WorldCat.
Absent hysteria, we can do sensible things rather than the sorts of insane and unethical schemes that appeal to hysterics: sterilization (eugenics), dictatorships, legalized abortion, economic folly, and, most recently, setting aside copyright law are all products of unjustified fears afflicting people who can’t think very well.
We could easily spend twenty years dealing sensibly with books that are in the public domain, scanning them accurately and organizing them usefully. We don’t need to join Google’s rush to poorly scan everything out of print and organize it in the most awful of ways, text searches. We can ignore the hysterics and those who use them (Google in this case). We can work toward providing better access without trashing copyright.