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Wired science writer/author makes plea for Google Books
September 25, 2009 | 11:24 am
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By Paul Biba
Wired writer Alexis Madrigal puts the case for Google Books. He is a staff writer at Wired.com, and author of a forthcoming book on the history of green technology. We haven’t heard a lot from the writer’s perspective on this issue, so I am very happy to haver found this article on the Wired Epicenter blog.
The dispute over Google Books continues to rage in the courts and op-ed pages of the country. There are legitimate questions about Google, profit sharing and privacy. But let’s not let the litigation obscure that Google Books provides an unprecedented and irreproducible service to its users
I’m a science writer at Wired.com, but I’m also working on a book about the history of (what we now call) green technology. My book puts a topic front and center that has been hidden in the footnotes of the American energy story. And without Google Books, I’m not sure it would have been possible to write it. At the very least, my contribution to the book world would have been smaller and shallower.
The searchability, accessibility and breadth of the Google Books collection do not just portend some future best-ever digital library. It’s already the best resource for research that exists.
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Comments:
Yeah, and we could do wonders for hunger by doing away with the locks on homes and stores. Want a steak for a BBQ? No need drive to the store and pay, just raid your neighbor’s refrigerator.
Of course, that wouldn’t make you neighbor happy and, with food now free for the taking, food production and distribution as sources of income might take a bit of a hit. Why buy what you can get for free? But there’s the flip side of that, why produce when what you create will get stolen? And with farmers and groceries no longer growing or distributing food, soon we’d all be hungry.
I’ve spend many hours studying the various arguments for and against the Google settlement. Almost all the arguments against come from the producers who want to earn a living from their labors, however small. They cite copyright law as well as laws in general and do it well. Almost all those in favor of the settlement come from those who consume rather than produce or, when they produce, it’s little more than a “cribbing together” of other people’s work that this Alexis Madrigal calls writing. Almost without exception, they have no conception of fairness. For them, “I want” is the supreme law, overriding all others. They remind me of two-year-olds.
What Google has done is bad. By pursuing their own agenda, they’ve polarized the issue and set matters back at least five years and maybe more. There’s simply no warrant in copyright law, national or international, for regarding the copyright of an out-of-print book or a hard-to-find writer any different from that of a current bestseller. The laws were, in fact, specifically written to prevent that from happening. Google’s lawyers know that, but they thought they could play an ignorant press well enough to get their settlement in place before anyone woke up to what they were doing. In that, they’ve failed, in no small part thanks to the four-month delay that I and six other authors persuaded the court to adopt.
Assuming the settlement collapses completely in the next few months, we’re now back to where we were before Google blundered into this issue. We need to adapt international treaties to modern circumstances. The Berne Convention hasn’t been revised since 1979, and that lies at the root of our problem. This isn’t something that can be solved by a few lawyers scheming in secrecy in motel rooms. It’s something that’ll have to be negotiated openly and globally, taking care to be fair to everyone involved.
The irony of Mr. Perry’s post is that his publishing company has borrowed the name of a group of English writers, seems dedicated to publishing public domain works or works that are derived from the works of others.
It is also interesting that Mr. Perry continues to claim to have studied the issue, but has clearly tried to claim that the settlement is something that it is not through the use of a flawed analogy. The basics of the settlement are (well were since details are now being renegotiated) this.
1. Google can scan and make available works that are out of print.
2. Any author is allowed to opt out thus removing their books from Google.
3. If anyone actually downloads or from Google prints the book, the author will receive a share of the profits from said book (2/3rds of all profits going to compensate authors and to administer the program).
So if we are to use Mr. Perry’s analogy, we have to alter it somewhat. We essentially allow people to enter and take food from other people’s homes if the doors are unlocked, and if they have not put a sign up saying to keep out of the house and if someone does take the food, then they have to leave some money for the food taken.
Mr. Perry also doesn’t seem to understand that the concept of Fair Use is a flexible one, constantly redefined by legal case, therefore it does in fact require the courts to determine if a new use is in fact fair use. I will grant that what Google is doing is cutting awfully close to the line, but I suspect that there must have been at least some uncertainty in the case for the Author’s Guild to decide to settle the issue.
Consider, in many respects, what Google is doing is very similar to setting up a giant research library. Many libraries will take published works (mainly magazines and newspapers) and convert them into microfilm to make them easier to use in the future. Google is doing the same but with books. The issue of course is that lots more people can use electronic files at the same time than microfilm… but this is where it is up to the courts to decide absent of a specific new law from congress.
BTW, as far as I know, there is no law that says a library cannot be a for profit enterprise. Its just as far as I know, it is not very common in the United States.
I do agree that US and international copyright law needs to revised. Actually I think it needs to essentially be rewritten from the ground up. Most importantly, I believe, copyrights need to be treated more like patents. They need to recognize that keeping out of print works out of the public domain serves the interests of neither authors nor the public good.
“We essentially allow people to enter and take food from other people’s homes if the doors are unlocked, and if they have not put a sign up saying to keep out of the house and if someone does take the food, then they have to leave some money for the food taken.”
This analogy seems to be rambling out of control. However, on the matter of putting a sign up: nearly all printed books are marked with a copyright symbol. Many have notices stating ‘All rights reserved’. I think your argument, which is in any case not a persuasive one, falls flat on its face at this point.
As for the ‘just a giant research library’ argument:
Let’s note that the online commercial library Questia states in its objection to the GBS that they themselves have been increasing their holdings by negotiating proper agreements with rights-holders. And this is right, since an online library, unlike a physical library, is of its nature a publisher, not just a circulator, of works. And if you are going to set up a commercial online publishing venture and sell (access to) goods you should agree with the owners of the goods. Basic rule of the market.
“Any author is allowed to opt out thus removing their books from Google.”
This is simply not the case.
Authors who found out about it in time were able to opt out of the (now suspended) settlement up until 4 September. Rights-holders of books who, from choice, or as a result of lack of notice, were opted in would have been able to withdraw their works from Google’s database if they applied before a date in 2011; or to withdraw their works from display or sale under Google Book Search.
Authors in short forms – poems, essays, short stories – whose work has been published in multi-author collections were given no such right. Under the terms of the settlement agreement they were permitted to withdraw their work from ‘display uses’, but not from sale. Incidentally, there is no justification for this distinction in copyright law, under which a poem has no less protection than a novel.