http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4320642.stm
Google's plan to create an index of millions of books has got them
into legal trouble, but technology analyst Bill Thompson thinks they
should press on despite the lawsuits.
This is so that researchers at universities, schoolchildren in
libraries and anyone at home can quickly find titles which might be
relevant to their work.
Called Google Print, it is a bit like Amazon's feature that lets you
search inside a book. Unlike Amazon, where you can then read a few
pages from each book you find, Google will only give you enough detail
to let you know that you have found what you are looking for.
It is a great idea, and the resulting catalogue will rapidly become
the starting place for researchers around the world.
But it might not happen, because the project is currently stalled
after three US authors sued Google for scanning their copyright
material.
'Brazen violation'
The authors, with support from the US Authors Guild, call the project
"a plain and brazen violation of copyright law" and argue that "it's
not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners
of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be
copied."
I am an author, so I have an interest in this, and even though I have
many doubts about Google's operations and ideology, I have to support
them in this one.
A few years ago Mp3.com launched MyMp3.com. It was a great service
which let you listen to your music collection anywhere.
They ripped tens of thousands of CDs onto their servers. Once you had
an account with them, you fed your CD collection into your computer
and it flagged which ones you owned. Then you could listen to them
from any computer you were using.
It was grey enough for the record industry to sue them out of
existence.
Google is big enough to stand up to the pressure, and it can afford
even more expensive lawyers than the Authors Guild.
But there is a danger that now they are a public company obliged to
enhance shareholder value, they will instead cut a deal with them to
share revenue or pay to license this way of using the text.
We would get our catalogue then, but have lost something equally
valuable - the ability for anyone else to do what Google has done.
After all, why should I not be able to scan the books I own and index
them so that I can find out exactly where William Gibson first used
the term "cyberspace"?
Google is having to scan books, except where the library already has
an electronic edition - but at least they can do this.
We should not forget that nobody, not even Google, could legally do
the same thing for documentaries on DVD or music stored on the iTunes
Music Store.
The content there, even if it is itself in the public domain, is
protected with encryption and digital rights management software, and
breaking that protection is illegal even if you want to use the
material for legitimate purposes.
It is good that they can avoid the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
but we must not let a strong reading of copyright law deter them
either.
Rights and innovation
There is a growing movement to treat copyright and other forms of
intellectual property as if they were just like other forms of
property right.
This would mean that Domino Recording, who hold the copyright in the
new Franz Ferdinand album own it in the same way I own the laptop I am
currently writing on.
That is not the case. Copyright is a time-limited state-granted
monopoly that gives the rights holder certain privileges.
It is a bargain between the state and creators that is supposed to
benefit both sides, rewarding creative endeavour and therefore leading
to a general improvement in society.
Rights holders have often tried to use the law to stop innovations
that do not benefit them directly.
In the 1970s the movie industry tried to kill video recording, and the
record industry has only just begun to realise that online
distribution is the key to their future survival rather than the
devil's handiwork.
Now some authors and their trade association are standing in the way
of progress, even though it is clear that the main beneficiaries of
the project will be publishers and the authors themselves.
They will sell more books or, if they are academics, see their
research read and cited more often. There will be a general increase
in the quality of university research simply because vital sources
will be overlooked less often.
The world will be a better place.
Clear motivation
Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig, chair of the Creative Commons,
puts it clearly when he points out that the authors "don't really want
the court to stop the new technology. Then, like now, they simply want
to be paid for the innovations of someone else. Then, like now, the
content owners ought to lose."
He is right. But even if they win, we authors ought to have any
victory under current law taken away from us.
If existing copyright law can stop Google, or anyone else with the
inclination, from creating such a phenomenally useful tool, then
copyright law is wrong and must be changed.
There are three things Google can do now to make it clear that profit
is not the only thing motivating them in the project.
First, they can change the name. "Google Print" makes publishers and
authors think of print on demand and printing extracts, but even the
US Authors Guild might have been happy to see the launch of "Google
Catalog".
Second, and more crucially, they can open the project up to anyone who
wants to participate. That means publishing the technical
specifications and any relevant APIs so that - for example - I can
search the database from within my web application without having to
show their ads on my site.
Finally, they should let any library in the world have a copy of the
electronic versions of all the books they hold that are in the
catalogue. Not a link to the Google website but a real copy, to be
held locally and used by the library under a very relaxed and
permissive licence.
Otherwise we will just have to kick off an open source scanning
project to create a free catalogue of our own - I have got a few
thousand books to get started with - and let the publishers sue ten
thousand of us.
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Defending Google's licence to print -
10-12-2005
, 12:03 AM
Linear Mode
