Posted on 03/26/2011 10:06:40 PM PDT by Libloather
Judge Rejects Google Book Deal Over Monopoly Concerns
By Matt Peckham, Technologizer
Mar 23, 2011 10:29 am
It looks like Google's attempt to bury the hatchet with authors and publishers in its bid to digitize a world's worth of books may be in jeopardy after a New York federal judge on Tuesday rejected a $125 million settlement reached in October 2008.
Google promotes that settlement on its Google Books page as "with a broad class of authors and publishers to make the world's books even more accessible online," but Judge Denny Chin was having none of it. Chin said the deal would "arguably give Google control over the search market," and that its terms went too far. Specifically: That the settlement would give Google a "de facto monopoly" on digitized content.
You may have heard that Google wants to scan and convert to text every book in the known universe. You may have heard that notion sold by politicians like John Conyers as possibly "the greatest innovation in book publishing since the Gutenberg press." You may also have heard it called "a disaster for scholars," or as UC Berkeley language professor and longtime NPR contributor Geoffrey Nunberg puts it, "a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess."
Google's argues it just wants to let you search the full text of any book scanned and digitally tucked away in its online database. Also: That it wants to "democratize knowledge" by scanning essentially everything textual created since, well, ever (precisely 129,864,880 books at last count, according to Google, of which its scanned about 12 million so far). That worried pretty much everyone in the publishing industry when Google made its plans public in 2004-enough to trigger several domestic and international lawsuits.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
And publishers?
and copyright holders
I never understood how this class action was supposed to be fair or representative of all parties with interests in the matter. What Google has proposed is quite possibly helpful to research, but it needs to be supported by Congress through express modifications in copyright law, and possibly the US is too hemmed in by international copyright treaties to be able to do this. And it should be anybody, not just Google, who gets to participate.
[What Google has proposed is quite possibly helpful to research]
Be very afraid of Google in this matter. They could essential take possession of the entire body of pyblished human knowledge through the back door.
I wrote a book about Harry Reid. What happens when google controls not only the search engine to find my book, but the printing and marketing mechanisms as well? The more you think about what they are trying to do, te less you will like it.
essentially and publish, my typos are legion.
I recently spent 3 years of my life and a bundle of money writing, photographing and publishing a book. It has been an eye-opening experience in many ways, but this latest move by Google has the potential to create especially upsetting ramifications.
If I have heard correctly, Google is another global control player seen with some frequency as White House visitors during the current administration. Yet their overreaching behaviors and rights infringments have repeatedly brought them into conflict with other governments and concerned groups. They strike me as fundamentally up to no good, evil, and I am not even enamored anymore of the mess the web has become since their search engine became dominant.
The problem as I see it with the ruling is that the ‘opt-out’ is one of the main ideas behind what Google wants to do.
There are apparently hundreds of thousands of out-of-print books that no really knows who owns the copyrights. Google wants to be able to scan these books and put them on the web.
With ‘opt-out’ they will be able to do this. If the copyright holder comes forward he will be paid for the usage of his book. If he wants his book out of Google he can do that too.
But with ‘opt-in’ if no one comes forward to ask that their book be included i.e. the author is dead, the publisher is out of business 50 years ago, etc., the book will be lost.
But with Google there would essentially no longer be any such thing as out-of-print books.
This is what Google is trying to do.
I wrote a book about Harry Reid. What happens when google controls not only the search engine to find my book, but the printing and marketing mechanisms as well? The more you think about what they are trying to do, te less you will like it.
This is where ‘opt-out’ comes in. If you don’t want your book in Google, it won’t be. You have that right as the copyright holder.
If google had a reputation for being fair and honest without distorting results for a leftward bias it would be worth considering. But they don’t, and they would distort even more for their lefty agenda.
Your naivete while charming reveals a real ignorance of what Google is really up to
Digital storage of books is dangerous. What happens when the “owner” of the digital content disagrees with it or thinks it is inappropriate? Read a “US history” book written contemporaneous with the history and then read one written today. Focus and perspective change with time.
Even children’s books get changed with time. Read a Hardy Boys first edition and compare with a current printing. Expressions such as “That’s very white of you” have been removed. If all books go digital, we will only have the current, edited (by someone), expurgated and updated version. We shouldn’t permit only one source to be custodian of all knowledge.
Books are great. Once they are printed, they exist. The only way to get rid of the information is to gather up all copies and destroy them. This is highly impractical as some will survive. On a computer it only involves a few keystrokes and the item is changed forever.
I think your argument falls apart at this point. Anyone and everyone is free to retain print versions. Do you want to ban digital books alltogether, since they are so easily modified?
It's not as if Google would be the only way to find your book. There will still be worse ways. E.g. there's always the card catalog, you know. If anyone's alive who remembers how to use it. Oh, and there's Bing and Yahoo and Yandex, too.
Remember, Google doesn't win by keeping your book hidden. They win by being the best way to find it, better than those other ways. Ideally, someone starts typing "Dingy" into Google, and your book pops out just ahead of Rush before they can finish the query!
Note that "computer" is a singular noun. There are many millions of computers in the world. Once the internet distributes a factoid to them, the problem of gathering up and destroying all the copies is even more intractable than in the world of dead trees. Even if you could find all the computers, you would have no way of knowing how many other computers they passed the offending factoid to.
Especially if the computers use onion routing (an invention of the United States Navy).
Maybe so, but my ‘naivete’ seems to be shared by a number of well-known authors on their blogs. They’re not completely happy with the deal, but think it’s the best thing overall.
I notice you haven’t seen fit to enlighten us as to what you perceive that Google is ‘really up to’.
[This is where ‘opt-out’ comes in. If you don’t want your book in Google, it won’t be. You have that right as the copyright holder.]
But that is the question. Why should I have to opt out of anything? Google needs to be the one asking permission.
[BTW, I just typed “Dingy” into Google. The first four hits were lexicographical. The fifth related to your favorite senator. So, you need to get to work on SEO. There’s definitely a window of opportunity (which hopefully will close for keeps in 2016).]
Good points, I am starting to crank up promotion again. It was a draining and dangerous experience, I was exhausted.
Some critics point out that Google’s herculean attempt at deducing meta-data (e.g. publication place, company, and date, author, editor, general topic) is less accurate than what you would get from trained monkeys throwing darts at a chart. Any conscientious librarian would not allow that to be so. The S.W.A.G. just doesn’t cut it in the library world, and that’s just what Google is seeking to create, a giga-library.
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