I’m part of a team of students at the University of Westminster in London who have produced a ‘dummy’ magazine about social networking. In this, we used the picture of a book included your blogpost above.

As we’re submitting the magazine for a student award, we need to get copyright approval for all pictures. Could you let me know if you are happy for us to use your image – the magazine will not be sold or used for commercial purposes.

You can contact me on emmayoule@hotmail.co.uk.

Thanks,
Emma

Let’s look 10 years down the line, when we have multi-terabyte storage in our pockets. Can Google sell a copy of all the book pages it has scanned to consumers, as long as you promise to only make “fair use” of it? Or, if there’s some disgruntled engineer there who makes a copy of the entire data set of all books and puts it out there on bittorrent-of-the-future, what then?

Through the age of mechanical reproduction, the arts survived, but how will they fare in an age of massive digital reproduction?

If Google’s doing this for the benefit of mankind, shouldn’t they share in the scanning effort of the Open Content Alliance? Should they allow other companies to use the same scanned data?

Q: Some publishers have asked Google if they would give the copyright holders a digital copy of their content in exchange for a license to make those copies. Google has yet to respond to those requests. Would University of Michigan consider giving the copyright holders a copy of their own content?

A: No. Our contract with Google prevents us from doing that.

I think what she’s talking about is section 4.4.1 of the contract which prevents the University from giving a third party a copy of the files. There is nothing else in the contract preventing the University from giving copies to the copyright holders. It’s interesting though that the owners of the intellectual property are being interpreted as third parties. When I first read that section I thought it was a protection for publishers, preventing the University from distributing copies. Now I’m concerned it’s Google’s way to protect its monetizing of that content.

Ask yourself why Google wouldn’t want the copyright owners to have a copy of their own content? I estimate that of the in copyright content that Google will be digitizing, at least 60% of that content will be getting digitized for the first time by this project, probably more. Most publishers didn’t start creating content digitally until the 90s and most have only begun to digitize their older content. Could it be that Google wants to prevent the copyright holders from competing with them in the eventual selling of that content online?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4598478.stm

After reading the story linked above and other public relations material from Google I’m convinced that’s what’s happening. Google wants a monopoly on the distribution of that content online, and unfortunately The University of Michigan is aiding them in that pursuit.

Uh, Ms. Coleman’s statement, “we believe copyright law allows us the fair use…” sounds to me like a claim of fair use.

“So if a book is 300 pages, and every person can download 5 pages, it requires only 60 people to share their 5 pages”

For the ‘in copyright’ books that I’ve accessed via Google Book Search most of those 5 pages would be the same 5 pages for everyone. Often publishers only allow a portion of the book to be made available, sometimes just the covers and the contents and index pages, not the whole book.

I think that publishers and authors would do a lot better leveraging Google Book Search as a marketing opportunity rather than trying to stop it. Something we’ve learned in the last decade or so is that if you try to ban something on the internet that’s potentially profitable then all you will probably do is force it to somewhere in the physical world that’s out of your control.

Stephen

Well, sort of. Obviously just about anything is hackable. But there are a few problems with your formulation, as far as I can see. For one thing, it’s not really the case that “every person can download 5 pages” — every person can view a number of pages designated by the agreement with the publisher (for a book I just tried, Siva’s Copyrights and Copywrongs, it let me see three pages). But it doesn’t let you select and copy the text or save the page image. So, though I am certainly no hacker (though I am quite aware of the capabilities of BitTorrent and hash functions), I don’t see any really easy way of getting the pages off of Google and onto my hard drive for later hosting. I mean, sure, you could do screen grabs, but how ugly would that be?

Furthermore, none of this even applies to the copyrighted books for which the publishers haven’t given any permissions beyond copyright — for those, you can’t even see a whole page. Personally, I would think that digitally reassembling a book from hundreds or thousands one- or two-line snippets would be a seriously tedious and annoying task, especially when you — and anyone else who might like to download it — could probably just check the whole darn thing out from a local library.

I guess my point is essentially this: obviously there are going to be people who try to hack in and reassemble the books indexed by Google Book Search, but frankly, it seems like doing that would probably be a hell of a lot more expensive, difficult, and tedious than just checking the book out of the library and going at it with a scanner (though obviously that option would be no more legal than the hack job). So my question on this issue would be: why would anyone bother?

(1) With your library example, you check out that book, and then you return it. Under the new GPL (Google Purloiner Licence), I would be able to check the book out, copy it, and retain that copy indefinitely. I would be able to read.. eh.. ahem.. I mean.. “manually index”.. that book over and over again, any time I wanted, without having to go to the library again to check it out.

(2) With your library example, there can only be one user of the book at a time. If I’ve already checked the book out, you cannot check it out, too, until I return it. This limits the number of simultaneous readers to 1. Under this new Google “Fair Use” scheme, I borrow the book from the library, and make my copy. Then you borrow it, and make your copy. Then Battelle borrows it and makes his copy. So on a week from Thursday, we can all be reading (ahem, “manually indexing”) it at the same time. That is a very different usage scenario of the book, than when the publishers sold it to the library in the first place.

(3) If you allow multiple simultaneous copies of an object to exist (i.e. if you allow both Google and Yahoo to go to Michigan and scan the same book from the same library), then it might not matter if Google and/or distribute the copies. All you need to do is make sure the original gets wide enough circulation, and everyone can basically copy (for the purposes of “manual indexing”, of course) anything they want. All it takes is one person to own the original, and all of that person’s friends can now legally copy the original directly from him.

And because you can trade and resell physical objects, I envision collectives popping up whereby massive numbers of books are rapidly traded, until everyone gets copies of everything they want.

Heck, why stop with books? Why not music? This Google scanning rationale applies just as much to CDs as it does to book, no? Don’t we want to preserve our musical cultural heritage, too? So let’s all start swapping CDs, ripping our own copies (for the purposes of “manually indexing” of course), and then passing the CD along to the next person. Legalized Napster, because (1) we’re only swapping physical objects, not intellectual property, and (2) each person who comes in contact with an original physical object has the right to “scan” (rip/copy) it for himself, in order to “index” it.

Yes, to a certain extent, people already do copy each other’s CDs. But its quite gray and very small scale. What we’re talking about now with this new Google “Making an Self Copy if I’m Going to Index it” Licence is legallizing this on a massive scale. I see whole new companies popping up facilitating the massive trade in original physical media objects.

I could go on and on about this, but my posts tend to be too verbose as it is. Apologies. Dya see how it is different, though?