Google Avoids Copyright Meltdown
Aaron Swartz of Copyfight informs us that "Google Sells Out Users to Publishers"
As you undoubtedly recall, months ago Google launched their Google Print Library Project scanning thousands of books from the country's libraries for potential search, putting up whatever fair use or the publisher would allow.Publishers, in typical copyright-holder paranoia fashion, worried that perhaps the two line snippets Google would be providing of their books would spell the end of the world for their entire industry. They wrote articles attacking Google for their cruelty and finally, today, Google announced it would back down.
That's right: Google won't even scan any book copyright holders ask them not to, even though doing so is perfectly legal. It's as if copyright holders got to dictate what books get placed in libraries. Their short-sighted selfishness will cost us all, depriving us of our heritage in our online Library of Alexandria.
Details at the Google Blog, under the Orwellian title Making books easier to find.
I have to disagree with Aaron here.
Google did not have the right to make wholesale copies of millions of copyrighted books without permission from the copyright holders. Google's original plan fails every possible fair use test ever tried. See, for example, American Geophysical Union v. Texaco.
If copyright is to mean anything at all, then corporations may not copy entire works that they have never purchased without permission for commercial gain. I can't imagine what sort of argument -- short of copyright nihilism -- would justify such a radical change in copyright law.
In fact, when I have asked people at Google to explain which exceptions to copyright the company claims would cover such a plan, I have failed to receive anything close to a coherent analysis or argument. I have heard them say stuff like, "we will be just like I-Tunes." God help us.
If the University of Michigan wanted to do this copying for its own patrons, then it certainly could. I wish more libraries would push their rights under copyright. But corporations do not have the same leeway as libraries. Libraries work for us. Corporations work for themselves.
As I said in my talk "The Googlization of Everything" to the American Library Association in June, Google's plan would have sparked a copyight meltdown. P2P was nothing compared to the fallout from this. And Congress would certainly have ensured that such a meltdown would not have ended well for readers, libraries, or the Internet -- none of which have rich lobbyists.
So I am very pleased that Google has decided to work with publishers (like it said it would originally) to convince them that offering their text in searchable form is good business for all. I still have some major problems with the contracts that these libraries signed with Google. I think the libraries are getting played badly here and they are violating their own principles of openness and public service by letting Google take charge and set the terms of this service.
Google might be a very good corporation -- one of the best ever, probably. But it's still not a library. Let's try to remember that.