Now We're Getting Somewhere
Category: Copyright Law , Google
Finally, Google's going to court. Shelf Awareness tells us this morning:Three authors and the Authors Guild filed suit against Google yesterday, charging that the company's program to scan millions of books in several major libraries and make the texts searchable online constitutes "massive copyright infringement."
According to Search Engine Journal,
Google is asking publishers to ?opt-out? of the Google Print program during the next 2 months if the publishers do not want their books indexed in Google Print. Interesting tactic, especially since the whole idea behind copyrighting is to be legally opted out of anyone copying your works - even Google.
Google has of course responded in their own blog on the issue. And to a degree, they have a point - if they are only posting snippets consistent with fair use conventions, then it's not such a big deal.
BUT...the trouble is, Google is not SCANNING snippets. They are scanning entire books for the purpose of their search engine - so that the search engine will make sure to pick up salient keywords that appear throughout the text of the book.
Even this is not so egregious...except that scanning the entire text of a book requires permissions. The libraries in question - Stanford, Harvard, et al - are giving THEIR permission. But is it the libraries' permission to give? Or is it the copyright holders' permission to give?
Google tells publishers, "If you don't want us to scan your titles, then tell us and we won't." But by doing that, publishers have to either enroll in Google Print as a partner (in a negative sense - a partner who is withholding titles from Google Print) - and thus become part of press releases and whatnot, whenever Google feels like letting the world know who its partners are (even if that partnership consists of not partnering - George Orwell is having a field day with this one).
OR, publishers have to let Google know in some abbreviated format not to scan their titles. I've taken a look at the form. Copyright holders are submitting books for EXCLUSION. How does one submit anything for exclusion? Isn't the point of exclusion NOT SUBMITTING?
The more convoluted this language gets, the more I have to see the Authors' Guild's point. Yes, the cat's out of the bag - Google's going to digitize books and publishers have to get used to this. But that's not to say that publishers shouldn't have the option of not getting used to it if they don't feel like it - and take the consquences. Google's trying to force this issue by going to libraries and doing an end-run around publishers and authors is...ill-conceived at best.
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