Google has scored a deserved victory in its battle to build the largest digital book library and we should all be applauding—even authors and publishers.
According to Reuters, Google has beaten back the Author's Guild regarding the helter-skelter scanning of books by the search giant in conjunction with the big libraries. The article begins:
Google Inc. notched a legal victory in its bid to create the world's largest digital books library, winning the reversal of a court order that had allowed authors challenging the project to sue as a group. A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York said Circuit Judge Denny Chin prematurely certified a class of authors without first deciding if the "fair use" defense under U.S. copyright law allowed Google to display snippets of books.
I need to reiterate the position I took on this wholesale scanning of books by Google. It all began when Google started the process without any permission from the publishers or writers.
As far as I was concerned, Google was finally doing something that nobody else wanted to do: scan all the world's books to create a library of everything ever written. When I was a little kid, this was a pipe dream of intellectuals and authors—a library of everything available to everyone.
But nobody was willing to do it. It was too much work and too expensive. So Google just did it. Instead of cheering on Google, everyone got mad. After all who did it think it was?
Google continued to scan and scan to the point where Microsoft jumped in and began to scan too. Microsoft actually surrounded its activities with a search system that would have evolved into a dream come true for any researcher from now and until forever. It was a killer. Microsoft got bored with the idea and junked the whole process, giving the books without the search engine to Archive.org. It announced that all the books not still in copyright were now in the public domain.
Well, those books as well as the Google books out of copyright have always been in the public domain. I got a little suspicious of Google's and Microsoft's intent when they began to insist that their unique scans were copyrightable in and of themselves. This will be debated down the road, but for now we have a head start on scanning everything. Books are discarded by libraries left and right, so it's a good thing Google started this process when it did.
Meanwhile the Author's Guild sues on behalf of authors everywhere and demands that Google pay $750 for each book scanned. How much of this money would go to the actual authors is debatable. My guess would be none of it.
This is not over yet. The Author's Guild is going to sue Google over the fair use standard. This should, once and for all, give us some definitions of fair use that we can all benefit from. As far as the Author's Guild is concerned Google abuses its scans by letting people read snippets of the copyrighted books. This is no good, says the Guild.
As an aside, it's clear to me that the Author's Guild and many of the authors themselves are clueless about marketing fundamentals. What Google is doing is actually all good for authors. In this case, authors get better known. They get quoted in journals and perhaps sell a few out-of-date books in the process. Instead, they all want an unlikely payday.
The fair use doctrine will be an interesting battle. Again, I'm rooting for Google.
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