Google wins the Book Search suit: declared fair use

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/14/us-google-books-idUSBRE9AD0TT20131114

by cpymchn • 13 years ago

71 25 13 years ago

reuters.com

Touche2• 13 years ago

FYI, here's the Google Books landing page: http://books.google.com/bkshp?hl=en&tab=wp&authuser=0&ei=Efy...

What was once a nobel effort to index old books has turned into a front for the Google Play Store. Sad.

eliben• 13 years ago

I don't get it. I often search for technical information and get to stuff indexed from within books on books.google.com - that's really awesome, and I'm not sure what you find sad here?

pyre2• 13 years ago

The parent is sad that Google Play is on the front page of books.google.com, and Google's 'noble effort' is now linked to their commercial Google Play product. This is silly though. Google has their "book search" product and their "buy books through Google Play" product. It's reasonable to assume that some people might end up at books.google.com when looking for the Google Play books section.

JaggedJax• 13 years ago

I don't see anything particularly wrong with that landing page. They have separated the two and if you do a search, you don't get any Play results. Seeing as they have two products related to books, it makes sense to list them both at books.google.com

dannyr• 13 years ago

It gives you to buy books or search for books.

What's wrong with it?

Touche2• 13 years ago

It's like having a library run by a book retailer, with advertisements inside the library.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Now they just need to fight off the TPP agreement, just like they did with SOPA, so it doesn't nullify this win for them.

AnotherDesigner2• 13 years ago

Could someone here please explain why this isn't copyright infringement? Aren't they taking other peoples work without permission, scanning it and making it publicly available? Also, presumably all of this works draws more traffic to Googles website, bringing them profits from advertising? I can imagine if a company that was less powerful than Google did this somebody would have huge fines and possible imprisonment.

And please spare me your "information should be free" arguments or the possible "benefits" to society. I'm well aware of those arguments but current law protects the individual against society raiding their work for its own benefit. Its a basic foundation that so much of our law has been built upon. So I'm interested in things as they are now, current copyright law, and not how you would like it to be as an outsider that would profit from more liberal copyright laws.

ceejayoz2• 13 years ago

They're not presenting the entire book, are they? I thought it was just short excerpts matching your search queries - essentially the same thing they do for (also copryighted) websites.

AnotherDesigner2• 13 years ago

I really don't know. I don't use a lot of Google services.

jamesbritt3• 13 years ago

That's correct, though I 've managed to read useful amounts of a book (several pages) in response to a search such that it was much the same as if I had the book on a shelf, flipped open to the part I needed, got what I wanted, and closed the book. In other words, it saved me the expense of having to get the whole book.

cromwellian3• 13 years ago

The basic foundation of the law permits limited copying of books for "fair use". When you went to college or school and did a book report, and quoted material from an encyclopedia in the library, did you pay the author? Have you ever used a scanner or Xerox machine to copy a page from a book? Did you pay for it?

Fair use is the foundation of society.

Are you aware that millions of manuscripts, books, and articles sit decaying in library basements around the world, because the authors are dead, or the publishing company is, and no one has the rights to reprint them or can track down who owns them? There is a giant black hole opening up in our culture due to obsessive and onerous copyright, and potentially valuable works are not findable, and may be lost forever because the libraries can't afford to preserve them digitally, or legally aren't allowed to.

This chart says it all: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/03/30/infinite_copy...

Digitally archiving and indexing the world's books is of enormous value to our society, and such action deprives no one of money from selling books, that's a ridiculous scare tactic, akin to wanting to be paid for someone displaying the book jacket or table of contents of your book.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

My understanding is that many universities actually pay some sort of mass stipend to cover the cost of citations. It's a really bizarre situation...

javis• 13 years ago

I don't have a problem with doing this in general. I just have a problem with a company who's sole purpose is to make profit doing it.

If a non-profit organisation like Wikipedia started doing this, it'd be fine by me. Because they'd actually do it for the purpose of free information and not so they can just slap ads on it.

bediger4000• 13 years ago

As I understand "fair use", you have to admit to copyright violation(s) first. Fair use in the USA is a small carve-out of the exclusivity rights, for things like review, commentary, education, etc. The Wikipedia page on "fair use" says it's an affirmative defense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense).

I also think you're confused about the moral basis for exclusive copyrights. The possible "benefits" for society are legally the only motivation for granting limited exclusive rights. Economically, monopolies (exclusive rights) are pretty bad all around, and politically, copyright is easily abused to stifle or chill free speech. We, as a society, put up with some odious side effects of copyright, in order to get people to produce more stuff now for general use later.

So, tell me why the Author's Guild don't get penalized for bringing a frivolous suit against Google - what google did is obviously for the best of society in general, and probably will be good for the authors in particular.

revelation• 13 years ago

Huh? It is copyright infringement. That is the whole basis of a "fair use" defense: you have to admit its copyright infringement first.

For everything else, you should probably read the actual decision..

jarrett2• 13 years ago

In summary: It was a fair use defense. To claim fair use, you must first admit to using copyrighted work. So the copyright itself isn't at issue here.

The fair use defense in this case rests in large part upon the fact that the works were excerpted, not reproduced in full. Per 17 U.S.C. § 107, one of the factors in evaluating a fair use defense is: "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole." That factor obviously weighed heavily in this case.

So, that is why Google actions are (for now) permissible under current copyright law.

jarrett2• 13 years ago

At the time I wrote the above comment, I had access only to summaries of the decision written by journalists. That's still all I can find, but some newer journalism contradicts what I read and parroted above. According to some, the judge didn't consider the "the amount and substantiality" to be a major factor, or if s/he did, s/he considered it to weigh slightly against Google.

I guess I'll have to wait until I can find a copy of the decision to know for sure.

kevando• 13 years ago

What ever the opposite of 'turning over' that's what Aaron Swartz is doing right now..

Google wins the Book Search suit: declared fair use

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