Clueless copyright issues
Winer thinks we should wait for publishers to tell us about their books, and not index them as Google wants to:
The likely reason they insist on opt-out instead of giving an inch and letting it be opt-in -- very few publishers would opt-in, and at least some would forget to opt-out.
To use the example he brings up - iTunes - had Apple let the RIAA folks do this one, then we would still be waiting for a service, and paying $5 a song when it finally rolled out with DRM that would make the Apple system look like an OSS playground. There's also this, from Wired - not all authors are on board with the publishers on this one:
Google's plan to scan library book collections and make them searchable may be drawing ire from publishers and authors' advocates, but some obscure and first-time writers are lining up on the search engine's side of the dispute -- arguing that the benefits of inclusion in the online database outweigh the drawbacks.
"A cover does sell a book to a certain extent, but once you're intrigued by a cover you want to dig deeper," said Meghann Marco, whose first book, Field Guide to the Apocalypse, was published in May.
Some authors think that - wait for it - making their books easier to find will help sales. What a shocker! Winer's hatred of "bigCorps" (unless they have big checks) is blinding him here.
Here's the thing - Google already indexes copyrighted works - everything we write on the web is copyrighted, so far as I know (IANAL). Google crawls that stuff (as do the other search engines) and indexes it all, making content easier to find. What they propose to do here is the same thing, but with books that tend not to exist in an easily searchable form. Ultimately, if it all works out, it'll be easier to find books I might be interested in, and easier to buy them as well. Should we require opt-in for indexing of the web, too? The way it works now is opt-out via robots.txt. Does Winer propose that we reverse that? If not, why not? By Winer's *cough* argument *cough*, our rights are being violated as we speak....
Comments
Clueless?
[Dare Obasanjo] October 25, 2005 12:45:38.903
I'm pretty sure Apple negotiated a deal with the RIAA to create iTunes so I think your point is moot. You need to deal with copyright holders if you want redistribute their content. The Web has set the precedent that Web search engines can infringe copyright as part of providing their service, however I'm not sure how well this has been tested in court. This doesn't mean I can start redistributing movie trailers, ring tones and snippets of songs because Google indexes and caches entire Web pages. It's now up to a court of law to decide whether books are more like web pages or like digital media like songs and videos when it comes to redistributing them on the Web.
My point is...
[ James Robertson] October 25, 2005 14:00:47.216
Comment by James Robertson
That indexing books for search purposes is no different than indexing web pages for search purposes. The latter is what Googel - and MS, for that matter - do now. The latter is an opt-out process, not opt-in. Are my copyright holder rights being stomped on because of MS' and Google's crawlers? If not, how would indexing books for the same purpose be a problem?
Implied Consent?
[] October 25, 2005 15:14:14.018
It seems to me that when you post your copyrighted work to a web server, you are (by necessity) implying consent that the entire work (page) may be copied (and cached) in a digital form by the client browser (and each of the routers between you and the client). If you include a link "Format for printing" then you are implying concent for the work to be copied onto paper. Even if you don't include the link, a case could be made for that implied concent for printing being provided. The implication comes from you instructing your server to respond positively to a request for a complete copy. Google is not dealing with publishers who provide a full electronic copy to anyone who asks (web content). They are dealing with publishers who provided content on paper with a statement at the top saying "you have permission to look at this paper, and to store this paper in a safe place, but you do not have permission to make a copy of this paper in electronic or physical form." In this case, there is an implied consent to allow the paper to make an image on your retina, and have that image transferred to your brain. If you wish to memorize the content, you probably have that permission, but not to store it in an external medium. One early concept of real estate law (that seems to apply to intellectual property law as well) is that property can be compared to a "bundle of faggots" (or sticks of firewood). If you allow rights to property to be divided up into smaller pieces, then the parties to a transaction can explicitly negotiate which ones are transferred. (With real estate this applied to things like "I sell you the surface of the land, but retain the mineral rights under the surface.") While it seems to me that it would be in the publishers' interests to make their products more visible, I'm not comfortable with courts deciding that owners of property are required to bundle their property is specific ways. While this limitation is usually done in the name of public good or economic efficiency, I believe that the historical evidence is that legally enforced reduction in choices generally does not produce public good or economic efficiency.