Forum Moderators: goodroi
World Copyright Summit Richard Sarnoff, the man who signed off on the historic authors settlement with Google, took to the stage to defend the deal today. If it survives antitrust scrutiny, the Settlement between Google and US authors promises to give Google a monopoly on out-of-print books in digital form. Isn't the accumulation of knowledge in one private corporation scary?"It's like getting a fox to look after the health of the chicken," says Eric Baptiste. Sarnoff - speaking at the World Copyright Summit in DC today - didn't quite see it that way. But his defense was very, very interesting. It's even more interesting when you consider his explanation.
"When the industry was confronted by Google's plan to scan books, we felt there were core copyright issues and they needed to be litigated They were making and keeping copies of these books and were going to exploit those in a certain way."
The authors' society felt "their entire behaviour and activity was illegal," Sarnoff said. "We wanted to challenge that, where rights holders got to call the shots."
But something funny happened on the way to the law court. Despite having the law on its side, the authors caved and settled out of court. Why?
Reported at The Register...
[theregister.co.uk...]
"Books that are Out of Print - are a 'No-opoly'," he says. "They're inaccessible except to those within physical reach of a particular library. This will create a market for those titles for the first time."
That's a pretty good point. Out-of-print books disappear into a black hole of invisibility, except for used copies that get sold in secondhand-book shops and earn no royalties for the author or publisher. As far as I know, Google is the only company or organization that has stepped up to the plate and tried to do something about the problem. As publishers continue to trim their backlists, and as libraries continue to face budget pressures (not to mention a lack of storage space as the number of book titles in existence grows), there's value to authors and the public in making it feasible for an organization like Google to help keep old books alive.
Time will tell, if the deal survives the anti-trust examination. That said, I don't like the idea of ONE company being in charge of EVERYTHING.
The thing is, Google is the only company or organization that's making a serious effort to keep out-of-print books alive. Publishers certainly aren't doing their part (they're part of the problem, not the solution), authors are powerless, and libraries don't have the scale, the expertise, the budgets, or the will to tackle the challenge. If a corporation is willing to undertake a public service--whether for profit or to promote its brand--should its offer be rejected when no other company, organization, or government entity is able or willing to perform that service?
The problem is the deal was done before others had an opportunity to compete for those old books (archive, etc)
OCR has been around for decades. It's been used commercially since at least the 1970s. (Wikipedia mentions that Kurzweil was scanning news and legal documents for LexisNexis more than 30 years ago.) If publishers, libraries, or database vendors had wanted to do something about out-of-print books, they could have done so--and should have done so--back when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were schoolkids.
When Page and Brin were schoolkids copyright was still honored and the orphaned works were not in play as a commodity.
Orphaned works have been "in play as a commodity" for as long as books have been around. Go to any secondhand-books shop, and you'll find orphaned and non-orphaned works being resold with no royalties to the publishers or the authors. If anything, such businesses are profiting more from orphaned (and non-orphaned) works than they were when Page and Brin were schoolkids, because today's retailers of used books aren't limited to eccentric bibliophiles or academic dropouts with musty shops near university campuses--their numbers have expanded to include chain stores in strip malls such as Half Price Books and online megavendors like Amazon.com.
