I thought this was a really interesting issue and am curious about everyone's thoughts: http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-google-stole-the-work-of-millions-of-authors-1454880410 Does the public good of being able to dynamically search millions of literary works trump the concept of copying published and copyrighted work? If Google earns additional ad dollars by virtue of the strength of its search engine - due in large part to those copied books - does it owe compensation even if it didn't actually deprive those authors of money they would otherwise have received? How does what Google did compare to the idea of copying literature and reselling it - isn't search basically like having a buddy who knows everything and can tell you who wrote "what's in a name" and point you to resources that talk about its significance? Ultimately this feels like a situation where people are saying "they have a lot of money, and since my work indirectly (or directly) helped, I want some of it."
I don’t know the legal issues but it seems that Google’s actions may have helped with sales for many authors by giving broader exposure to their work. I don’t think they publish the entire text without permission. There is probably a good amount of that as well. Deep pockets, probably some kind of settlement at a minimum for those that scream loud enough.
Prodigal, your post caused me to read a couple of other articles about this case about what is being argued. This is a 10-year case in which the Author's Guild cannot get any traction because Google did not make money from selling the copied work. Courts have ruled that providing snippets of the work online is not copying the work and making it available to public reading because the search results are limited and what is viewed by the public is very small. This evidently is not about Google selling the digitized copies to other libraries, although the implication is this without understanding the Google contracts with the libraries that provided the original text to be scanned. The Guild is arguing, " If Google is allowed to take huge swaths of copyright material for its own commercial purposes, it will establish a precedent and open the gates to future property grabs…" This seems like a bogus argument to get money for any amount of words that go in view of the public. For all practical purposes, everything will be digital in the future, so the future limitations are that you cannot take any piece of a creator's work and quote it to the public. The "Fair Use" argument is about making as much money as possible for using any part of their work for any reason. My interpretation: "if you use any words that I create, then you owe me some portion of whatever money that you make from using that small part of my creation." The previous court rulings do not limit the amount of money that the author can make if a "sizable" portion of their creation is exposed. I am not a student of the law familiar with this case so my interpretation could be wrong if the quoted argument is misleading. I guess, in some small way, it would be a limitation of future technology to take advantage of copyright material in some new way. How can you protect the author's creation from some future technical capability that does not exist right now?
That was my thinking as well. The whole concept of a search engine and its business model is different from anything copyright laws were designed to cover, from what I can tell. The basic idea is that to provide an effective search, I have to basically know everything about everything. How can you even begin to quantify the reimbursement for being able to search based on a key phrase from an author's work? In addition, it would seem that Google could then argue that any revenue the author makes related to book sales should be shared with it, since its search engine helps create more visibility and easier access to online purchases or even just to awareness that might inspire purchase. If your book can be found in search, that's advertising, pure and simple. My feeling is that authors should be hard at work leveraging that free benefit - which can make them a lot more than any reimbursement they might get through this current effort.
Well there we have it: https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-books-copyright-challenge-denied-top-us-court-143216437.html
