The New York Times
April 4, 2009
Google's Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged
By MIGUEL HELFTSAN FRANCISCO -- The dusty stacks of the nation's great university and research libraries are full of orphans -- books that the author and publisher have essentially abandoned. They are out of print, and while they remain under copyright, the rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.
Now millions of orphan books may get a new legal guardian. Google has been scanning the pages of those books and others as part of its plan to bring a digital library and bookstore, unprecedented in scope, to computer screens across the United States.
But a growing chorus is complaining that a far-reaching settlement of a suit brought against Google by publishers and authors is about to grant the company too much power over orphan works.
These critics say the settlement, which is subject to court approval, will give Google virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them. Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June.
While most orphan books are obscure, in aggregate they are a valuable, broad swath of 20th-century literature and scholarship.
Determining which books are orphans is difficult, but specialists say orphan works could make up the bulk of the collections of some major libraries.
Critics say that without the orphan books, no competitor will ever be able to compile the comprehensive online library Google aims to create, giving the company more control than ever over the realm of digital information. And without competition, they say, Google will be able to charge universities and others high prices for access to its database.
The settlement, "takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google," said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. "Google will be a monopoly."
Google, which has scanned more than seven million books from the collections of major libraries at its own expense, vigorously defends the settlement, saying it will bring great benefits to the broader public. And it says others could make similar deals.
"This agreement expands access to many of these hard-to-find books in a way that is great for Google, great for authors, great for publishers and great for readers," said Alexander Macgillivray, the Google lawyer who led the settlement negotiations with the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild.
Most of the critics, which include copyright specialists, antitrust scholars and some librarians, agree that the public will benefit. But they say others should also have rights to orphan works. And they oppose what they say amounts to the rewriting, through a private deal rather than through legislation, of the copyright rules for millions of texts.
"They are doing an end run around the legislative process," said Brewster Kahle, founder of the Open Content Alliance, which is working to build a digital library with few restrictions. ...
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Comments (2)
Interesting possibility, probably true. But in my own area of research I have done a lot of copyright searches, and it's amazing to find that a huge number of scholarly books from between 1923 and 1964 never had their copyrights renewed, and are thus in the PD.
What this means is that the problem for scholarly books may not be as bad as it seems-- it's incredible how many good books never got renewed during those years (well considering their sales, it probably makes sense!)
The more you examine this Google book deal, the more of a scam it appears to be. The participating libraries gave Google all of their books for FREE, thinking it was an altruistic thing. Now Google is going to market them, but the donor libraries don't get a dime, and can't even see their own books unless they subscribe just like everyone else! (they get copies of their scans but cannot use them for 'consumptive research' or whatever the lawyers call it.)
The real victims here? California taxpayers, for one, who bought all the books that Google appropriated for free. I blame much of this on the institution's lawyers, who should have seen what Google was up to from the beginning.
And the controls that Google has to labor under for PD works are not as liberal as many people think. They provide PD downloads on a discretionary basis right now-- and how long will this continue, when they find out they can get $5 a pop for them?
Sadly, Google Books has obviously blown the whole idea of liberating orphan works from copyright, now that people will have found a way to make money from them. The heirs and rightsholders will soon be coming out of the woodwork. But the good news still is that many pre-1964 books are in the PD because they were never renewed-- they are not orphans.
BTW, California's specific deal gives them the right to use their own scans, but this conflicts with the terms of the big Agreement, which says that a contributing library cannot use their scans for consumptive research. How will this be resolved without Cal being dragged into court all the time?
It's interesting that the latest news says that at least one contributing library has now negotiated free access to the corpus-- they don't have to pay to see their own books online. This only makes sense, and Google must have responded to the criticism-- and the fact that the judge could have torpedoed the deal on just this alone.