Re: Google Book Search and fair use

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I believe that the legal term for the situation that Adam is 
describing is "depraved indifference.''

Joe Esposito

----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Thursday, July 10, 2008 2:36 PM
Subject: Re: Google Book Search and fair use


> Sandy, my point hinges on a distinction between digital copies of a
> printed page and digital copies of a text. What is significant about the
> Google process is that they are making copies of the text, as well as
> copies of the page (they give the copy of the page back to the library,
> but they keep for themselves the much more valuable 'interpreted' digital
> copy of the text). There are lots of ways of producing useful digital
> copies of a text, but most of the efficient ones use an electronic file as
> the source (or something similar). This copying can be managed by the
> publisher or the rights holder (and publishers are rightly quite concerned
> over the distribution of the PDF file).  Google for the library project
> has not gone to publishers for 'source files from the text' they have
> generated their own digital copies (interpretations -- and with mistakes)
> of original texts. The Google process requires a lot of investment and a
> big software system. But disseminated low-cost ways of digitizing texts
> are coming.
>
> What happened to music about 30 years ago, and is now starting to happen
> with books, is that it is quite feasible to produce useful copies from the
> physical product. You dont need the source file. I predict that there will
> soon be lots of ways of producing (image scan->OCR->text database) usable
> digital copies of any printed text. The chances are someone is working on
> how to do this with an iPhone right now. Point the iPhone at your book,
> flip the pages, and *hey presto* you have your enhanced text database,
> accessible from and fed by your iPhone.
>
> CDs still have the rubric (similar to that which you find on books) that
> "Unauthorised copying, duplication, hiring, broadcasting ... etc is
> prohibited." But nobody (including all the book publishers of my
> acquaintance) ever seeks authorisation before copying for their iPod,
> their home music centre, or before sundry other things that may or may not
> be authorised by the music publishers. Because copying the physical copy
> is so easy (and so useful) music companies have had to abandon the fiction
> of opt in permissions for copying music. They still print the rubric on
> the sleeve of the CD, but I bet they dont get many requests for digital
> copies from end-users.
>
> If book publishers judge that maintaining the fiction of an 'opt in'
> permissions system will work when it is so easy and so useful to make
> databases of books from physical volumes, they have a rude shock coming.
>
> Adam
>
>