Re: Google Book Search and fair use

[Adam Hodgkin <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>]

Tackling pirates once they have emerged is one thing. Creating a 
climate in which pirates are a marginal issue is a better 
solution.

That means creating a copyright environment in which consumer, 
college students and researchers dont even think about 'rolling 
their own'.

I would have some suggestions:

(1) Do not follow the path of the music publishers, who buried 
their heads in the sand and opposed or ignored every new use, 
every new technical development.

(2) Devise a much better rubric, and devise an equivalent of 
robots.txt which allows and encourages acceptable database 
interpretations of texts.

(3) Reguire database implementations to use and register their 
use of publisher supplied PDFs. Google should not be creating 
their own inferior PDFs of books published in the last 12 years 
because publishers should have been archiving these PDFs

(4) Encourage and define a broader understanding of 'fair use' 
(ie 'embrace and extend the valuable concept of fair use rather 
than fight it all the way')

That is enough by way of suggestions to keep several working 
parties busy for years, but the key change is one of 'attitude' 
in which publishers must recognise that creating, supplying and 
licensing the use of digital texts is the core part of their 
mission in 21st C. Not something to be pushed away and ignored 
for as long as possible.

Adam


On 11 Jul 2008, at 23:07, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> Ok, point well taken, but what is your solution? Pirates,
> especially those offshore, are not likely to respond to any "opt
> out" requests either, and already there is plenty of such book
> piracy going on. Just ask the AAP task force that has been
> monitoring this. Or read the IIPA Special 301 report on IP
> enforcement in China. I suppose for us university presses there
> is some consolation in the fact that the monographs we publish
> are of interest to so few people worldwide that pirates don't
> bother to waste their time on them, but concentrate on commercial
> best sellers and textbooks instead.
>
>
>> Sandy, my point hinges on a distinction between digital copies
>> ofa printed page and digital copies of a text. What is
>> significantabout the Google process is that they are making
>> copies of thetext, as well as copies of the page (they give the
>> copy of thepage back to the library, but they keep for
>> themselves the muchmore valuable 'interpreted' digital copy of
>> the text). There arelots of ways of producing useful digital
>> copies of a text, butmost of the efficient ones use an
>> electronic file as the source(or something similar). This
>> copying can be managed by thepublisher or the rights holder (and
>> publishers are rightly quiteconcerned over the distribution of
>> the PDF file).  Google for thelibrary project has not gone to
>> publishers for 'source files fromthe text' they have generated
>> their own digital copies(interpretations -- and with mistakes)
>> of original texts. TheGoogle process requires a lot of
>> investment and a big softwaresystem. But disseminated low-cost
>> ways of digitizing texts arecoming.
>>
>> What happened to music about 30 years ago, and is now starting
>> tohappen with books, is that it is quite feasible to produce
>> usefulcopies 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
>> anyprinted text. The chances are someone is working on how to dothis
>> with an iPhone right now. Point the iPhone at your book,flip the
>> pages, and *hey presto* you have your enhanced textdatabase,
>> accessible from and fed by your iPhone.
>>
>> CDs still have the rubric (similar to that which you find onbooks)
>> that "Unauthorised copying, duplication, hiring,broadcasting ... etc
>> is prohibited." But nobody (including allthe book publishers of my
>> acquaintance) ever seeks authorisationbefore copying for their iPod,
>> their home music centre, or beforesundry other things that may or
>> may not be authorised by themusic publishers. Because copying the
>> physical copy is so easy(and so useful) music companies have had to
>> abandon the fictionof opt in permissions for copying music. They
>> still print therubric on the sleeve of the CD, but I bet they dont
>> get manyrequests for digital copies from end-users.
>>
>> If book publishers judge that maintaining the fiction of an 'optin'
>> permissions system will work when it is so easy and so usefulto make
>> databases of books from physical volumes, they have arude shock
>> coming.
>>
>> Adam