There is an absolutely fascinating article in the New Yorker related to Google’s Book Scanning/Search project and the pending furor over the copyright issues that this project is bringing to light. The results of this debate will have an impact on how you and I, dear readers, can expect to be able to find and access information in the future.
In this debate, we find authors and publishers pitted against search giants such as Google. Authors and publishers are frightened that they may be carved out of a potentially lucrative business and are insisting on a model which will allow them to receive royalties for their works. They’re also really scared that Google is scanning entire books (which makes sense given that they’re creating a searchable index of all the world’s knowledge) as opposed to the excerpts an academic might use in a research paper which are covered by “fair use”.
For their part, Google states that their use of these works is “transformative” and therefore not covered by copyright. Even in a search, Google only shows the pages surrounding the resultant selections. In their eyes, it’s the equivalent of a really detailed card catalog with the ability to search a selection and see if it meets your criteria before wlaking over to the shelf and picking up the book. You certainly cannot read the whole book through. Google also places restrictions on the number of pages that can be viewed/read by any one person out of any one work. Certainly these restrictions make it too much work to try and subvert them.
So where do I come down on this? I happen to think that creating digital copies of these books is incredibly important - books are ultimately temporary after all. History has taught us not to rely solely on one copy. Alexandria anyone? Have you ever lost a work on the computer while working on it? In my opinion, any enterprise taking on the task of scanning media and making it available more broadly is worthy of our admiration and support. It’s the potential monetization that puts everyone into a tizzy.
I am extremely concerned with what happens if Google manages to settle this lawsuit with the other parties. What will that mean for the other entities who are busy trying to make the same thing happen? Where will this leave competitors like Amazon in the discussion? Will smaller efforts be able to succeed or will they be priced out of the market by the precedent that this judgment would set? Must we accede all content to the mighty Google index?
Notice that nowhere in this debate have we yet spoken about what users/readers actually want and deserve. According to the New Yorker article, about 20% of all the books in existence are in the public domain. Let’s dismiss how ludicrously small this is for a moment and focus on what these constitute. These are generally older titles where the rights have lapsed or twhere there was never a copyright in the first place. Nobody fights over these and there are numerous efforts to bring this group of books into ready availability online. Another 10% of books are covered by copyright and currently in print. Nobody debates these much either since they typically constitute newer titles and represent precisely what copyright is intended to protect - the right of artists to make money off their works. It’s the other 70% that are the real buggers. The large majority of books are covered by copyright and not currently in-print. This leaves booklovers like myself in a position of having to track down a physical copy of an asset which is no longer produced. Thankfully, this has become easier in the age of the internet, but it has also built unassailable marketplaces around the truly rare and hard to find items. Why should we all not be able to benefit from knowledge which is failing to produce commercial value any further for the artists and publishers?
And so, the solution seems to me to be quite simple. We should enforce a “use it or lose it” policy on copyright holders. If, for instance, a book is no longer in-print and new copies fail to be circulated or made available to the market for some period of time at a reasonable cost, the copyright would be removed and the item would pass into the public domain, made freely available to the world - everyone with equal opportunity to profit off the work if they so desire. Why not? How many people still sell copies of “Moby Dick”, even though it is freely available in digital form in the public domain
The appeal of a “universal library” of all the world’s information is almost too much for me to bear. I want, I want, I want. It hurts me to think the reason we won’t such a thing is a relatively small cadre of people who wish to reserve the right to profit off their copyrighted material at some point in the future. Either you accept the business risk of making knowledge available or someone will do it for you, that should be our motto. It’s what the world deserves.
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