
The Authors Guild Is Still Wrong About Google's Book Scanning - walterbell
http://fortune.com/2016/02/08/authors-guild-google/
======
Eric_WVGG
I'm bewildered that such enlightened people as Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin
don't grok the value of this resource to writers.

Just an anecdote: the other day I heard a story about an FBI agent tasked with
eavesdropping on the telephone calls of Malcom X. Due to the nature of the
assignment, his job was to listen very carefully to everything he had to say.
The agent wound up coming around to his perspective.

This story came with a quote but no reference to the book, but someone on
Twitter thought to search in Google Books and quickly found it for me. This is
an amazing power, unimaginable in the days when research meant Dewey Decimals
and microfiche.

~~~
haberman
I have another similar story! This one kind of blows my mind.

In 1978, Corpus Christi College in Oxford, England was being renovated, which
involved breaking down a wall that had been standing for centuries. When they
broke open this wall, they found that there was a leaf from a manuscript
dating to the 16th century. It had been stuffed in there as a sort of building
material.

On this leaf was music, which was quickly identified as being a fragment of a
piece by Thomas Tallis (c.1505 - 1585) called _Gaude Gloriosa_. The piece is
known because it survives in other sources. It's pretty popular among music
from the period and several recordings of it have been made in the last 50
years.

But what was unexpected is that the text on this leaf was not the same text as
we have in the other sources. This text was in English instead of Latin.
Clearly the composer had reworked his piece to fit a different text. But what
was this other text? Nobody knew, and the pages they found in this wall were
highly incomplete, so they only had a small fragment of this alternate text.

The mystery wasn't solved until just last year (2015). A British scholar named
David Skinner typed the fragmentary text into Google, and out popped an
excerpt from a book. It turns out the author of the text is Henry VIII's sixth
and last wife, Katherine Parr. 37 years after the discovery of the leaf, and
almost 500 years after the actual event, Google allowed scholars to connect
the dots on this mystery.

(I'm not 100% sure whether the search that revealed the mystery came from
Google books or the regular Google search, since the scholar who did the
search didn't specify. But since the complete works of Katherine Parr are on
Google Books
([https://books.google.com/books/about/Katherine_Parr.html?id=...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Katherine_Parr.html?id=cBzuka1QBKkC)),
it seems likely that it was a Google Books search.)

By the way, this whole story is being published in an upcoming paper called:
‘Deliuer me from my deceytful ennemies': A Tallis Contrafactum in Time of War.
The abstract is available here:
[http://www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites...](http://www.tudorpartbooks.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites/tudorpartbooks/Abstracts_Tallis.docx)
(scroll to the bottom)

~~~
rememberlenny
This reminds me a lot of the entire Digital Humanities revolution with
computers. There is a lot of inconsistency with museum records. Especially for
art that is collected for cultural value from certain time periods, the
authors are misrepresented.

John Resig does a lot of writing/research on the misattribution of woodblock
printings and their sources. Through digitizing the works and being able to
use simple image recognition tools, museums across the world are able to iron
out inconsistencies.

------
epistasis
>In the “friends of the court” brief, it says the law was never intended to
“permit a wealthy for-profit entity to digitize millions of works and to cut
off authors’ licensing of their reproduction, distribution, and public display
rights.”

This "cutoff" language is part of what makes the Author's Guild argument fall
down. The authors still get all the normal licensing rights as before, so the
argument appears wrong on its very face.

What the guild is actually trying to say, I think, is that this new use is
something Google should have to pay for. Which is a stronger argument, because
it's not trivially refuted by the current status. By overstating their case I
think that their point is lost.

~~~
derekp7
Basically, they are saying that if anyone makes a profit off their work, they
deserve a cut of it. Makes sense on the surface of it, but let's try applying
this to other categories. Take for example a food critic. He makes his living
from reviewing the creative output of various chefs. Without the chefs doing
what they do, the critic wouldn't have an audience and therefore no newspaper
column. So do the chefs deserve a cut of the critic's revenue? Of course a
favorable review does tend to drive extra traffic to the restaurant, just as a
positive match in Google Books can drive a sale to a given book.

~~~
lelandbatey
I like your example quite a lot. I feel like if Google where providing a
service that only indexed books, but did not provide any content, the authors
guild would not have a leg to stand on.

In this altered Google Books service, let's say I search for the following
phrase:

    
    
        Then they were looking at the familiar environs of the ISS Flight Control Room,
        which was at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The director of mission
        operations was sitting in front of the camera stroking his iPad. He didn't seem
        to be aware that the camera was on.
    

This "alternate universe Google Books" would present you with only the
following information:

    
    
        Book: Seveneves
        Author: Neil Stephenson
        Quote is found on page: XXXX
        [ CLICK HERE TO BUY THIS BOOK! ]
    
    

The functionality of being a "Book search engine" would remain, without
reproducing any copyrighted material. I imagine that this alternate version of
Google Books would not incur any ire from the Authors Guild, or if they did
take issue, Google's use of their books would be firmly upheld as fair use.

As it stands now, Google Books shows you some of each book you search for, and
I suspect that's what the Authors Guild cares about.

~~~
derekp7
The thing is, often times (and I'm assuming it is based on concessions with
book publishers) they only show a very small amount of context for the quote
-- just enough so you can make a decision if that was really what you were
looking for (essentially what falls under common fair use guidelines). And
they do have links to purchase the book.

~~~
saurik
They normally show you multiple pages surrounding the search result. I have
_often_ been able to use the result of a Google book search to never need to
buy my own real copy.

~~~
SixSigma
Same here. I've used it to find the source of sentences for referencing in my
academic papers. And read a page either side to make sure the context is
appropriate.

------
state
Seems like this article is sort of preaching to the choir around here. I'd be
interested to hear if anyone on HN agrees with the Author's Guild or can make
their argument in an interesting way.

~~~
Someone1234
I'm going to make an argument for the Author's Guild even if I disagree with
them...

Google is taking books and digitising them. That within its own right isn't
illegal. But Google then takes the digitised books and utilises that content
for profit (every time you click buy, Google gets a cut of the sale) and
what's more the court has withheld the author's ability to decide how they
want their books to be advertised/presented.

I could scan in books, present content without context, and misrepresent what
a book is trying to say. For example I could create a climate skeptic website
that takes pro-climate change books and misquotes them into supporting me. But
because of this "transformative change" from physical to digital, suddenly I
am allowed to do that.

Every time Google quotes part of a book without context they're changing the
meaning of that book. The author has lost their right to stop that from
happening. Essentially Google has committed libel against authors by quoting
them without context or permission.

~~~
Oletros
> But Google then takes the digitised books and utilises that content for
> profit (every time you click buy, Google gets a cut of the sale)

Google doesn't use the books scanned for profit. If they sell a book is
because they already have it in Google Books, is not one of the scanned

~~~
Someone1234
They do definitely profit. They either gain referral fees, or they refer to
themselves (Play Store) and thus get effectively free advertising (that would
cost them money otherwise).

When you click a link to Amazon for a specific book from a third party
website, Amazon pays that website money for that referral. It is no different
here except that one Google department sometimes sends it to another Google
department.

~~~
Oletros
> Fiction: Google is paid by booksellers like Amazon to include links on
> Google Books pages.

> Fact: We provide links to booksellers on Google Books pages because we want
> to make it easier for users to buy books and for publishers to sell them.
> Booksellers don't pay to have their links included in Google Books, and
> Google doesn't receive any money if you buy a book from one of these
> retailers.

[http://www.google.es/googlebooks/perspectives/facts.html](http://www.google.es/googlebooks/perspectives/facts.html)

~~~
Someone1234
Except Google links to their own store in the US (Play Store) which they
definitely do profit from directly.

Click the "Buy Book" link here:

[https://books.google.com/books/about/Harry_Potter_and_the_So...](https://books.google.com/books/about/Harry_Potter_and_the_Sorcerer_s_Stone.html?id=wrOQLV6xB-
wC)

Unless Google are claiming they make no cut from Play Store book sales, which
is laughable.

~~~
Oletros
And, as I said, they are not profiting of the scanned book because they own
the rights to sell the vook in their store.

Unless you're trying to ay that Google can only link to stores that are not
their own, which is laughable

------
kybernetikos
So I'm confused about this. Do Google actually own all of the books they've
scanned? If I scanned millions of other peoples books and kept the scans,
wouldn't I be in breach of copyright?

~~~
fapjacks
You don't have to _own_ a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use
fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under
Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use.
Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool
over a lot of eyes lately.

~~~
kybernetikos
Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I
don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?

~~~
Zikes
Google scans, stores, and indexes billions of web pages, with obvious and
fairly incontestable public benefits. How are books any different? The
contents of an article, a blog post, and a NY Times Best Seller all get the
exact same copyright protections and considerations.

What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page
to your hard drive.

~~~
notahacker
The web pages are open public access in machine-retrievable format though.
Google purposely _doesn 't_ index content that supplies a robots file or
header requesting it not to be indexed, and certainly doesn't borrow human
accounts to allow Googlebot to also index registered-members-only online
content.

I'd argue that Google ought to have a similarly strong presumption that work
distributed only in a non robot-parseable format and only for a fee isn't
intended to be indexed in a publicly accessible database, unless the copyright
owner expressly indicates otherwise. Especially if they haven't even paid the
copyright holder the regular fee to _read_ the work

~~~
derekp7
So all the copyright holders have to do is put a robots.txt file at the
beginning of the book, and all is good? And really, there is no law that I'm
aware of requiring Google (or anyone else) to honor robots.txt.

~~~
notahacker
I don't think robots.txt has any legal standing, but I do think the fact that
Google is willing to respect requests not to index content from everyone
except print publishers of paid content is indicative of bad faith on their
part.

~~~
nkurz
Do you have reason to believe that they do not respect requests from print
publishers not to scan their books?

[https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3365282?rd=1](https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3365282?rd=1)

[https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#op...](https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#options2)

Regardless of whether they have a legal obligation to do so, they certainly
make it sound like they obey such requests.

