
Google Books wins case against authors over putting works online - peter_d_sherman
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/14/google-books-wins-case-authors-online
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mirimir
Nobody who has ever used Google Books would think that it's putting complete
copies online. The results include pages with hits, plus pages around them.
There are so many missing pages that books aren't readable.

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MarkMc
Can't I just search the last phrase on the last result page to get to the next
page in the book?

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taneq
Pretty sure it limits you to a set number of pages from any given book per day
or something. I'm sure with sufficient effort you could work around it but a
casual user can't just work their way through a complete book.

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kelukelugames
If that's the case then maybe we can write a program that scrapes 1% of 100
books every day. After 100 days we will have 100 books!

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mseebach
At some point you could also just get the book from the library and
scan/photograph and OCR it.

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meitham
It's different. When doing something as your described in a public library,
you're clearly breaking the library rules while you're in their premises and
can be caught, very different than having that being done by a software your
ran from your home. The former also does not scale to be economically
profitable, where the later can be hacked once and ran to scrape thousands of
books, basically a mass reproduction of books illegally.

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mseebach
1: I'd suggest you'd check out the book and bring it home with you and do the
scanning at home.

2: This is not Google's first rodeo when it comes to scraping. I'd be
surprised if you got more than a few days into the described process, so no,
it certainly does not scale.

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discoursism
(Four years ago. The AG eventually appealed to the Supreme Court, but were
denied a hearing.

15-849 AUTHORS GUILD, ET AL. V. GOOGLE, INC. The petition for a writ of
certiorari is denied. Justice Kagan took no part in the consideration or
decision of this petition.

[https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/041816zor_2c...](https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/041816zor_2co3.pdf))

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character0
This was a great rundown of what happened

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-
tragedy-of-google-books/523320/)

And unfortunately, it did not go well.

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discoursism
What do you mean? It went very well. We still have Google Books after all.

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londons_explore
This court case killed Google Books.

They've pretty much stopped scanning new books, even new out of copyright
manuscripts etc.

Google Books itself had loads of cool possibilities of new ways to make use of
the data from those books. This lawsuit has pretty much stopped all
innovation, and all the good engineers left the project years ago.

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toomuchtodo
The Internet Archive’s book scanning project is still in full swing. Yes, the
indexing and presentation is not at parity, but I prefer a non-profit digital
library to be the canonical reference instead of Google.

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yohui
That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the
Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works
that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain
projects, not supplanted them.

But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have
better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the
settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the
chance to rescue orphan works was lost.

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toomuchtodo
[https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-
from-1923-to-1941-...](https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-
from-1923-to-1941-now-liberated/)

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yohui
While a good step, this only makes up for a portion of what the settlement
would have allowed. (Most obviously, it appears this only covers books from a
20 year period and it takes more work to ascertain that the books are not
being sold.)

Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement
could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books
saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books:
[https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about](https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about)

~~~
toomuchtodo
I agree entirely, but perfect is the enemy of good enough. We can still
celebrate small wins while continuing to advocate for copyright reform.

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yohui
> _perfect is the enemy of good enough_

Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition
to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books
project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.

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eyeareque
Please add 2013 to the title.

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gordon_freeman
This article is from 2013. Can someone please edit the title with Suffix
(2013)?

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greglindahl
(2013)

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ronilan
Three other old links that randomly popped into this comment box:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/technology/23google.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/technology/23google.html)
(2006)

[https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-debuts-kindle-e-book-
reader...](https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-debuts-kindle-e-book-reader/)
(2007)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory)
(279 BC)

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pankajdoharey
More than the authors it were the publishers getting greedy.

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pseingatl
2013 decision. Old news, nothing new. Why post this now?

