
Google Wins Appeals Court Approval of Book-Scanning Project - ghukill
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-16/google-wins-appeals-court-approval-of-book-scanning-project-iftpwxl3
======
baldfat
As a former librarian I say YES!

The typical librarian actually doesn't fight for the access of materials but
fights to enforce copy right stricter than the copy right law even calls for.
At my college I took down the sign that said "No Copying of Books" at the
photo copier and I put in place the actual copy right law. I can't tell you
how many visiting librarians were "shocked" I did that. Well we also allowed
bottles of water and talking in all areas except the study rooms and areas
that had doors, but that is another story.

~~~
mangeletti
This is awesome. I can remember clearly, in junior high school, the librarian
informing us that we were only allowed to copy six pages of a book for
homework assignments. I don't really have a strong opinion on much of this
(one way or the other), because I'm not well enough informed on the topic, but
I remember feeling weird about it, becaus the library aid made us feel like
criminals for wanting to copy more than 6 pages. The library at that
particular school was pretty substandard anyway.

I'm not so sure I won't be aging myself by saying this, but I feel very
nostalgic about libraries, and the thought of them becoming obsolete saddens
me, not so much because I can't imagine a future with mostly digital books,
but because I always felt at home at the library (and not in the "there's a
man sleeping under the 600s shelf" sort of way). I always felt a sort of
wonderment at the library, and that others were there for the same reason
added to that. I didn't visit the public library for school reasons,
typically. Instead, I just sort of explored. I have always been a slow reader,
so finding the exact right thing to read next was a bigger deal for me than
just reading book after book.

I also volunteered as library aid in 12th grade, which was fun.

Are there others that feel / felt the same about libraries?

~~~
tgb
Yeah, we were only allowed to use the first 30 seconds of songs in school
projects. Presumably that rumor started because of iTunes (which is crazy of
course because iTunes obviously negotiates extra rights that you and I don't
have). Meanwhile we just had to cite where entire photos came from! I think it
was just the recency of the music piracy issues that made them care.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Yeah, we were only allowed to use the first 30 seconds of songs in school
> projects. Presumably that rumor started because of iTunes

More likely, it was a rule adopted because fair use analysis is generally
helped by using a limited portion of the copyrighted work, and organizations
concerned with liability don't really want everyone independently trying to
figure out how limited a portion is limited, so they like to set some standard
that is likely to be limited enough in most real cases of the type they are
likely to be exposed to (e.g., nonprofitable educational uses, for school
projects) as to mitigate risk sufficiently.

> Meanwhile we just had to cite where entire photos came from! I think it was
> just the recency of the music piracy issues that made them care.

That's actually perfectly sensible -- the demonstrated propensity of
interested parties to file a lawsuit, and the likely damages in the case a
suit is lost, are perfectly rational factors to consider when determining how
to craft a legal risk mitigation policy.

~~~
JupiterMoon
In general photo content owners are as litigious as music ones.

------
tokenadult
It's good that this news report includes a citation to the case decision at
the end of the article. That citation is

Authors Guild v. Google Inc., 13-4829, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second
Circuit (Manhattan)

The ruling applies, of course, only to the United States, and only if it is
not reversed by the United States Supreme Court. But I think the argument that
Google's use of the book content is not market-destroying for book authors is
correct, as I have bought books after discovering them through Google Books
searches.

~~~
jessriedel
It has to be that these sorts of lawsuits are supported by a small minority of
authors, right? It's crazy. Who has _ever_ planned to buy a book and thought
"hey, I'll just use the Google Book Search to read through it"? I've never
heard of 99% of the books that turn up on these searches, and I have ended up
buying at least 2 or 3 of them.

~~~
officemonkey
Yesterday I downloaded a sample of "Ball Four" (one of the books mentioned in
the article) from Amazon. No doubt Amazon has permission to do such a thing,
but it is pretty odd for some authors to be worried about one type of sampling
and not another kind.

------
brianzelip
Surprised to read about the perceptions of and experiences with (mostly pre-
university school) librarians here.

As a new academic librarian and recent graduate of UIUC's iSchool (top library
school in the country[0] and an active hub of computer science), my experience
is that the strict and shushing librarian is, mostly, as you all are
_recalling_ , a _thing of the past_. Libraries are more and more about
collaboration, computing, and guidance. Kitchens more than grocery stores.
Librarians are more and more facilitators, teachers, and collaborators. The
open access movement has a very strong base in libraries.

[0] [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-
gradu...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-
schools/top-library-information-science-programs/library-information-science-
rankings)

------
ChuckMcM
Ok this is pretty cool, I've been waiting for the 2nd Circuit to decide this.
Now to see if the Supreme Court will take it up.

I believe that this would also clear up a service that scans your books and
sends you the digitized version. That would seem to be fair use of my own
library as well. I spent about $1200 getting roughly a 1/3 of the volumes I've
collected over the years digitized at 600 DPI so that I could have them all
available on my iPad for reference.

~~~
gshubert17
May I ask where you scanned your books? I've used 1dollarscan.com before for
some book scans, which worked pretty well.

~~~
ChuckMcM
1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that
did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist.

I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500
and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of
Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and
assorted other magazines.

~~~
CydeWeys
1dollarscan doesn't seem that good to me, what am I missing? It's $2 per 100
pages if you want OCR, and even then it's not clear what output format they're
delivering -- it sounds like it's still a PDF? The entire point of eBooks to
me is that you end up with actual text, not just scans. And $8 per average
length novel seems like a lot just to chop a book in half, throw it through an
auto-feed scanner, and run an OCR program.

~~~
ChuckMcM
When I started scanning my library I signed up for the "platinum" program
which is $100 for 100 sets (basically 10,000 pages) with most of the
enrichments turned on (OCR, etc) I paid the $1/set uplift for 600 dpi for
technical documents with complex diagrams and occasionally I opted for color
scans for some things.

For a textbook style book "chopping it in half and throwing it in a scanner"
is a bit more work than the sentence would suggest. The most cost effective
scanner for this is the Scansnap 1500 as it will scan both sides of a page,
has a 100 sheet "feeder", and will OCR the text (using ABBYY which is
included). It screws up occasionally and especially on magazines which are
very thin / shiny paper it can take a while (and several rescans) to get the
magazine scanned. So in general there is a pretty solid time advantage to
using 1dollarscan. Especially if you can use your nights and weekends
productively doing something else.

That said, once I didn't have another stack of 10,000 pages to go at the end
of the month (I had scanned all the "obvious" targets, minus the McGraw-Hill
books which they won't scan) I did switch over to manual mode with my scanner
because while the total cost of the cutter and scanner was close to $2,000
(not quite 2 years worth of 1dollar scan services) it is a capability that can
sit idle without too much cost.

~~~
CydeWeys
Do you share your scans (ignoring legality here), or are they all strictly
personal?

~~~
ChuckMcM
No, I don't share them. The goal was to have my library be portable, and to a
lesser extent more easily moved/preserved. These days I try to buy my
reference books in a portable electronic form whenever possible.

------
heimatau
I think it's important to mention that Google only returns 'snippets' of the
text. The entire book is searchable and indexed but Google book-scanning
project prevents use to read the entire book. The court ruled this is fair use
since it enables the searcher to find out if the searched book has substantial
information regarding their research/searching.

~~~
joering2
One could wonder if the same rule would apply to music.

Would it be okay to have 30 seconds of any song available free online, just so
that you could search for a lyrics of the song you heard on the radio, and
then match it with 30 sec audio clip to find out whether the song is the one
you were looking for.

~~~
heimatau
30 second clips (which would be about 14% of most songs) wouldn't be the
equivalent. Since google is only providing less than a handful of pages in a
~300 page book (1%).

------
nkurz
There's nothing wrong with the linked Bloomberg article, but it's a little
barebones and link-free. Here are two others with a little more background and
commentary:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151016/08010632559/appea...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151016/08010632559/appeals-
court-explains-yet-again-to-authors-guild-that-googles-book-scanning-is-fair-
use.shtml)

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-
rul...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-rules-that-
google-book-scanning-is-fair-use/)

And the Court's actual written opinion:

[http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/c3458e0a-f3d...](http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/isysquery/c3458e0a-f3d2-492f-a8b3-6e1121cd5cff/1/doc/13-4829_opn.pdf)

------
gojomo
This is a great win for fair-use, and matches Google's original
rationalization for why their scanning was justified.

Note, though, that Google in the middle years of this dispute sought to
acquiesce to a class-action settlement with the Author's Guild. That would
have more-or-less abandoned the (strong and ultimately successful) fair-use
argument, and set up a system where Google and the Author's Guild were
economically aligned, with a precedent against other (less deep-pocketed)
groups who might want to make a similar fair-use argument in the future.

Third parties including the American Libraries Association, EFF, and ACLU
objected to the potential negative effects on competition, privacy, and free-
speech of that proposed settlement, which helped prevent it from being
accepted by the courts. That forced Google to fall back to its original
defense, and led to this broader win for fair-use principles. For more
details, see:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_Agreement)

~~~
yohui
Reading the article, I do not see how rejecting the settlement between Google
and the Authors' Guild improved the situation vis-à-vis censorship and
privacy. I also do not see how approving the settlmenet would have prevented
others from reaching a similar arrangement with the Authors' Guild, since
Google was not granted exclusive rights. Nor do I see how the settlement would
have threatened fair use: it would only have released Google from the burden
of continuing to fight on behalf of fair use in this case, not that someone
else could not have taken up the fair use argument.

Practically, the result of rejecting the settlement seems to have been a
slowdown in the pace of digitization, and that readers are left with still no
way to easily access orphaned works.

~~~
gojomo
With a finalized class settlement, Google would have stopped fighting for
fair-use rights, and entered into a moneymaking partnership with the Authors'
Guild with a unique right – established by the expansive class including all
authors not yet even identified – to scan and even market books, and be immune
from further lawsuits from the class.

Anyone with shallower-pockets that then tried to do what Google did would
likely have been sued by Authors' Guild – now strengthened by Google cash – or
other members of the class. There was no precedent or requirement that others
be offered the same deal as Google: if Authors' Guild liked their deal with
Google (and why wouldn't they), they could tell others, sorry, we've already
got a system in place, you're not part of it.

But further, why should other 'little guys' have had to fight a legal battle
with Authors' Guild, or negotiate under threat of litigation by a de facto
Authors' Guild-Google alliance, just to do something that (now, finally) is
clearly authorized by fair-use?

The class settlement's Google-financed-and-managed system, for the benefit of
the Authors' Guild class, would have started with an overwhelming and likely
legally and economically insurmountable advantage in the scanning and
marketing of older books. That gave rise to the centralization and
privacy/censorship concerns of the ACLU, EFF, and American Libraries
Association. They're smart and like old books, too – but perceived a risk that
outweighed the benefit of "just scan 'em all quickly – under a Google/Authors'
Guild monopoly".

~~~
yohui
Dragooning Google into the fight to defend fair-use may be a smart tactical
move for the EFF, but that should not impinge on the objective question of
whether the Google Books settlement was legal. The privacy and censorship
concerns they raised seem orthogonal to the settlement itself, as the concerns
would remain whether the settlement was accepted or (as was the case) rejected
(e.g. Amazon removing Kindle books from users' libraries).

Why wouldn't the Authors' Guild be willing to offer others the same terms? How
would it benefit them to depend on Google? The agreement would have granted a
new sort of status to Google, but there is no reason that status would have to
remain unique.

Regarding the anti-trust angle, the wiki article cites an MIT paper that
concludes the settlement would not violate anti-trust and would in fact
generate a consumer surplus. [1]

Forcing Google to fight for fair-use may have been a sound Machiavellian
strategy for the EFF (as it resulted in today's ruling), but it's ironic then
that the main reason why the settlement was rejected seems to be because it
was not strong _enough_ on copyright, as expressed by individual authors'
concerns over loss of control, and freeing of orphan works.

[1]:
[http://www.criterioneconomics.com/Google%20and%20the%20Prope...](http://www.criterioneconomics.com/Google%20and%20the%20Proper%20Antitrust%20Scrutiny%20of%20Orphan%20Books.pdf)

------
13thLetter
It's great that this may soon be resolved once and for all -- assuming the
Supreme Court doesn't put the brakes on -- but it's nightmarish that it has
been dragging on since, literally, 2005. We've got to find some way to speed
the legal system up; that might make it so you don't have to be Google to win
an important case, too.

------
ericras
I wasn't able to find much info on the current status of these efforts. Has
Google (and their university/library partners) continued over the last ten
years? I was under the impression that Google had suspended scanning years ago
- partly due to this lawsuit and partly due to a change in company focus.

------
jstalin
The court's opinion is available here:
[https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/ca2/13-4829/230-0...](https://www.unitedstatescourts.org/federal/ca2/13-4829/230-0.html)

------
ap22213
I'm not sure that I agree with this ruling.

Although Google says that they're using it for one specific purpose, I can
imagine that they'll use it for other things like improving their search and
ad technologies. If that's the case, then wouldn't Google's work be considered
derivative of the original content?

Why should the authors involved not be able to re-sell those digitalized
versions to other companies (especially other search engines)? There are
probably lots of companies that would like that data set and be willing to pay
for the use of it (including me).

~~~
skybrian
It's also possible that someone who reads a book might learn something from it
and go on to make a lot of money based on what they learned, without
compensating the author. Should this be different for machine learning?

~~~
conover
Textbook authors hate them!

------
abandonliberty
Unless works under copyright are fortunate enough to be picked up as
educational material/insanely popular, they usually vanish. Scanning helps
with discovery and recovery. The gap in our cultural heritage is huge[1]

[1]
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140114/10565225874/copyr...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140114/10565225874/copyright-
week-our-lost-culture-what-we-lose-having-killed-public-domain.shtml)

------
cronjobber
From what I hear (IANAL) fair use doesn't trump DRM anti-circumvention laws.
It would therefore seem that this ruling creates _even more_ incentive for
publishers to drop non-DRM'd formats.

If true, I'd count this decision as a net negative. (Sorry Google, your
balance sheet means nothing to me.)

------
joering2
> Judge Denny Chin ruled in November 2013 that Google Books provides a public
> benefit and doesn’t harm authors.

I'm interested what kind of evidence played a role here. How does the judge
determine it didn't harm authors, other than using a time machine?

------
GPGPU
I would love it if the publishers and google figured out a proper way to pay
to read books that were still under copyright. I'd love to get rid of all my
bookshelves knowing that if I wanted access to a particular book I could pay a
few dollars and get it.

~~~
oberstein
Why don't you pay one of the several startups doing book-scanning services?

~~~
GPGPU
I didn't even know there were any! I will take a look.

------
username3
Now we can run a search engine that just returns Google results since the top
10 results are just a small portion of the total results.

~~~
guelo
Google Search results are not a creative work protected by copyright.

------
planfaster
I hope this is not too off-topic but since we are talking about book-scanning,
how would I go about scanning my own books for private use?

For instance, if I have a bunch of books about drawing, I'd like to scan them
all so that I later group all of the figure drawing pages in one folder, all
the gesture drawing pages on another, etc, so they can be more easily used
(and more useful) as reference.

Does anyone here recommend a way to scan books at home? I'm not against buying
a contraption.

~~~
rryan
Google developed a system called the "cheese grater" and open-sourced the
plans / design:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JuoOaL11bw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JuoOaL11bw)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lLL0mUZHwU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lLL0mUZHwU)
[https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-
scanner/](https://code.google.com/p/linear-book-scanner/)
[http://linearbookscanner.org/](http://linearbookscanner.org/)

------
NiftyFifty
Since when does the right of the owner shift to the consumer with respect to
artistic creation? This sets off all kinds of red flags on all things created.
The view is narrow, and lacks a broader view on the scope of artists in
particular - namely photographers!

~~~
njharman
By "owner" are you trying to mean "copyright holder"? and by "consumer" I'll
assume you mean "not the copyright holder or licensee".

If yes, then ever since copyright law was enacted. It's called fair use and
the public domain. Also note not all artistic creation is actually
copyrightable.

------
an0nym1ty
>Google has scanned more than 20 million books since 2004 without the
permission of the authors.

I am blown away how this is ruled legal, but in many cases scanning books as
an individual is considered copyright infringement. As though they don't reap
financial benefit from expanding the scope of the data they control? It's
their entire business model...

~~~
detaro
Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement. Tons of people
do it. What you do with the scans afterwards matters more.

~~~
nkurz
_Scanning books almost certainly is not copyright infringement._

At least in the US, you are overstating the certainty. While I agree with you
that it should not be infringement, prior to this ruling, the legal status of
scanning books you own for personal use was not clear.

The qualified expert opinion I got regarding personal scanning was from a law
school professor specializing in copyright (and who actually participated this
case), and was along the lines of "it's probably legal but there is not yet
settled case law".

This ruling probably moves it closer to settled, but I'd be suggest against
placing large bets unless your qualifications exceed hers.

~~~
detaro
Interesting and surprising given that companies exist that offer it as a
service, but I stand corrected.

~~~
nkurz
They exist, but are well aware of the risks. And sometimes they find it wise
not to test the legal boundaries:

    
    
      Any book you cannot scan?
    
      Unfortunately, WE CANNOT SCAN ANY PUBLICATION BY McGraw 
      Hill. They do not allow us to scan their publications. When 
      we receive any publication by McGraw Hill from customers, 
      we will return it back by charging actual postage fee."
    

[http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php#8a](http://1dollarscan.com/faq.php#8a)

~~~
Turing_Machine
Good to know (/me makes note to avoid purchasing anything by McGraw Hill in
the future).

