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Big Ten Schools Recommit to Google Books Project
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Jun 10, 2007 10:14 PM
from the oodles-of-text dept.
from the oodles-of-text dept.
CNN reports that twelve major universities around the country have agreed to have substantial portions of their libraries included in the Google Books project. Around ten million volumes are expected to be included in the project. Participating schools include the University of Chicago and the 11 universities in the Big Ten athletic conference: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin. "The committee said Google will scan and index materials 'in a manner consistent with copyright law.' Google generally makes available the full text of books in the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books. Several other universities, including Harvard and California, already have signed up to let Google scan their libraries. "
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Technology: Ruling May Impact Google Book Search Case 172 comments
jsherman256 wrote to mention an NYT article discussing another possible problem on Google's legal front. A court decision in another case may spell trouble for their 'book search' technology. "In the recent case, Judge A. Howard Matz of United States District Court for the Central District of California, said Google's use of thumbnail-sized reproductions in its image search program violated the copyright of Perfect 10, a publisher of X-rated magazines and Web sites, because it undermined that company's ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users ... 'I think it takes the wind out of their sails,' Jan Constantine, the general counsel for the Authors Guild, said of the Perfect 10 decision. The guild and the Association of American Publishers brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Google over its Book Search program."
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Technology: Publishers Thank Google for Book Sales 257 comments
eldavojohn writes "A few book publishers are actually thanking Google for an apparent rise in sales due to Google's scan plan. Google is busy defending itself against authors and publishers that have brought lawsuits for ignoring copyrights. The director of the Oxford University Press said, 'Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers.' It seems to work in favor of the smaller publishers: 'Walter de Gruyter/Mouton-De Gruyter, a German publisher, said its encyclopedia of fairy tales has been viewed 471 times since appearing in the program, with 44 percent of them clicking on the 'buy this book' Google link.' Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?"
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Technology: Google Book Scanning Efforts Not Open Enough? 113 comments
An anonymous reader writes to mention the Washington Post is reporting that the Open Content Alliance is taking the latest shot at Google's book scanning program. Complaining that having all of the books under the "control" of one corporation wouldn't be open enough, the New York-based foundation is planning on announcing a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive to achieve the same end. From the article: "A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind's accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it's a company like Google that has embraced 'Don't Be Evil' as its creed. 'You are talking about the fruits of our civilization and culture. You want to keep it open and certainly don't want any company to enclose it,' said Doron Weber, program director of public understanding of science and technology for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation."
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Copyright Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Copyright Law (Score:4, Informative)
The bloody marvelous venture from Google changes that.
Parent
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We assume the copyright owner is the person/entity who has final say over who can read their work and under which circumstances. We assume we are talking about Google books, were anybody can come, type a book title and start browsing a portion of any book.
1- the information on the web is copyrighted but already mostly freely available. You only have to find it, which is what search services are about. In this case the vast majority of web authors want to be in Google's inde
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We assume the copyright owner is the person/entity who has final say over who can read their work and under which circumstances.
Basing your argument on a false premise is not a good start. Copyright law decides who can make copies of copyrighted works, not the copyright holder. In some cases only the copyright holder can authorize some reproduction/republishing, while in others they have no legal right to restrict others.
In this case, we readily see that copyright owners do not have complete and easy control over their work anymore.
They never did have. I can take excerpts of their works and republish them without consent and that has always been the case. You might note that I can do this whether or not some Web page author has set the ro
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I'm all for the book indexing, but still, you can't put a robots.txt on a book. This is an important difference which allows website operators to opt out of web indexing.
Respecting robots.txt is a courtesy from those crawling the pages. Some engines ignore them. Legally, robots.txt means very little. Google is providing a way for book publishers to opt out of Google books, and many people criticize them for their method of so doing, without realizing they do so as a courtesy. Legally, they can tell book publishers to go bugger themselves and index them anyway, if they are so inclined.
Book copyright owners are apparently being denied the privilege of opting out of having their books indexed.
No, book copyright owners have slightly more work to exercise their privilege (not thi
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They buy books then allow you to borrow them for free.
With Google they just let someone else buy the books but they only provide small portions. Cost of access and ease of access is the same.
Heck if they wanted to they *could* buy the books them selves. I think they are aiming for the public domain ones though hence the big library deals.
Re:Copyright Law (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Similarly, you can't bring a camera into most museums because it is only by restricting photography that museums can control who has the ability to reproduce paintings they own (after all, a 400-year old painting is well out of copyright).
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This is not the case in the UK, and the example of museums making posters for sale in the shop is a particular case where it has been ruled that there is no copyright in the resulting poster. As you say, the reason cameras are not allowed in many well-lit galleries where flash is not an issue is to try to keep those poster/book sales up. However, this rule is not as common in the UK as the US.
TWW
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You most certainly can bring a camera into most museums, if you manage to sneak it past the guards. If you make a photograph anywhere, inside a museum or outside of it, that photograph is copyrighted by you, period. The museum has no rights to it whatsoever, regardless of its policies.
Just to clear things up - since there's a bit of contradiction between the things you said - any faithful representation of a two-dimensional object is exempt from being copyrighted in the US. If you use your camera in the museum to take an accurate photo of the picture, and the picture is not copyrighted, then there is no copyright on the photo either. If you take a photo of the corner of the room, you could try to assert copyright on it, however.
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As absurd as interpretations of copyright law have become, it is hard for me to believe that an automated machine scan of a public domain book, involving no human effort other than placing the book in the machine and certainly no human creativity, acquires a new copyright of its own. IANAL but I recall reading somewhere that (1) simple compilations of uncopyrighted data, such as a phone book, cann
Off-topic: Big Eleven (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Off-topic: Big Eleven (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Off-topic: Big Eleven (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
My question is: (Score:2, Offtopic)
While under the safe shade of the off-topicness of the parent comment, let me say how disturbingly natural it has just recently become for me to add HTML tags.
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Google Books wouldn't be the one to do it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Google Books wouldn't be the one to do it... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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Consistent with copyright law (Score:5, Interesting)
I find it funny that they are saying the material will be provided in a manner consistent with copyright law when the article also mentions there is a lawsuit pending regarding the appropriate use of copyrighted material.
I may think Google is using it in a legal manner. You may think it is a legal manner. Google may think it is a legal manner. The schools and libraries may think it is a legal manner. However, until the court rules in the pending copyright case, no one really knows what is legal.
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It's pretty simple, really: Google and the participating universities are right, and the AAP and the Authors Guild are wrong. Next question?
(I will note for the record that while I'm not a member of the AG, I am a member of SFWA, which has worked hand-in-hand with the AG on a number of oc
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I think the whole point of going to these large academic libraries is that they have books that are unquestionably in the public domain -- entire rooms full of books 100+ years old of which only a handful of copies exist worldwide, and are available only in very limited contexts even when they are already digitized. Using the tools and distribution of Google, these materials can actually be shared e
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I find it funny that they are saying the material will be provided in a manner consistent with copyright law when the article also mentions there is a lawsuit pending regarding the appropriate use of copyrighted material.
Would it be fair to say that your post is consistent with decency laws in the US? Yet, I can still sue you for emotional damage I received when you used the word "material" after the word "funny" which I find to be obscene and evil. I can bring a lawsuit against you for anything I feel like. That does not mean I will win said lawsuit, nor does it mean that your post is of questionable legality until the courts rule on my pending suit.
Ohhhh boy it is Extinction Time(tm) !!! (Score:2)
The riaa and mpa
Re:Ohhhh boy it is Extinction Time(tm) !!! (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no reason why, when I sit down at my computer, that I should not have the sum total of human knowledge at my disposal. Providing this would be a direct benefit to many and an indirect benefit to all, so there is a good case for public funding.
Parent
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Using public funds to pay for universal access is a horrible idea, however, since some incompetent asshole will invariably be in charge of deciding what gets funded. If you are not convinced, consider the example of Soviet Union and their funding of g
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People already have online access to 'the sum total of human knowledge,' provided you are able to pay for it (usually through your university or R&D company account). Those who need it (scientists, doctors, students, researchers, etc.), already have access.
I understand where you're coming from, but your assertion is patently false. There are repositories of literature on certain subjects, but the truth is the vast majority of copyrighted works from the last 200 years, are no longer available for purchase or rental anywhere. In many cases the last copy of a work has been lost or destroyed, or only a few copies remain in private collections. The library of congress has not collected reference copies for a long, long time. Looking at the example of music perfo
Won't somebody think of the books?! (Score:5, Funny)
Boycott Google! They don't have any respect for literary privacy.
Is it up to the libraries? (Score:2)
If that's the case, it really highlights a major difference in the attitudes regarding copyright on books VS music and films.
Brigham Young University? (Score:2)
--
wi-fizzle research [wi-fizzle.com]
what if... (Score:4, Insightful)
Major Schools only? (Score:2)
I happen to disagree. Some of the PEW awards for Excellence in Technology went to schools not on that list, that have just as much technology and pending lawsuit results, could offer more diverse titles to put online. For starters, my alma mattar (sp?) contains the Jack Williamson Sci-Fi Library [enmu.edu] also an incredible array of documented artifacts [enmu.edu] in an anthro department that u
Funny thing, Contracts- (Score:4, Interesting)
The camera system they had was great- using Canon 1Ds with a mirror, a page flipper, and no book was opened past 45 degrees (I believe- I'm doing this from memory).
Would have been a nice job....
Universities should get raw data too (Score:2)
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The question then is whether they can show the digital copy to more than one person at a time, and if they can still do so when the book is checked out. Many books say no reproduction for any use but it seems to me that libraries may require some additional legal protections so they can advance into the 20th century.
What a book says you can do, and what the law says you can do are different things. If I publish a book and the first page says "you cannot copy excerpts from this book in the states of California or Idaho" nothing legally stops people from doing so. As for legal protections for libraries, they are actually pretty extensive. The problem is, the fair use doctrine is very vague and interpretable, and our court system is very wealth dependent. According to most precedent, if you're providing a work for educa
Google Books "Full View" is a treasure (Score:4, Informative)
There's just amazing stuff in there. Look at this peek at what Princeton University [google.com] was like in 1818. Before peeking, guess how many professors you think Princeton had in 1818.
How about Horseless Age, full of spiffy ads on all the hot automotive items of 1903?
How about The Boston Road Book, [google.com] which lists, describes, and rates all the best roads and routes for cyclists as of 1899?
Yes, I wish Google gave access to the OCR text (they must have OCRed it in order to index it) and I wish they were a little more forthcoming with respect to your rights to use this material (can Google really stop me from reusing material that's in the public domain? Does scanning a book constitute a transformative use or whatever?)
But don't let arguing over it stop you from enjoying this fabulous resource.
The link to "Horseless Age" (Score:2)
And I meant to provide a link to Horseless Age. [google.com]
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For those who don't read Vinge, one part of the story involves an impatient company using destructive scanning methods to scan books electronically. They were essentially putting the books through a high tech wood chipper which scanned each shredded piece of paper, reoriented it to match it back to its original page, and then reconstructed the book from that. Appare
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Re:Universities like Harvard and California (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect that you haven't lived in California for very long. "Cal" or "California" refers to UC Berkeley, the original UC. I agree with you somewhat, but millions have gotten used to calling it that. And it isn't the only state with multiple state run universities to adopt that terminology -- Missouri (or "Missou") is another example...
Parent
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When referring to sports teams and such, however, "Cal" or "California" does denote the Berkeley campus.
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