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Kris Smith? I almost forgot to do this. I hardly know if I should opt out or in and claim my work and say hands off. Still, can you tell me where to find the helper guide you mention? And yes, if only Dante had known, there would be a few more circles in hell.
Does the guide still work? I claimed my works today, after having claimed, then deleted the whole list a few months ago. It seemed a little easier to me this time, but. It seemed to me as though some of the steps in the guide were no longer applicable.
I never thought I would be grateful for my relatively small output.
One thing that I thought came in handy was that I could download a spreadsheet listing all my claimed works. There's a button that reads something like "Download spreadsheet." If you have a program like Excel, you can read and, I think, edit.
I hope they throw the settlement out, personally. Unfortunately, I think the fact that Microsoft and other behemoths are challenging it will just mean that authors will have to fill out 3 or 4 of these "Let me out of this thing" forms instead of just one.
I have some sympathy with your complaint but as a reader if a book is out of print and not easily available on the used circuit I think googlebooks is doing a service to humanity.
If your publisher won't print get them to assign right back to you and micropublish. But griefing on google cause you they're trying to make your books available seems against your best interests.
Google is violating the author's copyright. The holder of the copyright gets to decide who does what with their work. That's the point of copyright.
And I don't think Google is planning on tracking down the owner of the publishing and copyrights in order to make sure they get paid for the use of the work. Essentially it's just pirating.
Distributing someone's work without proper permission and with no concern about contracts and payments is wrong and not good for the artist. It takes away their means of livelihood. This may lead to the artist not having time to produce any more art. And that would be a bad thing.
And in the case of authors who are alive... I really want them to get paid so they can eat and see the doctor and WRITE MORE. The incentives are just set up all wrong in this for me getting what I want.
Copyright law is broken, over the last century it has been tortured from a reasonable protection of an artists livelihood to something much more suited to improving the bottom line of various publishing companies. The mere fact of an action violating the letter of the law just doesn't mean much to me or to our latest generation. Hurting an artist has meaning, almost everyone agrees that that shouldn't happen. But it is far from clear that merely following blackletter copyright law ensures that.
Try to set aside your kneejerk reaction and consider the example I posited:
if a book is out of print and not easily available on the used circuit
Who in that situation is hurt by google publishing their work electronically?
The fact is that most artists do not control their copyright, they have assigned it to a publisher. And while no one wants to hurt an author, the profitability of a publishing house is much less of a concern.
The author may want to publish it again in the future. It's their right. They own the work.
I may want to live in your house when you're not there. How would you feel if whether or not I moved in was up to Google. Your not using it, so it's OK, right?
You persistently ignore the fact that for most published work the copyright has been transferred and the author does NOT own the work.
A more accurate analogy would be if I built a house, then sold it to some company that leased it out for a while but eventually quit bothering to list it and let it go abandoned and empty. Google comes along, notices it's empty and starts leasing it out.
Regardless of whether it's empty or leased by google I'm not making any money out of it. At least if google is listing it there is a much better chance of it garnering notice in the architectural press and maybe making the new houses that I am building more desirable and valuable to me.
You are wrong.
Publishers get publishing rights which may revert to the author after a certain amount of time. At that point the author can publish the book themselves or resell the publishing rights.
This reversion of rights will be much less profitable to the author if Google's posted the book online.
I simplified, making a distinction between the "right to publish" and the "copyright" seems absurdly picayune. It becomes particularly silly where there are clauses in the contract (like Random House's e-publish = not out of print) that make reversion a practical impossibility.
The distinction between "right to publish" and "copyright" only seems picayune to you because you don't understand it.
"Copyright" belongs to the writer, inherently, as the writer owns the work. Thus includes the right to decide if, when, and who to license for specific uses.
"Right to publish" a right licensed by the writer, limited by the contract between writer and publisher.
Wrong. Google scanned MY books. Copyright 2006 and 2007. Still in copyright. Still owned by me. Still in print. Still available in shops and online. And had a lawsuit not been filed, they would've sold copies of MY books to people and not paid either ME or my publisher a dime.
That's STEALING.
Google is using the 'orphaned works' argument to divert attention from what they're really doing, which is trying to grab the rights of all books ever published.
Yeah, you're not really listening reading what I wrote are you? Please try again; I'm positing a particular case, I'm not saying it is what is happening in every instance and I am willing to stipulate that in some cases the goog is acting inappropriately.
But look a little outside your immediate world at the larger society we live in, copyright is supposed to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" and I don't think current law is doing a very good job of that. We have evolved unreasonable terms and conditions that serve nothing but the bottom line of large publishers.
Further I contend that the damage done even an egregious case such as yours is minimal and minor compared to the societal good that making even a few orphan books available. The infringement shouldn't happen & the damage should be redressed, but our society is changing around this point and we need something better.
Edited at 2009-08-31 11:21 am (UTC)
I'm reading what you're saying. My point is that Google is scanning everything. They aren't making any distinctions at all. They were taking the rights of every published author. EVERY SINGLE ONE. Not works of questionable public-domain-ness. EVERY SINGLE BOOK.
I've suffered no damage at all, and as I said before, I'm opting in. That's not the point.
Google tried to steal the rights of every published author for every published book, whether it was published in 1898, 1913, 1953, or 2009. EVERY SINGLE BOOK.
Copyright promotes the progress of science and the useful arts by making it possible for people to make a living at them. That's what it's for: so that the creator can profit from his/her work. It was clear to the first proponents of copyright and patent legislation that the profit motive drives individuals to more productivity even in areas where they'd be active anyway, and it is that productivity of new material that promotes the progress of science and the useful arts.
You dislike "unreasonable terms and conditions that serve nothing but the bottom line of large publishers." You fail to show how those terms and conditions cut into a writer's profits...in fact, they do not. They protect the writer (I can't speak to musicians and moviemakers--I'm not one of those. I write books. Copyright protects books.) You fail to show how publication of "even a few orphan books" actually benefits society. If you want writers to "look outside [their] immediate world," then turn that same demand on yourself. Why should your desire to read an out of print, hard to find book be more important than a writer's desire to profit from her work? Are all the out of print books being digitized really that beneficial? Is every book ever published really worthwhile?
More personally: Will reading an out of print book of fiction pay your bills? Feed you? Put a roof over your head? No...it satisfies a desire, but does not provide a need. But getting paid or not getting paid for the books does provide for writers' needs. It is from that income source that I pay for food, housing, clothes, utilities, etc. I contend (using your language) that your wanting to read something matters little compared to the writer's need for food, shelter, clothing, etc.
You contend the damage to writers is "minimal"--on what grounds? Where are your data? I can tell you that thousands of writers believe that Google's digitization *will* materially harm them--in the pocketbook. All of us have experience now with the e-market for books; all of us have publishers who own the e-rights and most have e-books out from those publishers. We actually do look at our royalty statements; we know how much we make from e-books, from Webscriptions, etc, and how much we make from print books, edition by edition. And we know how much we don't make from pirated texts sold online.
Do we need better copyright protection? Sure. We need it in the law that electronic publishers must contact and contract with those whose works are copyrighted before publication, not after. We need copyright enforcement...and most of all we need readers who don't think because they're mad at a rock star or movie company they're entitled to a free copy of our books.
It's actually as if you hired a top-line architect to design a house which you expected to sell at a reasonable profit. But then, before you sold it, Google took the plans and put up inexpensive versions of the same house all around the neighborhood. People choose the less expensive, but serviceable version, so your house sits vacant and your investment goes done the tubes.
Edited at 2009-08-31 04:03 pm (UTC)
Wrong.
Copyright is not transferred when a publisher is licensed to publish a work. Copyright belongs to the writer (that's why the copyright notice in the front of the book says (for instance) "copyright [year of publication][authorname]" The publisher has temporary, licensed use of those rights granted in the contract and nothing more. (I retain foreign language rights, movie rights, TV rights, game rights to my books and in some cases--depends on which book and which publisher--audio rights. Those rights are all valuable and may be salable. Yes, I make money off some of that.)
If the writer chooses to write in work-for-hire, then the copyright belongs to the hiring entity from the get-go, but if the writer is writing as himself/herself, then he/she owns the copyright and continues to own it. Most books are not written as work-for-hire.
Let's take your analogy but make it more accurate. You build a house and lease it (you don't sell it--you lease it. Same as with a book.) Your tenants leave. You can't get other tenants immediately. But you kind of like the house, so you keep it. Someone decides that since your property is empty, they can declare it belongs to them and lease it to whomever they wish, without your consent. That's illegal. You'd have the law on them, and the law would back you.
A house and an intellectual property may both be "empty" for awhile but desirable for leasing again later. I actually own one rental property (was my grandfather's store) which recently changed tenancy (former tenant wasn't paying rent regularly) and was thus empty for a few weeks as the old moved out, some repairs were done, and the new moved in. During that time I got inquiries from people who wanted to lease or buy it. They knew they had to contact me to find out if the property were available and whether I would lease it or had another use for it. Related to your earlier comments about benefits to society: it would be my right to maintain that building empty if I wanted to.
It is up to ME to decide what it is in my best interest. Yes, the neighbors might try to convince me to open it, lease it, knock it down and build something else, turn it into a parking lot (the city where it is, is woefully short of downtown parking), but it's my building and if I wanted to keep it empty and just pay the taxes on it, I could. You or anyone else would not have the legal right to step in and lease it to someone just because you thought that would be better for me.
Can you grasp that simple concept? Most of us writers who are complaining own our own copyrights. Google has infringed them. It has acted as if it had rights it does not have.
You say "...it is far from clear that merely following blackletter copyright law ensures that."
It may not be clear to you, but it is clear to the writers in question that copyright law *does* ensure that better than letting anyone and everyone make and sell copies of their work without permission.
"...the book is out of print and not easily available on the used circuit..." So what? The writer has a right--a legal right--to decide when and how their work will be published and sold. A writer may decide not to seek additional publication for his or her own reasons (e.g., the out of print book may be a first novel that the writer wishes now--after many other good books--had never seen daylight. Your desire to read juvenilia does not give you--or anyone--the right to produce a new edition without the author's permission.)
You say "...the fact is that most artists do not control their copyright, they have assigned it to a publisher."
This shows that you completely misunderstand what licensing publication means...it is not "assigning copyright to the publisher" but licensing specific modes of publication set out in the contract.
You say "...no one wants to hurt an author" (untrue--some people do) and "the profitability of a publishing house is much less of a concern."
Google, by making copies and proposing to sell them to profit itself, is taking on the role of a publishing house and hurting authors in the process. Google is doing exactly what you say you're opposed to--hurting authors by making an unfair profit from their work.
It's a rights grab, pure and simple. And though I'm following my agent's advice and opting in, I'm hoping the Justice Department quashes the whole thing.
I think the *idea* of Google Books is grand: making public domain and out-of-print (and therefore unavailable to the general public) books available. But it should be OPT IN, not OPT OUT. If little old Author X whose books went out of print 30 years ago wants to opt in so that their books become available again, I'm 100% all for that. I read obscure books as a child that I would love to be able to read again.
But I didn't sell the rights to my books to Google; I sold them to Llewellyn Worldwide. It was Llewellyn who paid my advances; Llewellyn who paid my editor, copyeditor, and proofreader; Llewellyn who paid my cover artist; Llewellyn who paid for marketing and publicity people. In a nutshell, it was Llewellyn who paid tens of thousands of dollars to bring my books out in 2006 and 2007.
Why should Google get any profit of sales of my work? They didn't pay for any of that.
Furthermore, by making it OPT OUT within a deadline AND applying it all works around the world, there are going to be hundreds of thousands of authors outside the States who didn't hear about it in time who will miss the deadline. I live in the UK, and loads of my author friends...ones who are very active Internet users...haven't heard a word about this until I mention it.
Why should Google get to grab rights of people outside the States who won't even get a chance to OPT OUT?
Nope; IMNSHO, it should be OPT IN, plus books OUT OF COPYRIGHT. Period.
Amazon does a MUCH better job of this concept...
1. It is opt in, the publisher has to provide permission, I believe, in order for them to do it.
2. They don't show the whole book, just a smattering of pages in the vicinity of the search term. And they cut you off after a certain amount. Which makes it advertising, more than "distribution".
The whole idea that Google can do what they're doing and think it is "okay".... yes, special hell.
The problem was that there are a lot of books for which it is not *possible* (or at least insanely impractical) to find out who owns the rights to a lot of older works, and thus you can't ask them to opt in, nor can publishers do it either.
"Orphan" works are a major problem because publishers can't print them without unreasonable risks.
What's need is something that resembles "mechanical licensing" for music. If a reasonable (hard to define, but *some* definition is needed) doesn't find the rights holder, then it should be "safe" to publish the work.
If the rights holder later shows up, then while royalties should be paid , *penalties* shouldn't.
Otherwise, you have large numbers of books that can't be published or even used as ideas, because the rights holders can't be found. Some *may* be in the public domain, some may not.
The problem is more a matter of defining "reasonable effort" in a way that is fair to *everyone*, not just publishers who can throw tons of money at looking for the rights holder.
Part of the problem is that it's difficult (or even impossible) to determine if an older book *is* out of copyright. The rules habve changed a number of times over the last 100+ years. And under the right circumstance some books published over 100 years ago could still be in copyright. (If the author died less than 75 years ago, and copyrights were renewed under the older rules at just the right times)
Folks like Disney are trying to extend it even farther (they don't want Steamboat Willie to wind up in the public domain due to copyright expiring).
Edited at 2009-08-30 10:02 am (UTC)
Wrong. Orphan works are NOT a major problem. That's what Google says, of course, but it's not true. There are easy guidelines for figuring out if a work is in or out of copyright. You don't know them, but I know some (it's late, church is waiting, gotta go) and it's just not that hard. It does take time, though, and time is money, and it's cheaper just to throw up your hands and say "Oh, it's too hard, we can't do it."
The Google settlement does not define ANY process for seeking the rights-holder. They don't even have to use their own search engine to Google them. They don't even have to look at a publisher's online catalog.
Copyright pays my light bill, my grocery bill, my taxes. Google's convenience should not outweigh my livelihood and in law it does not. They're trying to change the law by stealing my intellectual property, and I say the hell with it.
Ah, most of my info came from EFF press releases.
I agree that Google needs to be required to try harder.
Orphan works may not be a problem for a publisher. But they are fotr ordinary folks who want to use something. And with that, I'll bow out of this.
"Ordinary folks who want to use something"...I understand that there are people who want to use something. But let's leave "ordinary" out of the argument, since it is an attempt (maybe not intentional) to win sympathy--an emotional argument--for the user who hasn't paid the creator.
Readers used to understand--but have been cozened by certain elements online not to understand--that if they wanted to read something they needed to buy editions that paid a royalty to the writer (and along the way, the expenses of the bookstores and publishers who made that edition available.) Some of us are old enough to remember the hoorah in the '60s when Ace published Tolkein's work in the US without a contract with him and without paying him royalties. Big deal in those days.
Whatever anyone thinks of movie companies, Disney, music companies,etc., book writers have not benefitted from any of the supposedly humongous profits. Book publishers have a very narrow margin of profits because books aren't selling like DVDs and CDs; most book writers do not make a fat living off of writing books.
Readers also need to understand that the fiction they love is not a need, but a want. If you can't read a book from the 1950s online for free, it's not going to ruin your life. If you can't read the 1988 edition of my book Sheepfarmer's Daughter (one that Google did digitize without permission) you can read a later edition (same book) or read it in the omnibus Deed of Paksenarrion...by digitizing one edition, Google has effectively stolen all of them.
I don't understand how the fact that you want something makes it OK for that thing to be stolen. These are intellectual properties that are owned by the people who created them. Those people put a major chunk of their life into writing the book in the expectation that they would be repaid for their time. This is how writers earn their living. If Google gets their way, writers won't be able to support themselves because Google will be giving away their works.
Right now if a book has been in print for 200 years, it's probably out of copyright. But if it's been published in the last 50 years there's a good chance that someone owns the rights. The way it should be is that if Google can prove the work was available 200 years ago they can use it. But for anything under, let's say 100 years old, if they can't loacte the copyright holder and get permission, they should be required to just leave it be as a "good faith effort" to respect the copyright holders rights.
Well, as I said above, it's rather different for Google versus you and me. If you or I find something in an old book, and it can't easily be traced as to whether or not it's in copyright, then what?
In the front of the book you will find a page called the title page which will contain the copyright date and the publisher. With that information and a little bit of research, you should be able to find out if the book is under copyright or in the public domain.
It's like finding a wallet in the street. You can check the ID and call the owner or pretend you couldn't figure out how to locate the owner and just steal the money.
If you want writers to keep writing, you should not steal their work. They live on money from the sales of their books while they are writing the next book. If you value an author's books and want more of them, you need to make sure that they get the money they are owed.
And if the title page is missing? or the publisher no longer exists?
It's *not* that easy to determine if a work is still under copyright. Seriously. As Elizabeth stated above there's a list (and not a simple one) of rules.
In most cases it's not that hard.
No matter how hard it is to find out if an old book is under copyright, it doesn't give Google the rights that they are grabbing. My books came out in 2006 and 2007. It takes NO EFFORT WHATSOEVER to know that those books are still under copyright, which is 'author's lifetime plus 75 years'. Even if I were dead, the books are quite clearly still under copyright.
Google scanned everything. They are trying to grab the rights of all books ever published.
And yes, I do know for a fact that my books were scanned, because on of my colleagues in Bangalore wrote to me and told me she'd read part of one of them on Google Books.
So please don't kid yourself that this just about books written early the 1900s where it's not always readily apparant whether the books are in the public domain.
GOOGLE IS SCANNING EVERYTHING.
Yup. Exactly.
And they've done a fine job of marketing to convince the world that they're doing a great public service.
Some of the digitizing could be considered a public service...for instance, I have used online sources for research, including several digitized books from the early to mid 1800s. Both books in question were housed in libraries over 1000 miles away, and libraries are increasingly likely to dump old books to improve their circulation figures.
But the theft of *current* intellectual property, from living writers with recent books, is not a public service in any way. It's a theft.
Google scanned several of my books, apparently because its cursory search considered them "commercially unavailable." (In a list of editions of that title, the one they scanned was the one they called commercially unavailable.) It's the same book, just an earlier edition with a typo that we corrected before the next edition 9 years later. I would argue that finding "hills" instead of "hilts" in the earlier edition is not of sufficient value to humanity that they should be allowed to digitize that work without permission. Any scholar so hard up for a PhD in literature that he/she needs that earlier edition should get a life.
Again: why do you want to digitize and distribute copies of such a book?
For most of the books you run across, it IS simple to determine. Copyright after 1975: if the author is alive, it's under copyright. Is the author alive? Well, if you're Google you have this great search engine to play with...for instance, every living author I've Googled on in SF/F comes right up with sufficient information to indicate he/she is still alive. In doubt? Can't find contact info? Contact the publisher's rights department: "I'm wanting to do X with Title Y by Author Z. Is Author Z still alive and if so how can I contact Z or Z's agent?" It's not rocket science: it's easy. Publishers who admit they're publishers do this all the time. Google is acting like a publisher without doing the work.
Copyright before 1975: If you're not willing to do the work of determining if work is in the public domain, don't start distributing copies. Just don't. Google is a rich company who could easily afford to hire intellectual property experts, the same as any other publishing company. Individuals have no business starting in the publishing business if they're not willing to respect intellectual property law (and other commercial law. It's a business--you better be willing to cope with complicated matters of law: incorporation, tax laws, etc.--or hire someone who can.)
Why the heck should everything be "easy?" It's easy enough for me, and I didn't even glance at copyright law until I was over forty.
What does copyright mean for individuals? It means that if you want to make a copy of a book you own for your own personal use--not distributing it, not selling it--you can. What you cannot do legally is make multiple copies and sell them. If, for instance, you found the print too small in a paperback you bought, and you had a scanner of the right kind and a printer, you could scan it in, enlarge the font, and print it for your own use, or read it on your computer. That's true even if the book was published last year and is covered by copyright.
What you could not do, without permission, is make multiple copies and sell them.
If you do not own the book you are copying, it must be out of copyright for your private copy to be legal, although most writers (including me) would not kick and scream if you made your own copy of an in-copyright book you'd borrowed from the library...what we hope for, in granting libraries a license to lend books without recompense to us (something that doesn't happen in Europe, where authors are compensated for each use of a library book) is that the person who falls in love with the book will go buy a copy. Especially if you were copying for a physical reason, such as inability to read the small print, we'd shrug and then try to talk our publisher into doing a large-print version.
But at any rate, you are not entitled to make additional copies and distribute them.
And if you're not a publisher, why would you want to?
If you want to distribute copies of someone else's book then it is incumbent on you to determine the state of the copyright. Mostly it's easy (for anything after 1975, it's *at least* the life of the author--and it's easy to find out if authors that recent are still alive.) When it gets difficult, it's still your responsibility to be sure that the material is out of copyright. Publishers do this routinely. Dover, for instance, publishes books of material that they've found was out of copyright--and they do the research.
I would say the idea of making public domain works ONLY available is a good one. Most out of print books are still widely available (and some are coming back into print from time to time.)
However, if Google had chosen to offer digitization to writers who wanted it, I'm sure some would've taken them up on it. With that offer should have come a contract which the writer's agent could examine, with the same kind of guarantees you find in a regular publishing contract.
Because the fact is, Google is acting the role of publisher, in digitizing and making books available.
Wrong.
Authors have a legal right to decide who, how, and when their work is published, for the duration of their copyright. If the writer wants an out of print book to return to print, there are existing ways to do it other than having some other publisher grab it without permission--which is what Google has done.
Google is not "trying to make my books available" (my books ARE available and they digitized some of them anyway) as a public service--they're trying to make a profit off them without contacting me, contracting with me, or guaranteeing me the same profit I would get from my regular publishers or from self-publishing online. Google expects to profit by this, charging for downloads beyond a glimpse--that's in the fine print of stuff I've been reading over the past months. Now when they're digitizing rare books out of copyright, that's one thing...but when they're stealing the property of living authors whose works are in copyright--and proposing to sell them at a profit--that's theft, that's copyright infringement, and that should've been seen as illegal from day one. Because it is.
When they do that to you, you can bend over and say "Thank you, kind sir" if you want to, but I'm not about to. MY best interests are to have solid contracts with publishers that spell out in detail what the duties of the publisher are, as well as the rights. That's done very well for me prior to Google's rights grab.
Initially I thought the google idea was a good one. And in theory I still do. Thanks to Disney & co extending copyright to a ridiculous length there are many many orphan works that deserve to be put out in the public domain and reprinted instead of disappearing into a black hole. So Google's idea of digitizing everything and making it available is, in that respect, a good one.
The problem is that, as with so many things, the idea fails in the pesky details section. In this case it hurts, in particular, the successful author with a long backlist but it seems to me that in general the original settlement betwene google and the authors guild was just shabby all around.
It wasn't just shabby, it was flat out illegal. Look--the distinction between so-called "orphan works" and works under existing copyright is very clear--Google's attorneys deliberately blurred it. For works still in copyright, the law requires that a publisher contact the author before any use of that material other than brief "fair use" quotes.
A writer whose copyright is still valid can contact a publisher (including Google) to see if that publisher will take on an out of print/rights-reverted book. But it's the writer's choice. Nobody other than the writer gets to decide if a book that's tanked on the market gets another chance out there.
There are plenty of books that are out of copyright, and if Google had stuck to digitizing those, there would be little fuss. If they had offered to digitize long-out-of-print books that writers couldn't find a new publisher for--put out a call--and had contracts with those writers, there would be little fuss. But that's not what they did. What they did was go into libraries and digitize books that were covered by copyright protection without asking permission, and propose to distribute them via the internet, at a profit to themselves, without compensation to the writer. That's copyright infringement. That's theft of intellectual property.
I don't give a fig whether the movie industry or the music industry or Congress extended copyright to what someone else thinks is "ridiculous lengths." Copyright has made it possible for me to survive as a writer, and latterly to support a family with my writing. I want copyright to stand, and Google to obey the law. Ask before grabbing. PAY before grabbing.
But now I must run, or be late to church, and this afternoon I must tangle with the ridiculous (you want ridiculous, look at their process for claiming works!) Google forms.
Shabby was a bad wrod. I should have chosen a stronger one.
However orphan works are generally still under copyright. Its just that no one knows who the copyright holder is and/or how to contact him/her.
The prime error of the court settlement is in how the onus has been placed on determining which works are orphaned. And how authors of works that might be orphaned tell Google that they ain't.
I don't give a fig whether the movie industry or the music industry or Congress extended copyright to what someone else thinks is "ridiculous lengths." Copyright has made it possible for me to survive as a writer, and latterly to support a family with my writing. I want copyright to stand, and Google to obey the law. Ask before grabbing. PAY before grabbing.
I want you to go on surviving as a writer (and for that matter I want all other writers to do so too). From what I've read at a whole slew of author blogs/websites - including here of course - it seems to me that Google are deliberately making a maxiumum grab of everything which is, indeed, theft because some of what they are grabbing they know full well is not available for the grabbing. Mind you it's theft backed up by a court settlement which is umm interesting. I don't think google should be doing this and indeed I think they should be slapped around by a better judge and made to stop.
I think in fact they should have applied some fairly basic common sense to limit their grab such as removing from the grab all works published after about 1960 from the default "opt-in" position and that a court should have made them explictly NOT have rights to anything published after 1980 without an explicit contract.
It is in fact beyond me how Google managed to convince a court that the authors guild should in fact represent the interests of authors and that a settlement by this guild should be considered binding on others.
It's beyond me that the court didn't impose ANY requirements on Google that protect writers.
It seems pretty clear cut to me. Google is stealing. Why not get a person (or people) who are dedicated to checking to see if a work is copyrighted or public domain? I was going to say they could pay for the right to publish a book, but how would the author get paid for it? That's beyond my knowledge of publishing law.
Publishers like Dover Books do hire people to check out whether some old book they want to publish is in the public domain or not. (This includes the design elements Dover has published.) That's how it's properly done. Intellectual property experts know how to do the searches and have done it for years.
Google should have done that.
True orphan works (works still in copyright but whose authors can't be found) are much rarer than Google-y press releases would lead you to believe. Unless the writer's decided he/she doesn't want an earlier work brought out again (and that happens--if your first novel was a snuff-porn one under another name, and twenty years later you're gathering fame as the author of literary novels that might someday get you a Pulitzer or Nobel, you might be very glad that the first novel is out of print, that publisher went bankrupt, and you've burned every copy you can find) most writers are ridiculously easy to find. And not every orphan work is worth recovering (not just the snuff-porn novel of the now-famous professor, but a host of undistinguished "airplane books" or "beach books"that were simply light entertainment from day one and quickly went OOP.)
For instance, I've Googled (using Google's search engine, yes) a range of authors from famous to one-book writers in SF/F, some of whom I know have had their work digitized. All--every one--came up high (mostly first, except a few with very common names) on a Google search of their name. One or two seconds...there they were. I venture to say that every SFWA member, every member of Novelists, Inc, every member of two of the online writers' groups I'm on, would also come up high on a Google name search. Websites, Wikipedia bios, Amazon.com lists of their books...there they are, plain as day. While chasing down a possible scammer, I found that a number of self-published (or scam-published) writers are just as findable with Google. I venture to say that the proportion of "findable" to "unfindable" writers is high: most living, and many recently deceased (past 20 years) writers can be located online, with sufficient information to determine if they're alive, what they wrote, and with clues to locating them.
SFWA occasionally loses track of "obscure" members or the administrators of estates, but some of them want to stay lost. That's their right.
If you can't find the rights-holder, don't use the work. Very simple.
If Google had simply created a way for authors whose books were out of print to easily make them available again and/or had stuck to digitizing works in the public domain, I'd think they were doing a great thing. I'm disgusted by what they're actually doing though. Do you have any suggestions for helping to put a stop to this?
Agreed. Here's how Google might have gone about doing it the right way:
1) Go on digitizing works clearly in the public domain. There are lots of them and it would take years to scan these very old texts that do not have any previous digital files.
2) Hire (as other publishing companies have done) intellectual rights experts to work through the mass of material from the 20th c. (where most of the "problems" exist) and digitize as they are able to show works are in the public domain.
Rats--hit the wrong button.
To continue:
3) Offer writers digitization of their books by way of a contract that does the following: a) provides authors a digital file to review for accuracy (since scanning of printed books frequently introduces errors in the text: when Baen attempted to scan the mass market of one of my books, in preparation for a trade pb omnibus, "soldiers" turned into "sold hers") b) specifies the rights granted, the format in which the digitization will be releated, and the payment per download that will be transmitted to the author, and c) specifically allows writers to use the digitization however they themselves choose.
Note that 3) may conflict with existing publisher contracts and that out of print is not the same as "rights reverted." For instance: Google digitized several of my books for which Baen now has e-rights. They have infringed on my rights *and* Baen's rights.
This should never have been an "opt out" situation--it should always have been "opt in."
Not only are they stealing from the authors, they are stealing from the publishing companies as well.
To quote teriegarrison: "It was Llewellyn who paid my advances; Llewellyn who paid my editor, copyeditor, and proofreader; Llewellyn who paid my cover artist; Llewellyn who paid for marketing and publicity people. In a nutshell, it was Llewellyn who paid tens of thousands of dollars to bring my books out in 2006 and 2007."
They wouldn't have done that if another company could publish the finished work. Actually, they couldn't have done it as they probably would be out of business...
With all the half-price books and various used books stores around, many out of print books are find-able. Someone might have to do a bit of work to find it, but they can. And with this option, the authors still maintain their copyrights.
What they are doing is pure theft. Plain and simple.
Bingo.
Google's definition of "commercially unavailable" and equating that with "out of print" and "in public domain" is simply one big fat lie.
For instance: books with a long publishing lifespan may be "commercially unavailable" by Google's definition while being "in print" by the publishing house's catalog...or may be out of print between editions (on the day Google looked, let's say) or actually out of print while the author is busy trying to get rights reverted...or may be in print in a newer edition (with a new cover, for instance.) Google is acting as if every edition of a title is a different book (it is, for inventory purposes, but not for reader purposes: you get the same text in the mass market as in the hardback or trade paper edition, the same text whether you bought the expensive leather-bound Easton Press edition or the mass market at Half Price Books.)
My books go in and out of print (esp. the older ones) and my agent nudges the publisher if they're unavailable too long (a month) but it can take awhile to find an open slot in a printer's schedule. Does this mean the world is going to rack and ruin because one of my books isn't on the shelves somewhere? No. It's usually a dip in my royalty statement if the gap is several months long, but not permanent.
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