Perhaps Google Has Even More Respect For Copyright Than Microsoft
from the let's-look-closely dept
There has been a lot of interesting discussion following Microsoft’s bizarre self-damaging attack on Google earlier this week. Danny Sullivan did an excellent job dissecting Microsoft’s argument and showing how wrong the arguments were on just about every claim. Fred von Lohmann, over at the EFF then took Microsoft’s words and showed how you could apply them to the general concepts of innovation. If Microsoft’s Tom Rubin actually believed those statements, then he seemed to believe that the typical process of innovation was illegal. However, perhaps the most interesting response comes from Larry Lessig. Lessig specifically focuses on Rubin’s claim that Google’s book scanning project doesn’t “respect copyrights” and then shows how Google’s project actually appears to respect copyright a lot more than Microsoft’s book scanning project. He notes that there are different categories of works that are being scanned. There are those in the public domain, which are being used by both Google and Microsoft without asking permission. Then there are deals with direct publishers — again, both companies are doing those kinds of deals. However, the biggest single group of books (representing approximately 75% of the books Google is trying to scan) are books that are still under copyright, but which are no longer in print. In those cases, Lessig notes that Google’s method (scan the book, provide a tiny snippet of text, and a link on ways that hopefully will help you get the actual book (a bookseller or a library). Microsoft, on the other hand… provides you with nothing. Lessig points out that Google’s method seems to “respect” copyright a lot more, and I would think that many people (including authors) would likely agree. As Tim O’Reilly has famously said, obscurity is a much bigger threat to many authors than piracy. Google is helping prevent obscurity. Microsoft is making those authors more obscure. That doesn’t seem particularly respectful.
Comments on “Perhaps Google Has Even More Respect For Copyright Than Microsoft”
Nope
Google’s approach doesn’t show more respect for copyright, it shows more respect for authors, if one buys the assumption that they all want their out-of-print works available to the public. I suspect some do and some don’t, but it has nothing to do with copyright.
A link on Lessig’s site suggests that his estimate of total books is inflated by a factor of 4 or 5, so the number of books out of print but still under copyright is substantially less than what he wants it to be.
Lessig generally exaggerates the bad and minimizes the good, it’s his claim to fame.
Re: Nope
Setting aside the copyright issue, it has been shown that making a book available for free download actually increases the sales of that book. See the Baen Free Library for a very successful example of that principle in action.
reply to RB
RB, you are absolutely right about Google.
Regarding Professor Lessig. He uses multiple meanings of “respect” in one paragraph, intentionally misleading the reader.
Re: reply to RB
Yes, this coming from someone who claims to be from an industry front group who put out a “study paper” couple of years ago claiming the the DMCA was a “carefully balanced law.”
What complete and utter dog crap.
“To respond to these concerns, and to adapt the
copyright law to the digital environment, Congress
passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, otherwise
known as the DMCA, a carefully balanced law to
ensure that content owners would enjoy the protection
they need to put their works on the Internet, and that
appropriate fair use is maintained for consumers,
scientists, and educators.”
http://www.pff.org/issues-pubs/books/020901digitalonlinecontent.pdf
reply to DittoBox
DittoBox, I won’t scuffle with an anonymous reader, however if you are interested in the DMCA, then pick out specific points to discuss rather than hurling insults.
I’ve gone through the DMCA cases, and to be frank, there is a lot of hysteria out there concerning the DMCA that simply is not true. Conversely, I’ve found:
***the DMCA leaves sufficient room for adjustments within traditional copyright law to curb the anticircumvention provision.
***the anticircumvention provision has been applied consistently, and gives a fairly well defined safe harbour for reverse engineering for interop.
***the anticircumvention provision has been applied with flexibility by courts, with cases split among those that applied or curbed the applicability of the provision.
Whether the DMCA is carefully balanced will always be a matter of perspective. However, I don’t see it as terribly imbalanced.
“Google is helping prevent obscurity. Microsoft is making those authors more obscure.”
Just to be pedantic, Microsoft is NOT making those authors LESS obscure
Opt out
I haven’t followed this story too close but it seems to me there needs to be an option to “opt out” of the scanning projects, similar to the robot.txt for web sites. Since most of these books were created years ago I’m not sure how that process would work. Perhaps a common site (a “don’t not scan list”) for all indexers to check before indexing a given book.
Just an attempt to cozy up to content companies
Why even bother analyzing the copyright situation here? This isn’t about authors, its about publishing and and content companies, who aren’t obscure.
Microsoft is just trying to be more attractive to these companies than Google.
See http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/03/microsofts_atte.html
Re: Just an attempt to cozy up to content companie
Why even bother analyzing the copyright situation here? This isn’t about authors, its about publishing and and content companies, who aren’t obscure.
Microsoft is just trying to be more attractive to these companies than Google.
See http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli/2007/03/microsofts_atte.html
So why is what Microsoft doing a bad thing? If the content companies hold the copyrights to the works, their legal interests should be considered. Nothing about the “eliminating obscurity” claim raised by the article seems to be anything more than Mikes opinion as to what he wants. It seems to me that Googles intent is great, but the execution seems to be more of what I liken to a polite form of Robin Hood stealing (take without necessarily asking permission, but for the public good).
I’m not a big Microsoft fan but at the very least this article tries to paint them as somehow wrong, and I just don’t see it.
w00t
Score one for Google!
Despite what Google may or may not have violated, I’m just baffled at Microsoft’s attack. Why did they feel this was necessary? They should run their ideas through Microsoft Lawyer 2008 first before coming out against a competitor.
Nope
I thought that google’s book scanning project was bnot revealing the text of the book, but rather indexing it for thier search engine, just like thier spider does on the web, when it is ordered not ot cahce.