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Scanning the Horizon of Books and Libraries
A battle is raging over the future of books in the digital age and the role that libraries will play. One case now before a U.S. federal court may, some say, grant a practical monopoly on recorded human knowledge to global Internet search giant Google. The complex case has attracted opposition from hundreds of individuals and groups from around the planet.
Google announced in 2004 its plan to digitize millions of books and make them available online. Books in the public domain would be made freely available. Newer books, published since 1923 and for which copyright still exists, would still be online, but viewable only in what Google called "snippets." Two groups, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, sued, alleging copyright violations. In October 2008, the groups and Google announced a settlement to the lawsuits, dubbed the "Google Book Settlement" (GBS). Google would pay $125 million and create the Books Rights Registry, a new organization that would direct funds from the settlement, and future revenue from book sales, to the copyright holders. Google would be empowered to not only display works, but also to become a massive, online electronic bookstore.
The settlement grants Google, automatically, permission to scan, display and sell books that are still in copyright but are deemed "out of print," and for which the copyright holder cannot be easily found. These are referred to as "orphan works." The status of orphan works has been the subject of much debate, and legislation has been proposed to make orphan works more available to the public. The GBS gives Google, and only Google, the legal right to digitize and sell these works.
UC Berkeley Law professor Pamela Samuelson wrote recently, "The Google Book Search settlement will be, if approved, the most significant book industry development in the modern era ... [and] will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books."
Brewster Kahle co-founded the Internet Archive, a digital library aspiring to provide "universal access to human knowledge." It houses 150 billion Web pages, 200,000 movies, 400,000 audio recordings and more than 1.6 million texts. Kahle opposes the GBS. Google scans large library holdings and returns to each library digital versions viewable only on a limited number of computer terminals that Google provides.
I asked Kahle how he sees the future of libraries. "Libraries as a physical place to go, I think will continue," he said. "But if this trend continues, if we let Google make a monopoly here, then what libraries are in terms of repositories of books, places that buy books, own them, be a guardian of them, will cease to exist. Libraries, going forward, may just be subscribers to a few monopoly corporations' databases." Kahle's version of the digital library, which he and others are building collaboratively, is open and shareable, without strings attached as with Google's deal. Kahle co-founded the Open Book Alliance, which filed an opposition to the GBS, equating the settlement with oil price-fixing schemes set up by railroad barons and John Rockefeller's Standard Oil in the 1870s.
After Judge Denny Chin, who is presiding over the case, called for public comment, opposition began flooding in from around the globe, from sources ranging from the governments of France and Germany to scores of publishers and authors and artists including folk singer Arlo Guthrie and author Julia Wright, daughter of Richard Wright, who wrote the classics "Black Boy" and "Native Son." Marybeth Peters, head of the U.S. Copyright Office, called it an "end run around legislative process and prerogatives." Judge Chin proposed a "fairness hearing" for Oct. 7 to decide on the Google Book Settlement. On Sept. 18, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an opposition brief. It read, in part, "the breadth of the Proposed Settlement-especially the forward-looking business arrangements it seeks to create-raises significant legal concerns. ... A global disposition of the rights to millions of copyrighted works is typically the kind of policy change implemented through legislation, not through a private judicial settlement." Judge Chin announced a delay of the hearing. The Open Book Alliance, along with many others, applauded the delay and is calling for an open, transparent process going forward to deal with the future of book digitization and the issue of orphan works in a way that best benefits the public interest.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllGreat article.
Support Project Gutenberg, support the Internet Archive, support the various university libraries with online ebook collections, support the Open Book Alliance. Not Google. Support true open source, not pseudo open source that is controlled by one corporation.
Just what I was going to say. This is an important area of concern and I'm glad Amy brought it up.
Great article. Thank you, CD. Thank you, Amy. I think that this article goes well with Gore Vidal's scathing indictment of the state of the American mind, also posted today. The copyright model will not stand in the digital age. Our laws, and modes of business (capitalism is dead, if it ever lived) are outdated. But monopoly control of knowledge is not the answer.
How do you propose that authors retain control of their work, without copyrights? For example, without copyright, how would Gore Vidal retain control over his works?
Knowledge is power and literacy is the curse of the masses as far as totalitarian movements and the oligarchical elites who fund and staff them are concerned.
That's why the destruction of the public education system in the US with everyone wanting to be the "Education President","Governor", "Mayor" or whatever goes on with relentless abandon.
Poet
from an orange sunrise
to a mountain so blue
for seven heartbeats
seven blackbirds flew
aligned as the seven stars in your eyes
the night we, too, flew
and came crashing through
for seven heartbeats
seven blackbirds flew
I recently retired after 34 years as a public librarian. I saw the institution I worked for go from one of the finest libraries in its area to, basically, nothing. Its complete decline mirrored the decline of this country. They should change the name of the place to the George Wanker Bush Public Liberry.
You think we would have learned from the loss of the great library at Alexandretta, (sp?) and from bushmonkey's destruction of hundreds of archeological sites in bagdad/Babylon.
But no, we didn't.
When I think about all the ancient wisdom lost because of redneck texas indifference to knowledge, I am greatly saddened. While one part of me sees the necessity of an author receiving compensation for his work, the other half of me believes that all knowledge should be free, so that it can be cherished and preserved. Why should one corporation receive money for orphan works that it did not create? This is as bad as MonInsaneto receiving patents for life's genes they did not create.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
Since digital texts can be accessed at home and on the road, libraries should provide congenial places for study and discussion. Books should remain, of course, but a greater percentage of resources could be placed towards what one does before, after, or in conjunction with one's reading.
I am seated at a Starbucks near a major university. Of 20 seats within my view, students or people studying are seated at 18. 2 are empty. The place looks like this whenever I drop by, from 6 am to midnight. I assume most of these people could be at a university library if they preferred.
Why don't they?
Music and drinks, perhaps, but I think that the primary reason is the relative prohibition on social interaction at libraries. The stacks of books certainly don't keep them out of the nearby BORDERS bookstore.
I do not see why the congenial aspects of this model need the capitalist business model that presently supports them.
Libraries could be built with a substantial central area with seating, could allow and even sell food and drinks to defray costs, and could go the cafes one better by providing books - which are wonderful things, and still the best way to read long narrative accounts.
Yeah right? Intellectual property is a dead letter in the information age, yet monopolies have a legal obligation to protect their assets. Hmmm, how does this extend into journalism and literature?
Oh yeah, post all books in some vast online document, then one fine day....WINKOUT.
All the books disappear in a moment.
Orphan works must be released into the public domain. That they are not signifies a problem not with Giggle the internet godzilla, but with the writers/publishers' guilds. Giggle's size is itself a problem, and no doubt Giggle will create new problems with power abuse as the monster is taken over by capitalists as most corporations eventually are. But this must not distract attention from the problem of the writers/publishers' guilds which are defying the spirit of the copyright clause in the US constitution, one of the few examples of progressivism in US law and political documents. The writers/publishers have by now almost fully discredited themselves in various ways, e.g. by neglecting to provide public access to "orphan" and "out of print" media works, by manipulating the politics of media content, by allowing propaganda through, and by abusing copyright and violating the people's rights in order to "maximize profits".
Protecting and preserving the texts themselves, keeping what is online true open-source, all this can be done - but only if more people know about what Google is trying to do. I don't see this info ANYWHERE in the mainstream press [big corporate surprise there, huh?] I wouldn't know about this myself except for subscribing to CommonDreams online.
Let's push this story everyone on our mailing lists, people!!
Fight the power=CieskoKid=
Call me paranoid, but given how Google tracks the people who use its search engine and how laws evolve wherein they must relay the information to the Governmnet as to who reads what and when, i Much prefer the anonymity of reading books the old fashioned way.
mordechcai please don't blame this one on bush. this was
brewing since the sixties when educated people set the
world on fire. the real powers that be realized their
mistake and lessened school funding and took a much
more proactive role in determining the greater masses
educational capabilities. they think that now education
more then ever will be controlled and people will be
taught what they deem needed to do their jobs.this DOES
NOT mean that they received an education. it means that
folks like you will increasingly not have jobs. libaries
will be computerized in some form or another and only
the books needed for robotization will be allowed!
watch for the day hardcopies become illegal copyright violations...confiscated and burned...
that sounds familiar...
What's important about books?
Very likely the first book that was widely printed was the Bible -- an early German translation probably..
What was important was that the contents of that book could now be made more easily available to more people.
The printers had expenses and may have begun the practice of having buyers pay for a book.
Then commentators, writers, were added -- comments on, say, the particular translation of the Bible were written and printed. New and different interpretations of the Bible were written.
Eventually Books came to be thought of as products written by writers, printed by printers, published by publishers. And in the modern age everyone along the production line from the first handwritten sentences to the final "book" had to be paid. To this day there is a push and pull about what percentage each of the many different people of the team that makes the final product gets from the money a buyer pays. Varies widely!
Haven't we forgotten what books are really about?
Books are stories, all kinds of stories. True stories, imagined stories, reminiscences, future fiction, fantasy, myths... Through the ages people have sat around a little fire in the evening, telling stories. Often, very often, the same story told over and over again, colored, hanged a little by the tellers of stories.
Our strange world that has to put a dollars and cents value on everything, thing as well as idea, has made us forget what is real.
In the end the only thing that is important is the contents of a book, ore important than the prettiness of how the contents are presented, or the price of paper.
If we can agree that it is important to save all or most of the content of people's remembrances, imaginations, ideas, that is now floating around anchor-less, then, and only then can we argue about who should profit from "owning" that treasure, or how we the people should be allowed to dip into the treasure.
I write essays, books. It is more important to me that my ideas get out in the world than getting paid for having the ideas. That is why my writing is available to anyone, on the internet. Anyone can copy, print, distribute the content (on condition it is not taken out of context). The only thing readers cannot do is make money from it.
My writing is protected by a "Creative Commons license."
Google can do the same.
The nature of a spider is to sit and watch
They say the Pen is mightier than the sword and the on-line ink is ephemeris it is a one source stream controlled by one entity. it is a recipe that could lead to death and nothingness, where the amount of ink will be controlled conditioned and ultimately censored.
If goggle is not already embeded it is absolutely certain that ultimately it will fall and like telecommunication and media entities it will bow and serve the master constitutionally or otherwise. Empire do not have a conscience attack they do not stop and scream OH lord what have we done! they blow like a dying star than they burst.
I have no doubt that we will adapt and break the speed of light intellectually and spiritually and the evolutionary human.
The new millennia will bring a new era, for that to happen I implore people to show courage, agility of the mind and vision for without the pen the ink could ...