Court decision good for readers, bad for writers
By Sophia Pearson and Bob Van Voris, Bloomberg
Google Inc.’s project to digitally copy millions of books for online searches doesn’t violate copyright law, a federal judge ruled, dismissing an eight-year-old lawsuit against the largest search-engine company.
Google Books provides a public benefit and is a fair use of copyrighted material, Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan ruled today. The project, which has scanned more than 20 million books so far, doesn’t harm authors or inventors of original works, Chin said.
“Google Books provides significant public benefits,” Chin wrote. “It advances the progress of the arts and sciences, while maintaining respectful consideration for the rights of authors and other creative individuals, and without adversely impacting the rights of copyright holders.”
Chin’s decision comes more than two years after he rejected a proposed $125 million settlement in the case filed by The Authors Guild, which represents writers. The group sued in 2005 alleging that Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, infringed copyrights by scanning and indexing books without writers’ permission.
Paul Aiken, the Authors Guild’s executive director, said in a statement today that the ruling is a “fundamental challenge” to copyrights and that his group plans to appeal.
Well, I just went to oogle books and searched for Moby Dick. It came up and I started reading what appears to be the whole book. Is it copyrighted? Evidently not. 50 shades of grey came up as well. It did have a copyrighted notice at the bottom of each page. But, it was still readable to me.
This ruling doesn’t make sense to me. If I wrote a book, I would expect to benefit from my labor in the customary ways. Google seems to have found a loophole in copyright law. This loophole should not be allowed to persist, especially now that a court has had opportunity to close down this violation of the rights of authors. I say appeal and win this case. If this ruling is not reversed on appeal, we may all have to go to work for Google, free of charge.
there are in fact poor rulings, which I guess is what appeals are about.
The fact that “Google books provides significant public benefits” has to be totally irrelevant to any legal issue as so does copying and not paying for “protected works”. And it is obvious that Google doesn’t do this to enhance knowledge but as a way to drive folks to its site and benefit from advertising revenue.
If this is so valuable and such a public benefit, then this should be part of a government function such as the Library of Congress. In such a case, if it really benefited authors and publishers, they would pay to have it done by a neutral party.
The headline is spot on of course, in the short term that is. Because when writing becomes less desirable to would-be authors, we will have less good writing….in fact,this is already one of the impacts of e-books and their below cost price in the e-book marketplace (which is driven by Amazon). Not all reading is equal. Just because you can use a typewriter or a keyboard, doesn’t mean you know how to write! So in the end, it’s really both writer’s and readers that will loose.