Saturday, April 18, 2009
Google Book Search settlement
Google settles case over copyright infringement of book search -- and gains a huge, uncontested right to distribute book content. Read about this case here. For a less-legalise version of the story, click here. This story breaks down how Google has actually managed to engineer a monopoly over the rights to search virtually every book ever produced in the world.
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As a poor college student (is there any other type?), I like this and can only hope that one day in the next two years this will include textbooks
ReplyDeleteThis is awesome! Finally some good news (sort of-went back and typed this after fully reading the story). After being devastated at the result of the court case with Lundstrom, Sunde, and company (Pirate bay guys), finally some good news with regard to content distribution on the internet. Just a quick tidbit and someone can respond to this if they disagree or share my feelings and you guys can read about the story.....
ReplyDeleteHere! http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-trial-the-verdict-090417/
Anyway, piratebay guys were found guilty for "assisting copyright infringement" which, don't get me wrong, but doesn't that leave open the lawsuit against the internet service providers as well? I imagine this won will sink quick.
By the way, we should have that conversation about "what is sharing?" versus what is "illegal distribution?"
Anyway, back to the google books article. Wow. On the one hand, a major victory for FREE OPEN CONTENT just occurred. I don't have to out and buy "The Prince," I can now just read it off of google. Great! But, at the same time, I felt a weird "Fahrenheit 911" feeling while reading this story. Could Google control what people read with this? Could it include one book but exclude others? What if Google isn't a fan of conservatism? Could they delete the "Concept of the Politica"-Carl Schmitt from their library? Hmmm. Who will watch the watchers?
But to me...It seems like a good compromise with regard to free content because we are only dealing with "orphan authors"-authors who cannot be located such as old dead white guys.
At the end of the day though, I am a firm believer and I wonder if anyone else agrees in the idea that media will all be free at some point. Maybe I am exaggerating and it is hard to imagine and it may sound crazy but...if you look at what, for example, Trent Reznor has done with Nine Inch Nails, it may be a little easier. If you don't know the story, they released their cd FREE and people "paid what they wanted." Not a bad idea in my mind. Probably made money. Didn't have to fight the constant struggle against piracy. And gained major props from the tech world, a tech world including myself who may not have ever listened to their music.
Will this be the way of the future with recording artists? Can we imagine a world where Peter Jackson releases his film online for people to "pay what they want" to download it? Who knows?
Also, I feel like this post is already to long but the Creative Commons movement and license fits right a long with this and I have a good anecdote about Creative Commons and my experience with it possibly for another time. Thoughts on Creative Commons anyone?
Perhaps I have misread this article, but isn't it stating that google is the only website that will allow all of these books to be bought in one place, and not that google will have these books online to read for free? If I interpreted it the right way, then I don't see it as that big of a deal, but if google will now allow us to read all of these books for free online, this athiest has just found a new God to praise. As a big fan of piracy, I fully support free online reading.
ReplyDelete@Harrison. I think you may be right and it may have been my mistake and...the reason was because I went on the google books site...searched "The Prince," clicked the first result and it was all there...figured they were all like that. Oops!
ReplyDeleteLink to prove...
http://books.google.com/books?id=VIAgG12gh_EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+prince&ei=l43uSanmOpTSkATD58ycBQ#PPP1,M1
This is really a victory for young people everywhere in the world who are increasingly turning to electronic media and computers to get their information. With our busy, on the go, wired lives, this will make it much easier to get the information we need through books on the go and make more titles available everywhere, not to mention making research projects even easier to complete with better sources of information. This may be seen as a blow to traditional publishing companies, but hey, its 2009 and you have to change your business model if you want to survive.
ReplyDeleteGoogle is, in fact, NOT SUPPORTING CREATIVE COMMONS AND OPEN CONTENT.
ReplyDeleteWhy you ask?
Because they will SELL ACCESS TO LIBRARIES to make the scanned books available to end-users. It's a fairly complicated agreement, but it's not just about "free book content for everyone" (if it was, I'd be very supportive). Instead:
"Google will be allowed to show readers in the United States as much as 20 percent of most copyrighted books, and will sell access to the entire collection to universities and other institutions. Public libraries will get free access to the full texts for their patrons at one computer, and individuals will be able to buy online access to particular books."
This is from the SF Chronicle.
Is the world going to turn into Fahrenheit 451 and burn all our books? I like good old fashioned, bound, paper books.
ReplyDelete