[Web4lib] Consumer Group Raises Concerns about Google PrintLibrary

[Patricia F Anderson]

Leet's take a minute and go back to when copyright really started and what 
it was originally supposed to do.

According to <http://www.copyrighthistory.com/>, the first copyright law 
passed was "The Statute of Anne, 1710". This is some hundreds of years 
ago, and while people obviously were creative before 1710, there must have 
been problems with being creative in that environment which the new law 
was intended to address.

The original purpose of the copyright laws was fundamentally to create a 
reciprocal relationship between the creative person and the consumer of 
the creative works. In man-of-the-street lingo, what was happening was 
that someone would say something brilliant, someone else would steal and 
publish it under their name instead of the original author, the original 
author would be upset and quit sharing their clever works. Before this 
point in time, there were not easy ways to 'steal' someone else's 
intellectual work, although it certainly did happen, and when it did 
happen, it was much harder for the creative person to find out their work 
had been stolen.

By 1710, printing presses were not so rare, and broadsheets were available 
to the common person. When a creative person would think "what's the 
point?" and stop making new work, everyone was impoverished by the loss of 
those *future* creative works. It became recognized that the solution was 
to reward the creative individual for their already existing creative 
works and to facilitate a connection between the author and people who 
appreciate what they are doing -- to *feed* the creative person. This 
would let the author know that people like their work, and encourage them 
to do more of the same.

Obviously, this was before the middle-man mentality of the current 
publishing industry (or public libraries, for that matter), and the laws 
intended to facilitate the artist-consumer connection have been distorted 
in their intent by the context of contract law and the publishing 
industry. However, let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater, ok?

Right now, the closest model we have to the original purpose of the 
copyright laws is shareware. Traditional libraries were more similar to 
shareware than to the commercial publishing model. You could check a book 
out, read it, and if you liked it a lot or used it often, you would end up 
buying your own copy. IMHO, saying "don't let Google put snippets of a 
book online" is morally equivalent to saying "we won't sell our books to 
libraries." Take a look at the context of the law's intent, and then think 
about what breach of rights is actually occurring.

>From the National Consumer's League press release, their concerns were 
"dramatic threats to the principle of copyrights; fairness to authors; and 
cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship." The first two of these 
(copyright and author's rights) fall into the context of the discussion 
above. I think if we look not at the letter of today's laws but the intent 
of the original laws, we will quickly find that the Google project is a 
model more like shareware and has the potential to more properly nurture 
the relationship between author and reader.

The remaining three concerns (selectivity, exclusion, and censorship) are 
a bit different, and require a little more exploration to find out what 
NCL means. Further on in the PR, they say, "To the extent that Google 
finds itself drawing lines for inclusion or exclusion based even 
indirectly on content ... it makes itself a censor of our history and 
culture." To my ears, as a librarian, it sounds as if the complaint has to 
do with the fact that the libraries did not purchase every book in 
existence -- that limited budgets and the application of judicious 
selection criteria are being interpreted as censorship. In a certain 
context, there could be a justification for this, and I recently heard 
Kathryn Peiss speak about how important it is for research scholars to be 
aware of the impact of collection policies of a certain era on 
contemporary research efforts. Despite this apparent validity, I would 
truly be deeply alarmed if the use of selection criteria were ever to be 
held against a library in a lawsuit, and as such, I am concerned about the 
use of this argument in the case against Google. It is a very fine line 
between saying Google is bad for only choosing those libraries, and to say 
that the libraries were in the wrong for making selective rather than 
comprehensive purchases.

My two cents.

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu


On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Thomas Edelblute wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
>
> Bob Rasmussen wrote:
>> On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Chuck0 wrote:
>>
>>> While I have plenty of reservations about a big corporation and its
>>> plan to become "the Internet," I see anything that dissolves
>>> intellectual property and moves our society to the eventual abolition
> of IP as a good thing.
>>> ...
>> [snip]
>> But your blanket statement against all IP rights seems, shall we say,
>> "unsustainable".
>[snip]
> Of course, not all bands want to make it big, so they have no interest
> in the music industry existing. They do their music as a hobby and
> expect little or no renumeration. Bands and artists who aspire to make
> money from their craft can still make money without IP existing. They
> can book shows, sell CDs, t-shirts, collectibles, and so on. People have
> been making art for a long time before IP and copyright came along.
>
On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Thomas Edelblute wrote:
> Thomas Edison bankrupted the French movie producer (whose name I forget)
> by pirating his movie depicting a voyage to the moon and distributing
> freely across America.  Copyright law is designed to offer protections
> from unauthorized reproductions and financial incentives for authors and
> artists to continue to create new works. While open source has its
> merits, it does not over-ride the need for IP protections.  Hollywood
> would not make films without these protections, and some of my favorite
> Science Fiction authors would not write without these financial
> incentives.