Today Andrew Sullivan posted the following excerpt from David Post’s blog, The Volokh Conspiracy:
The Google Books project has the potential to become one of the great information-gathering activities in human history — every book (just about), at everyone’s fingertips, searchable and instantly accessible from any corner of the globe. And we want to deter that?? Because that will decrease “respect for IP laws”? Talk about putting the cart before the horse!! Because it will inflict some sort of terrible “harm” on copyright holders? I’m not terribly sympathetic. Copyright, as Jefferson stressed so long ago, is a “social right” — given by society because we feel it serves useful ends (incentivizing authors to produce new creative works). When it ceases to serve those ends, it should be eliminated. The Google Books project is another example of how copyright interests, these days, do little more than obstruct useful innovations. There are 7 million (or more) out of print books that Google would like to place on-line where they can actually be accessed and read. I’m sorry if that infringes someone’s copyright, but really — in what way is society better off, exactly, from recognizing the copyright holder’s rights in this circumstance?
Here is my response:
The issue to be concerned with in the case of Google’s Book Project is not Google’s supposed copyright infringement of those IP holders whose work is not in the public domain but is out-of-print. The salient issue is whether the current case against Google will, if Google wins or if they manage to settle in Google’s interest, allow Google a monopoly of access or an exclusive license to profit from and control access to all these millions of titles in the digital sphere. Google is using the class action lawsuit that has been brought upon them by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers in order to negotiate through the judicial system not only retribution for potential past infringements of copyright (that would be the millions of books Google has already copied without permission) but also a legal framework for the future, one which would allow Google the sole access to go and sell these works by establishing an entity called the Book Rights Registry. This is not only an unprecedented abuse of the purpose of class actions, but it has the potential of setting up a monopoly over the digital library.
Google owning all the access to the books of the twentieth century that are out of print? Should Google Book Search, a search engine controlled and moderated by a single corporate interest, really have that much control over intellectual property? I’m all for the digitization of out-of-print material, but the fact is Google is not the only archive that is working on this. However, Google is doing their very best to shut out the competition. There should be a digital library system much like the public library system: free access and a multiplicity of sources.
Source:
Democracy Now‘s Interview with founder of Archive.org, Brewster Kahle
