Google Library Project

On Cspan a couple of nights ago there was a panel on the lawsuit by a publishers association against the Google Library Project before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. There were people on all sides, mostly lawyera, as well as in the audience.

The interesting result of this discussion was not so much that the Google plan is opposed by the publishers of in-print books, only about 5% of the 25 million books, that could be copied by the project, that is to be expected, but that the bulk of the books still covered by copyright are out of print. There is this huge gap, most the the 25 Million titles that are not profitable enough to reprint, and yet the way copyright law works Google has to mount this expensive effort to contact the copyright holders and get their permission to copy their books.

The Google Library Project does not make the whole text available to its users, only small "snippits" of indexed chunks of material. The whole work will be copied and put into databases and the company assures us that the content will be secure. Of course people are up in arms that digital copies can be compromised. Ironically, many large library systems have been digitizing their holdings for years as a conservancy. Google is volunteering to help them do this task.

Like the parellel debate over music copying, the question seems to boil down to short-term profits for publishers, which they and the artists are entitled to, vs. long-term availability of creations whose economic value is not supported by traditional publishers. On the one hand there are many valuable materials that are not used enough to return a profit in the usual business model and on the other there are things of value that never get selected for distribution for profit that come to get value either for only a few people, or become important much later. Traditionally, works that become famous after copyrights have elapsed go into the public domain, where reworkings by others can garner copyright protection. The issue for the Google plan appears to be how copyright holders "opt out" of the system. The argument for the suit appears to be that the publishers want copyright law to automatically exclude materials from the plan. The Court could decide in favor of Google that "opting out" is a new business model for publishers, a cost of doing business; that it is far more valuable for society to have hard to get creations that are out of print and not profitable to publish available at least in part on-line and to allow copyrighted works to be included when it is either the intention of the author to make his work available and that the role of the publisher is to tell the system to exclude works in-print or under copyright. The Court could also rule that works kept out of print for a period of time before the copyright expires could be included except when the creator opts out.