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Comment by AnotherDesigner | Hacker News Reader

Could someone here please explain why this isn't copyright infringement? Aren't they taking other peoples work without permission, scanning it and making it publicly available? Also, presumably all of this works draws more traffic to Googles website, bringing them profits from advertising? I can imagine if a company that was less powerful than Google did this somebody would have huge fines and possible imprisonment.

And please spare me your "information should be free" arguments or the possible "benefits" to society. I'm well aware of those arguments but current law protects the individual against society raiding their work for its own benefit. Its a basic foundation that so much of our law has been built upon. So I'm interested in things as they are now, current copyright law, and not how you would like it to be as an outsider that would profit from more liberal copyright laws.

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The basic foundation of the law permits limited copying of books for "fair use". When you went to college or school and did a book report, and quoted material from an encyclopedia in the library, did you pay the author? Have you ever used a scanner or Xerox machine to copy a page from a book? Did you pay for it?

Fair use is the foundation of society.

Are you aware that millions of manuscripts, books, and articles sit decaying in library basements around the world, because the authors are dead, or the publishing company is, and no one has the rights to reprint them or can track down who owns them? There is a giant black hole opening up in our culture due to obsessive and onerous copyright, and potentially valuable works are not findable, and may be lost forever because the libraries can't afford to preserve them digitally, or legally aren't allowed to.

This chart says it all: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/03/30/infinite_copy...

Digitally archiving and indexing the world's books is of enormous value to our society, and such action deprives no one of money from selling books, that's a ridiculous scare tactic, akin to wanting to be paid for someone displaying the book jacket or table of contents of your book.

My understanding is that many universities actually pay some sort of mass stipend to cover the cost of citations. It's a really bizarre situation...

As I understand "fair use", you have to admit to copyright violation(s) first. Fair use in the USA is a small carve-out of the exclusivity rights, for things like review, commentary, education, etc. The Wikipedia page on "fair use" says it's an affirmative defense (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense).

I also think you're confused about the moral basis for exclusive copyrights. The possible "benefits" for society are legally the only motivation for granting limited exclusive rights. Economically, monopolies (exclusive rights) are pretty bad all around, and politically, copyright is easily abused to stifle or chill free speech. We, as a society, put up with some odious side effects of copyright, in order to get people to produce more stuff now for general use later.

So, tell me why the Author's Guild don't get penalized for bringing a frivolous suit against Google - what google did is obviously for the best of society in general, and probably will be good for the authors in particular.

In summary: It was a fair use defense. To claim fair use, you must first admit to using copyrighted work. So the copyright itself isn't at issue here.

The fair use defense in this case rests in large part upon the fact that the works were excerpted, not reproduced in full. Per 17 U.S.C. § 107, one of the factors in evaluating a fair use defense is: "the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole." That factor obviously weighed heavily in this case.

So, that is why Google actions are (for now) permissible under current copyright law.

At the time I wrote the above comment, I had access only to summaries of the decision written by journalists. That's still all I can find, but some newer journalism contradicts what I read and parroted above. According to some, the judge didn't consider the "the amount and substantiality" to be a major factor, or if s/he did, s/he considered it to weigh slightly against Google.

I guess I'll have to wait until I can find a copy of the decision to know for sure.

They're not presenting the entire book, are they? I thought it was just short excerpts matching your search queries - essentially the same thing they do for (also copryighted) websites.

I really don't know. I don't use a lot of Google services.

Maybe it'd be a good idea to know what the service does before criticizing it?

That's correct, though I 've managed to read useful amounts of a book (several pages) in response to a search such that it was much the same as if I had the book on a shelf, flipped open to the part I needed, got what I wanted, and closed the book. In other words, it saved me the expense of having to get the whole book.

The same argument applies to someone who read the book in question, wrote a blog post summary of it, and quoted the most useful or valuable sections. If your entire book can be summarized by a few pages, you've got worse problems.

It's like arguing that a movie trailer gave away the best parts of the movie, so you have no need to watch the movie.

If your entire book can be summarized by a few pages, you've got worse problems.

Well, what I got from such cases was not a summary of a book, but useful code or math or a technical explanation. Google book search can work like a reference library, and if it's really good at that then I can see how it might cut into sales.

For example, if someone publishes a cookbook (for food or code, for that matter) it seems possible that people could just search for the small-ish section they need and never have to buy that book.

In practice I suspect the number of actual lost sales because of this is minuscule.

This situation reminds me somewhat of the situation of music before song purchases, where you'd be forced to buy an entire CD just to get one song. It may very well be that the modern textbook is the wrong model, and authors in the digital age should design their books to be purchased or consumed in a more fine grained fashion.

If a $200 math textbook instead was published as a series of $2.99 chapters, students would be less likely to try to steal or avoid payment.

Most cases of piracy come down to distribution, delivery, and convenience simply being improperly aligned with consumer demand. Do people pirate Game of Thrones because they don't want to pay for it, or because HBO makes it too inconvenient and expensive for the majority of people demanding it?

The song/CD analogy is really good. If a book is mainly a collection of discrete parts then Google book search makes it easier to read the stuff you care about.

[A]uthors in the digital age should design their books to be purchased or consumed in a more fine grained fashion.

Very true!

I've started, ever so slowly, to self-publish some technical books that I've deliberately try to keep small. I want to offer just the best parts, remove the fluff and filler: http://justthebestparts.com

It pained me to buy pricey books just for one or two chapters, and I see no reason now not to publish things in more digestible and accessible chunks.

In a past life I did some writing for Wrox Press (the previous, went bankrupt, version) and the editors were often very keen and having extraneous detail added rather than encourage people to either Google it or, perish the thought, go get another book (unless it was a Wrox book).

If they gave you the page number and a smaller excerpt, you could have gone to a local bookstore to read the extra couple of pages without purchasing the book. Should we ban bookstores now?

I don't have a problem with doing this in general. I just have a problem with a company who's sole purpose is to make profit doing it.

If a non-profit organisation like Wikipedia started doing this, it'd be fine by me. Because they'd actually do it for the purpose of free information and not so they can just slap ads on it.

Huh? It is copyright infringement. That is the whole basis of a "fair use" defense: you have to admit its copyright infringement first.

For everything else, you should probably read the actual decision..

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