5 ways how the Google Books Agreement will change the future of reading

If you are not indifferent to the future of books, you need to understand the Google Books Agreement (Google Book Settlement). This is a complex legal document, so to facilitate its understanding, we talked with some of its creators, critics and supporters.
The Google Books Agreement could easily become the most important innovation of the 21st century in the field of copyright in the publishing world. To understand why, you need to go back in time about 12 years ago, when a very important event in the field of copyright occurred.

Mickey Mouse Protection Act

The sphere of copyright began to seethe in 1998 in connection with the appearance of the so-called “Mickey Mouse Protection Act”. In official circles, this bill bore the name of the “Copyright Extension Act” and was the result of an intense lobby by the entertainment industry, partly headed by Disney. The essence of the law was to extend the term of copyright protection for all objects created after 1923. By the end of the last century, according to the then applicable law, Disney had to lose the rights to many of the results of its founder’s work. Mickey Mouse was supposed to be in the public domain. Therefore, the company, naturally, was interested in preserving its rights for the further economic exploitation of these assets.
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The new law was beneficial to both direct authors and legal entities. According to him, the author’s rights to the product were protected for the entire life of the author, plus another 70 years; for products whose rights belonged to legal entities, a period of 120 years has been established from the moment of creation. (Before the new law, the dates were 50 and 75 years, respectively).

In addition, the law spawned a poorly organized but powerful movement of people who advocated reforming the sphere of copyright. It included activists, scientists, artists, technicians and spread from university campuses to the US Supreme Court, in which Lawrence Lessig (Lawrence Lessig) argued that the new law was against the constitution because it violated the first amendment (however, the Supreme Court did not buy this). Over the past decade, many of them have moved to work in Silicon Valley, from where so easily copied digital media constantly raise the question of what copyright really means in the information age.

Someone will say that the Google Books Agreement is the result of all this activity. But one of the main obstacles to copyright reform is cultural expansion, and the roots of SGK are drawn from the remarkable Google project (Google), which aims to spread knowledge from research libraries around the world.

Many years ago, the search company began digitizing books from the libraries of several universities, literally removing each book and scanning it. The idea was simple - to give access to inaccessible texts to everyone, and not just to those lucky enough to live alongside a good library. With the help of Google, people could search the full text of the book and see an excerpt from one or two sentences. So the law on the protection of Mickey Mouse, perhaps, would limit the growth of national wealth, but Google Books would significantly expand it.

Agreement

Initially, the Google Search by Books project (Google Book Search) was conceived as an online library, in which search is conducted on the full text of books, and which is accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, when you digitize the entire library in a row, those books that you shouldn't have come across. Among the rare and long-unreleased works, Google digitized, including millions, of those that were protected by copyright. So after the launch of the project, many publishers and authors filed lawsuits in court. They were opposed to even part of their books being available on the net for free, they wanted people to pay for them.

During the litigation with the Guild of Authors and representatives of the Association of American Publishers, Google decided to negotiate extrajudicially. The result was the first Google Books Agreement in 2008, from which the Google Books project was born. This project looked at things more widely than its predecessor, Google Search for Books, and, with some exceptions, gave the company, in absentia, the right to digitize any book registered in the United States until 2009, and any book published in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. 2009 Yes, yes, you were not mistaken. In exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars under the Agreement, Google now has the right to digitize almost any book published in the English-speaking world until 2009. Due to a number of complaints in 2009, a new edition of the FGC was adopted (it is often referred to as FGC 2.0). And this edition adds interesting oil to the fire. About her I will continue to talk.

It is important to note here that SGK 2.0 has not yet been approved and is currently undergoing examination by a judge from Manhattan after long hearings in February. In the light of this examination, it may require a review, especially given the objections of the Department of Justice in some parts.

As Ursula Le Guin critically remarked: “The CGS will really turn the copyright on its head.” It will change the way you search and read books. And this is how.



1. It may become harder to get online information about the books of your favorite authors.

The authors, from Ursula Le Guin to Michael Chabon, spoke out against SGK, criticizing him for literally pulling control from his hands from their hands. They and thousands of other authors (the full list can be found here [PDF] ) refused to work on the terms of SGK. They did not want their works to fall into the meta-group of “all works published in the United States,” in which Google wrote them down without asking. In short, they don’t want to be in Google’s digital library. But why?

Le Guin e-mailed us:

“Google is digitizing books that are protected by copyright, without obtaining or even trying to get permission from the rights holder. How he managed to convince several huge libraries to allow it, remains to be seen, because the libraries have always been very careful in monitoring rights. If we continue to act in Google, it will end with the entire list of digitized books, many of which are stolen, fully controlled, controlled, opened and closed to the public by a commercial company interested in maintaining its monopoly. ”

Like many other authors, Le Guin does not see the FGC as a killer solution to the copyright reform. She wants to decide for herself who digitizes her books and how.

In the short term, the abandonment of the FGC will not affect most writers. But in the long run, with the increasing number of people reading books online, it may be that it will be more and more difficult to become familiar with the books of Le Guin. You can buy them online and see a brief description, but as long as Le Guin will not give any other company permission to do what she has banned Google, no one will be able to virtually glance through her book like in an ordinary bookstore.

Funny, but many of the books of Le Guin are still available in Google Books. If you search, you’ll see what Google calls the snippet view of the books in the search results.

There are reasons for this. Le Guin’s refusal of SGC does not prevent Google from digitizing its books or showing excerpts from them in search results. The refusal gives her only the right to file a lawsuit against Google for violating her rights. (If you have not abandoned the FGC, you cannot file a lawsuit, since this issue is now subject to an extra-judicial decision ( according to US legal practice. - approx. Translator )). It's funny, but for Le Guin, the only way to stop Google is to agree with the FGC and then ask to ban the display of their books.

And now some more piquant details. Suppose Le Guine agreed with SGC because she wanted people to familiarize themselves with her books. But the agreement of the publisher of her books with Google can erase her wishes. The publisher may require Google to continue to exclude its books from the search and show them only in the form of passages (for full information on this subject, refer to Appendix A of the GCK ).

Here, a wave of protest writers is broken. All publishers in the Association of American Publishers, including the publisher Le Guin, agreed with SGC.

About 30 thousand publishers from 100 countries concluded an agreement with Google Books. In general, publishers, not writers, own most of the rights to printed books. This means that it is the publishers who can control how the books will be accessed via Google Books, whether the authors themselves like it or not.

If writers like Le Guin really want to abandon SGK, they ultimately have to resolve this issue with the publishers, not with Google. Given the attitudes of the authors, you may soon be confronted with the fact that your favorite writers will begin to refuse to do business with publishers. Or refuse to sign contracts that give the publisher the right to distribute their works online. Which, of course, will further limit your ability to find your favorite books in digital format.


2. You will find yourself reading free books belonging to the authors' pen, which are long gone, and Google makes money with it.

It may be that the books of your favorite authors will be harder to find, but then you will get access to books that you never knew were about.

Of the estimated 12 million books digitized by Google, 2 million are in the public domain. That is, they were published before 1923 and are no longer protected by copyright. But some of the books are significantly "younger", they have fallen out of the attention zone of protection of rights due to holes in publishing. There are about a million such so-called "orphan books." This means that they are still protected by copyright, but have not been printed for a long time, and no one knows where their authors are. Many such books are all sorts of fantastic stories that have recently been published. Now, many of them can be read for free, and for a paid subscription they are available for almost everything.

How is it that you get access to huge amounts of copyrighted books for free? By default, Google uses a so-called “partial view” (partial view), which allows you to either view 20 percent of a book’s volume from different parts for free, or get the full text for a fee, unless the copyright holder has specified otherwise. Since owners of orphan books are not found, Google applies a default mapping to them.

Google adopts all these orphans not out of the goodness of their heart. SGC gives him the right to sell them. As soon as the SGK is officially approved, the company will immediately begin selling 5 million copyrighted books.

How is this possible? According to Google's estimates, approximately 5 million copyrighted, but no longer published books are currently in his library. One million of them are “truly” orphan books. The remaining 4 million are books whose authors are still alive, but they simply cannot be found. However, Google did not even try to find them, because, we will speak directly, it is difficult to find the authors of 5 million books. So the company relies on the fact that the owners of the rights will find themselves, declare their rights and tell Google what to do with them.

Imagine that I am the author of a dozen of fantastic books about alien lesbians, published in the 50s and quickly out of circulation, but digitized by Google last year. Now the whole series “Journey to the probe cave” is available in partial viewing on Google Books, besides, Google sells their full texts, and this does not distort me. How can I let Google know that these are not orphan books, and that I want to set reading conditions myself?

For starters, I can claim my rights on the Google Books site through this form . After that, I get the right to $ 60, which Google pays the authors according to SGC. Then I have several options: I can allow partial browsing, showing passages (we saw it above using the example of Le Guin’s books), ban the display altogether (searching the text becomes impossible), completely remove the book from Google’s servers and finally allow Google to sell my book on specially agreed terms.

Everything sounds great, but there is a problem. Many authors simply do not know that Google has digitized their books, so they simply will not contact the company with the requirement to remove them. Others may come across their books online, but they have not heard anything about SGK, moreover, they will not find a form for claiming their rights. And even if they find it, it may seem like a very difficult task to fill it.

What may seem particularly strange to them is that Google, having paid them $ 60 only once, will continue to make money on their books by placing ads on their pages. This brings me to my next thought.


3. Google will compete with Apple (Apple), Amazon (Amazon) and anyone else to become your favorite online bookstore.

Another oddity of the FGC is the creation of such a branch institute as the Book Rights Registry (we will call it simply the Registry), which exists separately from Google. The main task of the Registry is mediation between the authors and Google. But, of course, it will turn into an organization that regulates licensing issues, with the help of which authors will be able to distribute rights to their books to anyone who wants to make their electronic copies.

Suppose our fictional author, “Traveling to the X-Ray Cave” decides to sell his books online. He goes to the Registry and says: "Hey, Google has already made digital copies of my books, and I want to sell them through Google." Great, Responsible Registry. Because he already has an agreement with Google, according to which he will receive 63% of all revenues from the Google Books project. At the same time, the Registry chooses how it will pay the author of Travels - 63% in one fell swoop (which is unlikely) or in parts. At the same time, it will still charge for its services. But now our author lay down on the sofa and waits while the Registry sends him money.

And now the fun part. Our talent with the help of the same Registry can sell rights to other stores. Suddenly, the alien lesbians are back in fashion, and our writer is soaring in glory. Naturally, Aybuk (iBook) and Amazon will immediately want to sell his forgotten books. And our author says: “Yes, no problem! Contact the Registry, it will give you rights. ”Now both stores can get a digital copy and start trading. Our writer again on the couch counts the money. (For those who are in the subject of music: yes, this registry will be a kind of analogue of ASCAP and BMI in the music industry).

Our singer of an alien lesbian epic, of course, is in an ideal situation, depending on many factors, not the least important of which is the approval of SGK 2.0. We also depend on the honesty of the leadership of this not yet created registry, which will include activists from the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (the ones who appealed to the court that generated the SGC).

Before the Google Books store opens, this guide will have to work hard. First of all, they need to distribute 45 million dollars, which Google has to pay to authors of digitized books without permission (remember: a found author who has declared his rights receives $ 60 per book). Then they need to deal with the distribution of the money that Google sends to them, most of which comes from Google AdSense and sales of novels about alien lesbians. Part of the money goes to the authors. But what happens to the income from orphan books? The registry saves them for 5 years, then spends some of them looking for the owner of the rights to pay him. If this has not been done for 10 years, the registry is allowed to transfer this money to non-profit organizations.

Besides all this, the task of the Registry is to mediate between authors and booksellers.

But there is another snag about how wide the registry will be in relation to books whose authors simply cannot get the opinion. Law professor Pam Samuelson (Pam Samuelson), constantly advocating for the reform of copyright, is extremely pessimistic about this aspect of the Registry. Here is what she wrote last year :

“Supporters of the most restrictive copyright will dominate the Registry’s guide almost completely ... For example, the President of the Authors Guild recently complained that the new Kindle is able to“ read aloud, ”and called it“ fraud ”and copyright infringement. As for the Association of American Publishers, it came out in support of a law that bans the National Institutes of Health (NIH) advertise the policy of “open access” to articles devoted to research conducted on grants of NCDs. Of course, the Authors Guild and the AAI call Google a thief for books scanned in libraries.
If they could find authors of orphan books, they might have preferred that their books be available under the terms of Creative Commons licenses or in general become in the public domain in order to facilitate the access of interested researchers. The registry will initially be oriented against movement in this direction or even against considering such conditions of access to books that most authors would like. ”

Pam's thought is a wonderful message to reformist copyrights who consider SGC a good counterbalance to the Mickey Mouse Protection Act. SGK will improve our access to books, but gradually advocates of copyright from the Registry can turn Google Books into a paradise garden behind barbed wire.

In addition, if you look at the problem from the point of view of online booksellers hoping to compete with Google, this is a disaster. Remember? Google now has the right to digitize any book published in the United States until 2009. No one else has that right. In order to sell electronic books (e-books), Amazon and others like it will have to get permission for each book either from the Registry or directly from the rights holder. As Samuelson explains, if a company wants to compete with Google, it must immediately begin digitizing books without permission and go to court in order to reach an agreement in this court on the same sweet conditions as Google’s.


4. The difference between the library and the bookstore will disappear.

Ultimately, what Google did was to transform libraries into stores. Digitizing the books of several libraries, the company literally turned them into a source of income. She wants to sell these books, and if she fails, she can earn money from advertising embedded in their display. At the same time, it creates a huge free archive of rare and copyright-free books. And access to it gets anyone who has access to the Internet.

Therefore, SGC should be viewed as a document regulating the activities of not only libraries, but also digital bookstores. But the library is a huge repository of texts telling us the history of our culture. We demand from libraries what we do not require from stores. We want the library to be as complete as possible, we want it to be in the public domain. And, perhaps most importantly, we want it to resist the effects of fashion and political regimes.

If you look at Google Books from this point of view, the FGC exposes two problems: reader's privacy and protection from censorship (for example, from removing politically unpopular books from collections).

At present, the government protects libraries from unauthorized access of law enforcement agencies to data on who reads what and in them. But SGC does not contain such guarantees . In fact, Google will store much more detailed information about the behavior of its reader, than any librarian could think of himself, down to individual parts of the book.

There are other nuanced nuances in FGC. SGK allows censorship and change of texts of books stored in the depths of Google.

Fron Von Lohmann, attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (Electronic Frontier Foundation), writes :

“An even more important problem is the possibility of selective editing of the texts of books. In Section 3.10 (c) (i), the Agreement prohibits Google “except in cases expressly specified by the Registered Owner of Rights“ to change the text of scanned books when displayed to users. This, of course, is good because we don’t want Google to arbitrarily change books. But Google has the right to do so if it receives permission from the copyright owner. Why on earth? And if the owner gives such permission, can Google refuse to make changes? Will information about such a change be openly provided to the reader? The answer is unclear. But it is absolutely clear that the best rule would be to forbid any editing at all in the texts of scanned books. After all, no library allows copyright holders to make edits to books from their collections. Breaking this rule opens up prospects for rewriting history, as described in Orwell’s 1984 novel.

The proposed agreement is also of concern in terms of determining the degree of Google’s freedom in deciding which books will be available to the public. For example, section 3.7 (e) clearly declares that Google can, at its own discretion, exclude any scanned book from open access “for editorial or non-editorial reasons.” ... It should be noted that governments will undoubtedly take advantage of this opportunity and Google, to remove uncomfortable books from the shelves of "Google Books." It is very easy to imagine how foreign governments will put pressure on their citizens to “remove” their books from open access. It is also likely that foreign governments will put pressure on Google to exclude certain books. If SGC is approved in its current form, neither Google nor the owner of the rights will be able to say that they do not have the right to do so. ”

If we consider "Google Books" as a bookstore, then the idea of ​​the possibility of changing or removing the texts of books is not so terrible. But when there are millions of books in your library, the authors of many of which are dead or no one knows where they are, the situation has to censor. Conditions can be created that allow governments to rewrite history legally.

One way to solve the problem is to divide the collection of books into two parts, regulated in different ways: the library (national wealth and orphan books) and the store (all other books, owners of which are known and allowed to trade them through Google).


5. Fiction Pulp Fiction may again become popular in the most unexpected way.

SGK is a new stage in the development of the publishing industry. It opens the veil over what bookstores could be in a mature information age: a hybrid of a library and a shop window, whose task is to preserve and make money on books. But maintaining a balance between the public good of libraries and the free market of stores will be difficult. Who will win? A store that turned the archive into paid storage? Or a library that created a beautiful collection, available for free, but not able to keep itself in good condition due to the impossibility of income for sellers or authors?

I believe that a compromise solution will win in which the showcase provides the library. But in order to take this path, we need to provide this library with guarantees. We can not allow the books of deceased or missing authors, the books that we are trying to keep, disappear or be censored like the books of living authors. , , , , .

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, - « » (Stephenie Meyer) «» (Ralph Ellison). . , , .

Derek Slater (Policy Analyst, Google), Fred Von Lohmann (Attorney, Electronic Frontier Foundation), Joe Gratz (Attorney, Durie Tangri) . , , .

Joe Alterio, , Adam Koford. .

(Annalee Newitz) annalee@io9.com .