Steve et al. -

This situation is a clear instance of labor politics. What we have are disenfranchised authors, who have already been living in an America that disrespects and doesn’t pay its authors; and we have a fairly conceited corporation that is placing the full text of their intellectual property in their database without permission. As we all know, you technically can’t even photocopy an entire book – it violates copyright. That is where Yahoo! is approaching this with a modicum of good faith (see my post below).

Google is blurring the distinction between index, digital library, and even corncordance. This whole business about “snippets” if preposterous. I think everyone has a hunch that “snippets” are not the end goal for a project this vast. What authors and their guilds likely see is Google illegally copying their property and fear they eventually may offer a pay-to-read option – and why not? They’ve already digitized the book itself.

O’Reilly, in his rather swaggering editorial, admits “there are many unanswered questions about how businesses will help consumers buy the books they’ve found through a search engine for printed materials.” My hunch is that only one or two businesses will do this (Amazon, anyone?), and those businesses will also get rich. This is labor vs. big business.

I think the analogy you suggest is flawed in its reasoning, because we’re not talking about professors chatting or jotting down a citation, one to another. No one would argue that Professor Jimmy is breaking the law for saying, “Go read this book.” What we’re talking about is the wholesale, letter-for-letter copying of an author’s life’s work – be it scientific, artistic, philosophical. It’s tantamount to Professor Jimmy walking around with photocopies of hundreds of books to refer to before counselling his students, which of course is illegal (and would be pretty heavy to carry anyway).

Yahoo! has – at the very least – welcomed authors into the conversation about what will happen in their initiative. Why does this seem so remarkable?

I just realized how many typos are in that comment above. Sorry. I have only the beast intentions. Er, I mean “best” intentions.

Dave, I think you missed the point of my little idea bouncer. What I am trying to do is understand what is going on in terms of processes, procedures and functions rather than copies because I think that framing it in these terms might provide a different perspective that is useful.

I am also not talking about passing a single citation from one person to another. Let me reframe this: I bet there are a number of poems that you have memorized in their entirety. In this case you have a physical copy of an entire work in your head stored in a neuro-chemical format. In this sense you could function like a search index and engine, albeit for an entirely limited amount of material that is constantly changing. Now can you explain to me from a functional point of view how this is different from a computerized search index and engine (ignoring the obvious things such as the interface to you-as-search-engine is a face-to-face conversation rather than a web browser)? Anyone could come up to you and ask you to retrieve a snippet from you index and you could perform the task. Likewise, you could devote your life’s work to “wholesale, letter-for-letter copying of an author’s life’s work” into your memory (though you would probably not be very successful).

So I would like to ask you personally, ignoring the paranoid assumptions about what Google’s money making motives are in this, do you see the utility of having access to such an index? I can’t help but think about the extremely specialized items in a research library that are never checked out.

Hey Steve -

I don’t think many librarians (me included) would argue against the essential usefulness of an “index” like the one Google proposes. I can see the powerful uses behind the idea. And, let me clarify – I have no qualms about including material that is in the public domain and not under copyright.

But, simply put, just because something is useful, doesn’t make it legal. Someone took a shot at Reagan, but that wasn’t legal.

The trouble is, Google’s project isn’t an index, although they say it is. Here is a short, snappy definition of “index” proposed by Colorado State Libraries: “A systematically arranged list giving enough information for each item to be found.” Google and Yahoo! won’t just point to an item, they will collect the item, too, going well beyond the function of an “index.”

Steve, the crux of our issue here is not whether these projects will be useful, but whether these companies are producing these very useful tools in a manner that respects the most basic laws in publishing (which have been respected and enforced since the 19th century).

And I can’t see the usefulness in the superhuman analogy you make, because it isn’t illegal to memorize an entire book (if someone could do such a thing), it’s illegal to photographically copy, archive, and give the public access to images of it. There’s a distinction between vehicles. When you say that you want to “understand what is going on in terms of processes, procedures and functions rather than copies,” you separate the product from the process, which ignores the heart of the matter.

Your question about the utility of the Google project made me think of some potential thorns in the bushes. One scenario in particular is searching on a term like “biodiversity” or “pollution” and getting scientific books with objective value, but also getting hits from works by authors like novelist Edward Abbey who has a combative left-leaning politics, and wrote fiction. Will it be clear to a 12 year old writing her report on pollution that Abbey’s books are fiction – though loaded with fact-based passages – or will we have yet another information literacy issue at hand here?

Just another thing to chew on!

Dave, let me make one last attempt at impressing upon you the usefulness of my “superhuman” analogy. This was forwarded to me by one of my colleagues:

”Copies” are material objects, other than phonorecords, in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed, and from which the work can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device. The term “copies” includes the material object, other than a phonorecord, in which the work is first fixed.
source: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101

Look at the line that says “in which a work is fixed by any method now known or later developed.” What that seems to imply to me is that just because we can’t “export” our minds’ data today, doesn’t mean we can’t in the future. And if such a technology is “later developed” our thoughts would be considered fixed form and subject to copyright. This would make it illegal to memorize a book, poem or other work. If we lived in such a brave new world, I would personally be scared.

Again, the usefulness of my little exercise is to think about the purpose and principles of copyright rather than what many have called an outdated and abused system. Remember, copyright has a purpose: “To promote the progress of Science and Useful Arts, by Securing for Limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” (http://www.loc.gov/flicc/hbfl/chap7.html) In an era when a man or woman’s children might never see their parent’s work enter the public domain in their lifetime you have to admit that the current system of publishing is flawed. You wrote, “Steve, the crux of our issue here is not whether these projects will be useful.” The point of copyright is entirely about usefulness. It is used to secure a limited monopoly in order to provide incentive to promote the creation of new knowledge.

As far as your thorn in the bush is concerned, your example is one that we still have when a 12 year old does an OPAC keyword search, so we have that problem anyway.

More later…

Steve -

I think that we’ll have to agree that we don’t agree on these points. And that’s fine, because that’s what this blog is all about. We do agree on the usefulness of these tools, but we don’t agree on how the tools should be realized.

The key ideas for future thinking in this debate, for me, are:

1) Whether Google’s actions are legal;
*addenda: Whether Google’s and their libraries’ actions are an act of hubris;
2) Whether copyright ought to be rewritten for advances in technology;
3) Whether libraries and companies like Google and Yahoo! are moral bedfellows;
4) Whether the term “bedfellow” is an anachronism;
5) Whether I can use these tools to teach effective researching;
6) and, What new literacy problems will we have to confront?

Other viewpoints would be warmly welcomed here. I’d be curious to hear from the other Cirkulators.

Not to beat a dead horse, but here is another point of view from an author:

Defending Google’s licence to print