[481] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Untangling Orphaned Works in the Proposed Google
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Thu May 21 20:03:05 2009
Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 16:39:38 -0700
To: privacy-list@vortex.com
Message-ID: <20090521233938.GA20481@vortex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Disposition: inline
From: privacy@vortex.com
Reply-To: PRIVACY Forum Digest mailing list <privacy@vortex.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Errors-To: privacy-bounces+privacy-forum=mit.edu@vortex.com
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Untangling Orphaned Works in the Proposed Google Book Search Settlement
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000571.html
Greetings. In coming months a number of important court decisions
will be made regarding the controversial proposed Google Book Search
settlement [ http://bit.ly/gbooksearch1 - http://bit.ly/gbooksearch2 ].
Related concerns expressed by various parties include privacy issues,
competition effects, authors' rights, and other related topics.
The proposed settlement is rather complex, and I won't attempt to dig
too far into the details here.
But on the whole, I am in favor of the proposed settlement. A key
aspect of this whole controversy is to find some reasonable mechanism
to get orphaned works into "circulation" again -- that is, broadly
accessible. Orphaned works that are effectively unavailable cease to
exist in a practical sense, and the work of their authors is lost.
I recently used Google Book Search to explore whether waterboarding
was traditionally considered to be torture (answer: yes) -- and I
found a great reference in an 1895 (copyright expired) book via
Book Search. Without Google Book Search, that volume would have
likely sat unseen on a forgotten shelf for -- well, maybe forever
( http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000555.html ).
The main dispute relating to Book Search in respect to orphaned works
appears to be the effective exclusivity that the settlement appears to
grant Google in this regard, as the entity doing the scanning and the
maintaining of the related database services (both decidedly
nontrivial tasks).
While in theory other organizations would appear free to make their
own arrangements and do their own scanning, the latter in particular
makes little sense to me -- why even consider scanning books over and
over again, with associated handling, wear and tear?
Keeping in mind that I am a proponent of the Google Book Search
settlement, one possibility that I think might be worthy of some
consideration would be to allow for various non-Google entities to
have some form of direct access to the Google Book Search orphaned
works scanned images on a reasonable basis, so that competing indexing
and access systems could be more easily established without subjecting
books to re-scanning.
I am not suggesting that this access should be without associated
compensation to Google. But if the proposed settlement becomes
jeopardized due to this particular set of concerns, a means to help
establish a more competitive environment relating to orphaned works
does seem both possible and practical.
Perhaps such steps simply won't be deemed necessary by the courts.
But if this is the sort of price that must be paid in order to get a
settlement approved and these books online, it's something that we may
need to be thinking about.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, GCTIP - Global Coalition
for Transparent Internet Performance - http://www.gctip.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
_______________________________________________
privacy mailing list
http://lists.vortex.com/mailman/listinfo/privacy
