The death of Copyright? I don't know, but it's not looking too well, right now.

[lagilman]

Yeah, I'm not real thrilled about this, for various reasons including the "my work, my decision what gets done with it, not some random corporation."

If you wanted to draw the analogy with "my body my decision," you might not be too far off.



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Originally posted by mb_galleycat at Google Wins 8-Year Book Scanning Battle

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/google-wins-8-year-book-scanning-battle_b80103

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/?p=80103

Google has won its controversial book scanning fight with the Author’s Guild. US Circuit Judge Denny Chin ruled in favor of Google on Thursday claiming that Google’s massive book scanning project, in which the online giant scanned millions of books and made them available through search without obtaining the permission of the copyright holders, to be legal.

According to Chin’s ruling, Google’s project makes life easier for research, makes it easier for libraries to obtain digital copies of books, brings old books to light and gives people who would not have access to books access. Here is an excerpt from the ruling

The sole issue now before the Court is whether Google’suse of the copyrighted works is “fair use” under the copyrightlaws. For the reasons set forth below, I conclude that it is.

We’ve embedded the entire document after the jump. continued…

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Comments

[scifantasy.livejournal.com]

The "orphaned works" point was part of the proposed settlement, though, not this. The Guild was on board with that, and the judge ended up striking it down because of the public interest.

Here, the keys to the decision were the public good. Excerpts:

"Google's use of the copyrighted works is highly transformative. Google Books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books. Google Books has become an important tool for libraries and librarians and cite-checkers as it helps to identify and find books. The use of book text to facilitate search through the display of snippets is transformative."

"Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new areas, thereby opening up new fields of research. Words in books are being used in a way they have not been used before. Google Books has created something new in the use of book text -- the frequency of words and trends in their usage provide substantive information."

"a reasonable factfinder could only find that Google Books enhances the sales of books to the benefit of copyright holders. An important factor in the success of an individual title is whether it is discovered -- whether potential readers learn of its existence. Google Books provides a way for authors' works to become noticed, much like traditional in-store book displays."

(And so much for me saying I don't want to try to argue this online...but then, this matters to me too, after all.)

[lagilman]

Yes, I read the argument (not being, y'know, ignorant of the issue or not having been following this for the past eight years)

I disagree with it.

(I am not a lawyer and you can therefore dismiss my concerns all you wish. But they are my concerns and they are valid ones, as evidenced by the fact that this case took eight years to come to a decision)