[Ecommerce] NYT: If books are on google...

[Manon Ress]

Connections
If Books Are on Google, Who Gains and Who Loses?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/14/arts/14conn.html?pagewanted=1

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 14, 2005

In 1709, Daniel Defoe compared them to "House-breakers," "High-way
Robbers," and "Pick-Pockets," not sounding that different from the
way software makers, movie producers and writers sound today when
they speak about copyright pirates.

Why, Defoe asked - at a time when authors had no rights to their own
work - should there be laws against one class of villain, and not
against those who steal another kind of property created "after
infinite Labour, Study, and Expence"?

Why, his colleague at arms Joseph Addison asked, should "Mechanick
Artizans" be able to reap the "Fruit of their Invention and Ingenuity
without Invasion" while a writer who has "studied the Wonders of the
Creation" has "no Property in what he is willing to produce"?

Such were some of the earlier clamors for authors' rights. The latest
can be heard in debates about Google Print, an enterprise in which
Google is scanning books from five major research libraries, along
with submissions of publishers, to create a searchable database of
the written word. In September, the Author's Guild, a trade group
representing writers, sued Google, claiming "massive copyright
infringement." The Association of American Publishers has also sued
Google over its project, which just resumed after being suspended for
a few months while the company re-examined the issues. Last month, a
competitive group, the Open Content Alliance (which includes Yahoo
and Microsoft), announced plans to scan collections of other
libraries, while trying to accommodate the objections made to Google.

The controversy promises to erupt on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the New
York Public Library's Celeste Bartos Forum, when the debate will be
joined by members of the guild, the publishers' association and
Google. Also in the fray will be Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law
School, Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine, and Paul
LeClerc and David Ferriero from the library (which is participating
in Google Print).

But as I argued in a version of this column in The International
Herald Tribune last month, contention is commonplace during eras of
technological change. When Defoe and Addison were demanding
consideration in London 300 years ago, the right to "copy" or publish
any book was held not by the author but by members of London's
Stationers' Company - booksellers and printers - who held a monopoly
on that right in perpetuity. That seemed reasonable during the
century after the introduction of the printing press and the
considerable expenses needed to print, distribute and sell a book to
the small literate public.

But by the beginning of the 18th century, printing was becoming less
expensive, international and provincial publishers were offering
competition, literacy increased and authors grew in public stature.
So over the next half-century, British laws limited the control of
the Stationers and expanded the rights of authors, while also putting
time limits on all forms of control, creating what became the public
domain.

Then came another wave of technological change: the industrial
revolution. And similar controversies erupted. Inventions were once
relatively immune from copying because of the craft they required;
execution could seem more difficult than coming up with the idea.
Once manufacturing was mechanized, though, the idea itself could
become vulnerable, leading to both increased governmental control and
increased industrial espionage. Britain prohibited the export of
machinery while the fledgling United States welcomed insiders with
information from there.

Now, just as increasing trade and decreasing costs led to the
breakdown of the Stationers' monopoly in the 18th century and to an
increase in industrial espionage in the 19th, the Internet's near
elimination of costs for the transmission and sifting of digital
media has led to another wave of copiers and protectors, along with
accusations of theft and heated debates over file-sharing, copy-
protection and licensing.

But during the last decade the debates have had a different
character. The self-described "progressive" side has challenged
copyright enforcement and even argued for its radical diminishment.
This attempt to minimize existing controls, though, is imagined not
as a triumph for authors (as was initially the case in the 18th
century) or as a triumph for profiteers or national ambitions (as in
the industrial espionage of the 19th), but as a form of liberation.

In many such arguments, lines are starkly drawn and echo older
ideological battles: idealism confronts materialism, socialism
confronts capitalism, communal values confront individualism.
Challengers of copyright and patent legislation often portray
themselves as liberators, bravely opposing a greedy global corporate
culture that tries to claim each bit of intellectual property for
itself the way imperialist explorers tried to plant the motherland's
flag on every unclaimed piece of land. Meanwhile, advocates of
tighter control over copyright see things very differently, viewing
this attack as an assault on the rights of inventors and writers,
undermining those who invest their time and labor to answer human
needs and desires.

In part, the ideology of liberation evolved out of libertarian and
utopian hacker culture (which also gave birth to recreational
piracy). An international counterculture developed around the new
technologies sometimes spurred by figures who had also been active in
the political counterculture of the 1960's and 70's. That spirit led
to advances - like the development of "open source" software in which
programmers have contributed their energies to shared projects. It
has also led to well-traveled mantras like "Information Wants to Be
Free" and to arguments more focused on restricting those who attempt
to control than those who attempt to copy.

But the categories are all wrong. Organized information - information
given shape and meaning - is never really free. And the virtues of
"open source" software are not simply that it avoids corporate
ownership. The operating system Linux, for example, has succeeded not
just because varied individuals are freely contributing to its
evolution, but also because companies are supporting it, and panels
of overseers and a strict organizational procedure govern its
specialized licenses.

Technology also keeps unsettling the categories. Some new forms of
control will be needed to prevent unrestricted copying, but
technological innovation will undermine attempts to apply too much
control. Some flexibility is needed to prevent the stifling of
communication and commerce, but technological innovation will foil
those who believe it should not exist at all. This doesn't make
things easy; it makes them unpredictable.

This is clear in the Google debate. Google, which is engaged in a
project that was sci-fi fantasy two decades ago, is essentially being
accused of piracy, creating copies of protected works without prior
permission. But these are new kinds of copies, with very different
uses; only books out of copyright will be fully available online.

The law has already judged search engines to be engaged in "fair use"
when they index copyrighted material found on the Internet; now the
issue is whether indexing copyrighted material not found on the
Internet is also "fair use." Google has specified the extremely
limited form such use will take for copyrighted library material:
enough to allow a search that will provide information about the book
(including places to buy or borrow it) and three citations restricted
to small passages that should suffice to illustrate the book's
importance or relevance to the researcher. More extensive reading
would require purchasing the book from booksellers or publishers
(though other payment models will be necessary, such as those being
experimented with by Amazon). Individual books can be removed from
the index, just as Web sites can.

This model will change over time. So will the notion of "copy." So
will the practices of libraries, publishers and booksellers. It may
not be too much to hope that so will the ideologies of copyright debate.

************************************************
Manon Anne Ress
manon.ress@cptech.org,
www.cptech.org

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