Google Book Search Debate at New York Public Library

On Thursday I attended a debate about Google Book Search at the New York Public Library.  NYPL is one of five libraries that have allowed Google to scan their collections--either in whole or in part--and make them searchable.  The others are Michigan, Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford. Both the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have sued Google for copyright infringement.   

Google scans books in their entirety in order to provide robust searches; people can conduct either a regular search, or dedicated book search,  in order to find books.  Only snippets of copyrighted text will appear, while the full text of public domain material appears.  (Perhaps this discrepancy will lead to a greater appreciation for the value of the public domain.)  Google has not cleared the rights to do this from the authors or publishers,  which has generated the lawsuits.

The debate featured Nick Taylor of the Authors Guild; Allan Adler of the Association of American Publishers; David Drummond of Google; and Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University and the Creative Commons.   The Times has a  story today, and Lessig has reflected upon the evening.

It was much more lively than I anticipated.  People clapped for the panelists on many occasions.  In general, older people clapped for the anti-Google arguments; younger folks cheered for Google.   I always clapped for Google, although I am concerned that it has the could gain monopoly power over how we access information.  But there is no doubt that making closed libraries open is a great public good;  Michigan is an open public library in principle, but  attending it in person is such a formidable barrier for most people that it is closed in reality.  One of my initial concerns was that Google would sully the library results pages by running ads, but thus far they have chosen not to do this.

The opposition of authors made no sense to me before the evening, or after.  As Tim Wu argues in Slate, Google is doing authors a favor by increasing exposure to their works.  Mr. Taylor  frequently stressed that it was an "appropriation" of intellectual property for Google to do this without permission.  But receiving permission from every author would be so cumbersome as to halt the project in its tracks, and does not seem necessary under the terms of fair use.  After all, only mere snippets of text would appear in the results.

The publishers have a more reasonable argument.   They claim that the mere act of copying the books in the first place, no matter how it is used, violates copyright.  Alas, this may be true.  Copyright law has not kept up with technology, and so we are living in an uncertain time.  I am one of many that hopes that Google does not settle these suits, and that they progress all the way to the Supreme Court.  We all need to know for certain the boundaries of copyright law in the digital age. I hope these boundaries are generous.

Comments

[Johnny]

Thanks for inviting me to the event! It was certainly rollicking.

Some of the authors opposed to the project seem to be opposed simply on the basis of paranoia. Some may see this as the first step in an effort to pull their works away from them, but that concern seems far-fetched enough to be silly.

As for the initial copying, you know from my comment on Lessig's blog that it's the only valid speedbump I see. It makes me wonder if there's room for a technicality that could go in Google's favor. Surely the original copyright laws did not account for making digital copies of physical books. Modern copyright law has had to be expanded to account for functionally equivalent copies. An album being turned into MP3s is functionally equivalent, but Google's snippets are certainly not.

I don't know enough about copyright law to know whether it focuses more on the outcomes or the processes. But I'm very interested in how Lessig and like-minded people would suggest changing copyright laws to bring it up to date with technology.