Open Access News

For Google, Mary Sue Coleman, Riches We Must Share.... Coleman is the President of the University of Michigan, which is letting Google scan all seven million volumes in its library, including books under copyright. Excerpt:

Beyond the specific legal challenges emerging in the wake of such a sea change, there are deeply important public policy issues at stake. We must not lose sight of the transformative nature of Google's plan or the public good that can come from it. Throughout history, most of the world's printed knowledge has been created, preserved and used only by society's elites -- those for whom education and power meant access to the great research libraries. Now, groundbreaking tools for mass digitization are poised to change that paradigm. We believe the result can be a widening of human conversation comparable to the emergence of mass literacy itself....For those works that remain in copyright, a search will reveal brief excerpts along with information about how to buy the work or borrow it from a public library. Searches of work in the public domain will yield access to complete texts online. Imagine what this means for scholars and the general public, who, until now, might have discovered only a fraction of the material written on a subject. Or picture a small, impoverished school -- in America or anywhere in the world -- that does not have access to a substantial library but does have an Internet connection....Libraries and educational institutions are the only entities whose mission is to preserve knowledge through the centuries. It is a crucial role, one outside the interest of corporate entities and separate from the whims of the market. If libraries do not archive and curate, there is substantial risk that entire bodies of work will be lost. Universities and the knowledge they offer should be accessible by all....[W]e believe deeply that this endeavor exemplifies the spirit under which our nation's copyright law was developed: to encourage the free exchange of ideas in the service of innovation and societal progress. The protections of copyright are designed to balance the rights of the creator with the rights of the public. At its core is the most important principle of all: to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, not to stifle such exchange.

For the Authors Guild, Nick Taylor, ...But Not at Writers' Expense. Taylor is the President of the Authors Guild. Excerpt:

I am a writer.... have invested a small fortune in books chronicling the period and copies of old newspapers, spent countless hours on Internet searches, paid assistants to dig up obscure bits of information, and then sat at my keyboard trying to spin a mountain of facts into a compelling narrative. Money advanced by my publisher has made this possible. Except for a few big-name authors, publishers roll the dice and hope that a book's sales will return their investment. Because of this, readers have a wealth of wonderful books to choose from. Most authors do not live high on their advances; my hourly return at this point is laughable....So my question is this: When did we in this country decide that this kind of work and investment isn't worth paying for? That is what Google, the powerful and extremely wealthy search engine, with co-founders ranking among the 20 richest people in the world, is saying by declining to license in-copyright works in its library scanning program, which has the otherwise admirable aim of making the world's books available for search by anyone with Web access. Google says writers and publishers should be happy about this: It will increase their exposure and maybe lead to more book sales. That's a devil's bargain. We'd all like to have more exposure, obviously. But is that the only form of compensation Google can come up with when it makes huge profits on the ads it sells along the channels its users are compelled to navigate? Now that the Authors Guild has objected, in the form of a lawsuit, to Google's appropriation of our books, we're getting heat for standing in the way of progress, again for thoughtlessly wanting to be paid. It's been tradition in this country to believe in property rights. When did we decide that socialism was the way to run the Internet?...The value of Google's project notwithstanding, society has traditionally seen its greatest value in the rights of individuals, and particularly in the dignity of their work and just compensation for it. The people who cry that information wants to be free don't address this dignity or this aspect of justice. They're more interested in ease of assembly. The alphabet ought to be free, most certainly, but the people who painstakingly arrange it into books deserve to be paid for their work. This, at the core, is what copyright is all about. It's about a just return for work and the dignity that goes with it.

Comment. Nick Taylor's piece shows that he's as clueless as I feared. First, he doesn't understand what socialism is. Second and more important, he complains that the Google project will deprive him of revenue but doesn't offer a single reason to think so. On the contrary, he concedes the increase in exposure. Is he saying that the increase in exposure will boost sales but that the boost in sales isn't good enough and that he also wants a cut of Google's "huge profits"? If so, he should ask for a cut and stop contradicting himself with the talk about ceasing to be paid for his hard work. Is he saying that the increase in exposure will decrease sales by satisfying readers who would otherwise have bought his book? If so, he should say so, offer whatever evidence he has, or at least show some willingness to study the evidence, which includes mounting evidence against him. If he thinks that Google's snippets are too large, then either he should scale back his lawsuit to the demand that they fall within fair use or he should forthrightly call for the repeal of fair use. Couldn't a good writer do a better job with Taylor's thesis, whatever it is?