Court rejects Google Books settlement

[murraypaul]

Ditto

[CommonReader]

With all these arguments about orphaned works and registration I have still to hear one good argument why Google alone should be given a position that enables it to plunder orphaned works with impunity.

[kennyc]

They seem to be the one willing to foot the bill to do it. I haven't seen anyone else step up...that's about the only reason in favor that I see.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Kali Yuga

OK, I'm gonna make this short in the hopes you might actually read it. If you don't, I won't waste my time replying again.

• Luck is present in every economic and cultural success. Copyright is no more or less a "lottery" in this respect than anything else.

• The rights holder does pay for protection, in two ways. The primary way is that most of the burden of enforcing copyright falls on the rights holder.

• Just as with police and fire, copyright holders pay taxes. Sales taxes on the content; corporate taxes on the publisher; income taxes on the creator / rights holder.

Registration changes nothing about the above factors or their dynamics. You aren't any "luckier" or likely to succeed because you register. And the rights holder is already paying to protect the work, via any litigation costs and taxes.

Thus, the "lottery" concept is patently absurd. I suggest you drop it.

Everything you say applies equally to every other form of I.P. except copyright. Every other form of I.P. has to be registered (with payment up front). That means, as far as I.P. goes, that copyright is "free riding" on the I.P. system.

Copyright is the easiest of the three types of I.P. to create. (And if you don't believe me, read one of my Red adventure.) That's still not an excuse to let copyright "free ride" (since you're hung up on the term "lottery ticket").

I don't buy off on the "poor artist" viewpoint. There are "poor inventors", they have to pay full price. And don't say they are all corporations, I helped a friend get a patent on a new variant of canal lock design a couple years ago.

Copyright should be an "opt-in" system just like the rest of I.P., not an "opt out" system. It was that way from 1791 to 1976 in the US, I didn't see any lack of creativity during that period...

[spellbanisher]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Copyright should be an "opt-in" system just like the rest of I.P., not an "opt out" system. It was that way from 1791 to 1976 in the US, I didn't see any lack of creativity during that period...

That's not true. I wasn't able to create anything during that period.

[charleski]

I still haven't seen any convincing argument against a requirement for registration in order to maintain rights in a published work. Other forms of IP require it, and for two hundred years copyright did as well, so there is no 'natural' endowment to be considered*.

Questions of cost are a red herring, since, in the US at least, the majority of commercially-viable copyrightable material is initially registered anyway in order to qualify for statutory damages; adding a requirement for renewal would be trivial for most professionals, and would only burden those who fail to keep track of their work. Since the aim is to discourage creators from abandoning their works and making it difficult to clear the rights for them, this would have exactly the desired effect. There would be some added cost, but several mechanisms have been proposed in which that cost would be shared between those who benefit from this system - those who wish to use orphaned works in commercial ventures, the creators (who would benefit from a system in which licensing was more generally amenable) and the public at large.

There's certainly room for compromise, and I'm open to the idea that copyright should not require registration for an initial period (say 20 years or so), since the creator is likely to remain vested in his or her creation during that period. But extension beyond that should require an affirmative declaration by the creator that they haven't abandoned their work and are willing to maintain contact details for anyone wishing to license it.

The purpose is simple: the preservation of our heritage. The larger the base, the higher we can build, and it's far from unknown for works to be disregarded shortly after publication, only to attain far higher significance at a later date. Our current technologies preserve through copying, and indeed the vast bulk of our repository of culture comes from copies - the original manuscript of Sophocles' plays was lost aeons ago. The purpose of copyright is to aid the progress of culture, and it should not be allowed to retard it.



*I'm perfectly aware that there are extremists who aver that there should be no distinction at all between real and intellectual property, and that the book they wrote through the sweat of their brow deserves the same protection as a house they might build with the sweat of their back. Their arguments are nonsense, however, and skip lightly over the fact that anyone may live in a house, yet only a minority of the world's population would even understand the squiggles they make on a page, let alone find any value in them. All intellectual property is fundamentally derivative, and only has value in the context of the culture in which it was born.

[Dulin's Books]

Originally Posted by kennyc

They seem to be the one willing to foot the bill to do it. I haven't seen anyone else step up...that's about the only reason in favor that I see.

exactly- who else is even trying? they should be allowed to go forward with the restriction that if someone says "hey I just found a book I own the rights to in your database" then they should have to go to mediation over payments and continuing rights

[elcreative]

Can't see why Charleski is concerned about the preservation of our heritage since IP has no value and is all copied (derivative) in one way or another ... why bother, just keep reading what's been done, it'll all be the same valueless stuff...

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kennyc

They seem to be the one willing to foot the bill to do it. I haven't seen anyone else step up...that's about the only reason in favor that I see.

Between them, Microsoft and Apple probably have around $100Bn in cash and short-term investments. Which rights would we be willing to give up to them if they decided they wanted them?

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Between them, Microsoft and Apple probably have around $100Bn in cash and short-term investments. Which rights would we be willing to give up to them if they decided they wanted them?

You seem to be confusing something, or trying to start an argument.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by charleski

I still haven't seen any convincing argument against a requirement for registration in order to maintain rights in a published work.

• Rapid protection for works that need to be distributed quickly (e.g. an illustrator, writer, photographer, newspaper, magazine that produces copyrighted work very fast and/or in large volumes).
• The system to handle registrations is extremely slow, and the government shows no interest in speeding up the process.
• Registration can place an undue burden on many artists and rights holders.
• Disputes or confusion over the rights can happen at any time, and is responsible for an unknown number of orphan works. I.e. registration won't resolve all orphaned works, unless it becomes onerous and/or frequent enough to utterly swamp the Copyright Office.

Required repeat registrations place an undue burden on both the content creators and society at large. And since it won't resolve some of the problems that result in orphaned works anyway, is it really worth the costs?

Originally Posted by charleski

Other forms of IP require it, and for two hundred years copyright did as well, so there is no 'natural' endowment to be considered

I may have missed it, but no one is making any such claim. "Physical property rights" are just as much a social, political, cultural and economic construction as are intellectual rights.

Originally Posted by charleski

Questions of cost are a red herring, since, in the US at least, the majority of commercially-viable copyrightable material is initially registered anyway in order to qualify for statutory damages....

Really? So I just imagined that people used the "Poor Man's Copyright" then?

Originally Posted by charleski

adding a requirement for renewal would be trivial for most professionals, and would only burden those who fail to keep track of their work.

And, again, for the copyright office. Required repeat registrations would increase their already overburdened workload and backlog.

You may also want to try managing a large inventory of artworks before proclaiming it to be cheap and/or easy.

Originally Posted by charleski

The purpose is simple: the preservation of our heritage.

Managing orphaned works has almost nothing to do with "preserving our heritage."

The number of orphaned works is relatively small, and most of those works were abandoned because no one paid any attention to them. The reason why a text is languishing in a university library somewhere is because they are not vital to the culture at large.

This is not to say that the issue shouldn't be resolved, only that we don't need to treat every single crumb that fell from the dinner table like it's a truffle. Nor do we need to hamstring artists in the process of sweeping up a fraction of those crumbs.

[kennyc]

And now

...

This phenomenon is fairly recent — and it’s getting out of control. For most of this country’s history, a person’s identity was not something that could be owned. While the unauthorized use of someone’s name or image was sometimes barred as an invasion of privacy, the right belonged to that person alone and could not be assigned to others. It was not until 1953, in a case involving baseball players licensing their images for use on baseball cards, that American law first constructed identity as a property interest that could be sold or licensed. This interest became known as the right of publicity.
...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/op...%2Findex.jsonp

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kennyc

You seem to be confusing something, or trying to start an argument.

Simply that just because Google are willing to spend a huge amount of money on this, doesn't mean they should be allowed to get away with removing others' rights.
It is often a useful tool to say: "If it were company X rather than company Y doing this, how would I feel about it?"
In this case: If Microsoft (or Apple) were trying to create a monopoly on the rights to out-of-print works, would that sound like a good thing?
(As a general question to the world, I think you think this is a bad thing anyway)

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

Simply that just because Google are willing to spend a huge amount of money on this, doesn't mean they should be allowed to get away with removing others' rights.
It is often a useful tool to say: "If it were company X rather than company Y doing this, how would I feel about it?"
In this case: If Microsoft (or Apple) were trying to create a monopoly on the rights to out-of-print works, would that sound like a good thing?
(As a general question to the world, I think you think this is a bad thing anyway)

Yep, you're confused. My answer was in response to one reason why google should be allowed to do this.

You're way off into the stratosphere....

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yep, you're confused. My answer was in response to one reason why google should be allowed to do this.

Perhaps I am.
You said "They seem to be the one willing to foot the bill to do it. I haven't seen anyone else step up...that's about the only reason in favor that I see."
Which I thought was saying that the fact that they were willing to pay for it was a reason to allow them to do it. It was that which I was disagreeing with.