5 ms·

So I'm confused about this. Do Google actually own all of the books they've scanned? If I scanned millions of other peoples books and kept the scans, wouldn't

So I'm confused about this. Do Google actually own all of the books they've scanned? If I scanned millions of other peoples books and kept the scans, wouldn't I be in breach of copyright?

fapjacks 11y ago
You don't have to own a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use. Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool over a lot of eyes lately.
- kybernetikos 11y ago
  Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?
  - gweinberg 11y ago
    Whether you bought a copy of the book or borrowed it is pretty much irrelevant. Particularly if your computer is on line.
  - Zikes 11y ago
    Google scans, stores, and indexes billions of web pages, with obvious and fairly incontestable public benefits. How are books any different? The contents of an article, a blog post, and a NY Times Best Seller all get the exact same copyright protections and considerations. What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page to your hard drive.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      The web pages are open public access in machine-retrievable format though. Google purposely doesn't index content that supplies a robots file or header requesting it not to be indexed, and certainly doesn't borrow human accounts to allow Googlebot to also index registered-members-only online content. I'd argue that Google ought to have a similarly strong presumption that work distributed only in a non robot-parseable format and only for a fee isn't intended to be indexed in a publicly accessible database, unless the copyright owner expressly indicates otherwise. Especially if they haven't even paid the copyright holder the regular fee to read the work
      - derekp7 11y ago
        So all the copyright holders have to do is put a robots.txt file at the beginning of the book, and all is good? And really, there is no law that I'm aware of requiring Google (or anyone else) to honor robots.txt.
        notahacker 11y ago
        I don't think robots.txt has any legal standing, but I do think the fact that Google is willing to respect requests not to index content from everyone except print publishers of paid content is indicative of bad faith on their part.
        nkurz 11y ago
        Do you have reason to believe that they do not respect requests from print publishers not to scan their books? https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3365282?rd=1 https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3365282?rd=1 https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#options2 https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#op... Regardless of whether they have a legal obligation to do so, they certainly make it sound like they obey such requests.
        Zikes 11y ago
        robots.txt actually has little to nothing to do with copyright, and more to do with "unauthorized computer access" which is protected by the CPAA. It's a guard against accidental access or publishing of sensitive data - which isn't necessarily copyrighted but has other legal protections - as well as placing an unwanted burden on the server.
      - jacobr1 11y ago
        > Especially if they haven't even paid the copyright holder the regular fee to read the work They have though. All the works scanned were either purchased by google in hardcopy form, or scanned in partnership with libraries that had purchased the books.
    - kybernetikos 11y ago
      > What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page to your hard drive. Web pages are intended to be copied by the user - it's pretty much impossible to use them otherwise. Books are not.
  - extra88 11y ago
    If you borrow a book from a library or a friend, scan it to a file on your computer and return the book, you've committed a distribution of a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder. If the copyright holder discovered this they could sue you at which point you could attempt to present a Fair Use defense based on the four factors [0]. Assuming it's a whole published book that's available for sale, you'd need a noble use to explain why you didn't just buy a copy to scan for yourself but even if you lose, the damages could be relatively small assuming you didn't distribute the file further. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
extra88 11y ago
Google Books started their scanning with books held in university libraries (and the New York Public Library). While there might have been some variation from school to school the basic deal was Google and the school each got a copy. The university copies are largely, or entirely, held by HathiTrust [1] (who was also sued by the Author's Guild). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books_Library_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books_Library_Project [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust

So I'm confused about this. Do Google actually own all of the books they've scanned? If I scanned millions of other peoples books and kept the scans, wouldn't I be in breach of copyright?

fapjacks 11y ago

You don't have to own a copy of the copyrighted materials to have some use fall under Fair Use doctrine. Making a mixtape for your girlfriend falls under Fair Use. Making fun of the mixtape on Youtube also falls under Fair Use. Unfortunately, the big conglomerate "content" industry has pulled the wool over a lot of eyes lately.

kybernetikos 11y ago
Some use sure, but if I have an scan on my harddisk of an entire book that I don't own, are you saying that's potentially fine?
- gweinberg 11y ago
  Whether you bought a copy of the book or borrowed it is pretty much irrelevant. Particularly if your computer is on line.
- Zikes 11y ago
  Google scans, stores, and indexes billions of web pages, with obvious and fairly incontestable public benefits. How are books any different? The contents of an article, a blog post, and a NY Times Best Seller all get the exact same copyright protections and considerations. What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page to your hard drive.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    The web pages are open public access in machine-retrievable format though. Google purposely doesn't index content that supplies a robots file or header requesting it not to be indexed, and certainly doesn't borrow human accounts to allow Googlebot to also index registered-members-only online content. I'd argue that Google ought to have a similarly strong presumption that work distributed only in a non robot-parseable format and only for a fee isn't intended to be indexed in a publicly accessible database, unless the copyright owner expressly indicates otherwise. Especially if they haven't even paid the copyright holder the regular fee to read the work
    - derekp7 11y ago
      So all the copyright holders have to do is put a robots.txt file at the beginning of the book, and all is good? And really, there is no law that I'm aware of requiring Google (or anyone else) to honor robots.txt.
      - notahacker 11y ago
        I don't think robots.txt has any legal standing, but I do think the fact that Google is willing to respect requests not to index content from everyone except print publishers of paid content is indicative of bad faith on their part.
        nkurz 11y ago
        Do you have reason to believe that they do not respect requests from print publishers not to scan their books? https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3365282?rd=1 https://support.google.com/books/partner/answer/3365282?rd=1 https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#options2 https://www.google.com/googlebooks/publisher_library.html#op... Regardless of whether they have a legal obligation to do so, they certainly make it sound like they obey such requests.
        Zikes 11y ago
        robots.txt actually has little to nothing to do with copyright, and more to do with "unauthorized computer access" which is protected by the CPAA. It's a guard against accidental access or publishing of sensitive data - which isn't necessarily copyrighted but has other legal protections - as well as placing an unwanted burden on the server.
    - jacobr1 11y ago
      > Especially if they haven't even paid the copyright holder the regular fee to read the work They have though. All the works scanned were either purchased by google in hardcopy form, or scanned in partnership with libraries that had purchased the books.
  - kybernetikos 11y ago
    > What you're proposing is no different from saving the contents of a web page to your hard drive. Web pages are intended to be copied by the user - it's pretty much impossible to use them otherwise. Books are not.
- extra88 11y ago
  If you borrow a book from a library or a friend, scan it to a file on your computer and return the book, you've committed a distribution of a copyrighted work without the permission of the copyright holder. If the copyright holder discovered this they could sue you at which point you could attempt to present a Fair Use defense based on the four factors [0]. Assuming it's a whole published book that's available for sale, you'd need a noble use to explain why you didn't just buy a copy to scan for yourself but even if you lose, the damages could be relatively small assuming you didn't distribute the file further. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors

extra88 11y ago

Google Books started their scanning with books held in university libraries (and the New York Public Library). While there might have been some variation from school to school the basic deal was Google and the school each got a copy. The university copies are largely, or entirely, held by HathiTrust [1] (who was also sued by the Author's Guild). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books_Library_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books_Library_Project [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust