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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

by 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
    If I borrowed from a library and kept a complete scan of the book when returning it, copyright law would still apply. Libraries as far as I know do not have the right to authorise third parties to copy entirities of others work.
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.

by Zikes 11y ago

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
  If I borrowed from a library and kept a complete scan of the book when returning it, copyright law would still apply. Libraries as far as I know do not have the right to authorise third parties to copy entirities of others work.

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.