4 ms·

What do you mean? It went very well. We still have Google Books after all.

londons_explore 9y ago
This court case killed Google Books. They've pretty much stopped scanning new books, even new out of copyright manuscripts etc. Google Books itself had loads of cool possibilities of new ways to make use of the data from those books. This lawsuit has pretty much stopped all innovation, and all the good engineers left the project years ago.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  The Internet Archive’s book scanning project is still in full swing. Yes, the indexing and presentation is not at parity, but I prefer a non-profit digital library to be the canonical reference instead of Google.
  - robin_reala 9y ago
    HathiTrust too has great content and indexing, it’s just a shame that it’s much slower than Google Books. But between the that and archive.org they’re a fine replacement.
  - yohui 9y ago
    That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain projects, not supplanted them. But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-now-liberated/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-...
      - yohui 9y ago
        While a good step, this only makes up for a portion of what the settlement would have allowed. (Most obviously, it appears this only covers books from a 20 year period and it takes more work to ascertain that the books are not being sold.) Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books: https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about
        toomuchtodo 9y ago
        I agree entirely, but perfect is the enemy of good enough. We can still celebrate small wins while continuing to advocate for copyright reform.
        yohui 9y ago
        > perfect is the enemy of good enough Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.

This court case killed Google Books. They've pretty much stopped scanning new books, even new out of copyright manuscripts etc. Google Books itself had loads of cool possibilities of new ways to make use of the data from those books. This lawsuit has pretty much stopped all innovation, and all the good engineers left the project years ago.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
The Internet Archive’s book scanning project is still in full swing. Yes, the indexing and presentation is not at parity, but I prefer a non-profit digital library to be the canonical reference instead of Google.
- robin_reala 9y ago
  HathiTrust too has great content and indexing, it’s just a shame that it’s much slower than Google Books. But between the that and archive.org they’re a fine replacement.
- yohui 9y ago
  That's great for material that's public domain or out of copyright, but the Authors Guild settlement could have digitized and made accessible orphan works that are still under copyright. It would have complemented the public domain projects, not supplanted them. But instead academic opponents of the deal seriously thought they would have better luck pursuing copyright reform in Congress (!), and helped kill the settlement. Of course, in reality Congress did no such thing, and so the chance to rescue orphan works was lost.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-now-liberated/ https://blog.archive.org/2017/10/10/books-from-1923-to-1941-...
    - yohui 9y ago
      While a good step, this only makes up for a portion of what the settlement would have allowed. (Most obviously, it appears this only covers books from a 20 year period and it takes more work to ascertain that the books are not being sold.) Moreover, this does not contradict the idea that the Authors Guild settlement could have complemented public domain efforts. Even today some of the books saved on the Internet Archive were retrieved via Google Books: https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about https://archive.org/details/googlebooks&tab=about
      - toomuchtodo 9y ago
        I agree entirely, but perfect is the enemy of good enough. We can still celebrate small wins while continuing to advocate for copyright reform.
        yohui 9y ago
        > perfect is the enemy of good enough Funnily enough, that's also how the original article described the opposition to the Authors Guild settlement. As it turned out, killing the Google Books project didn't really move us closer to copyright reform.