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> Chin also rejected the theory that Google was depriving authors of income, noting that the company does not sell the scans or make whole copies of books avail

> Chin also rejected the theory that Google was depriving authors of income, noting that the company does not sell the scans or make whole copies of books available. He concluded, instead, that Google Books served to help readers discover new books and amounted to “new income from authors.” Fire up your torrents. We have a new precedent for the legality of file sharing. As long as the pirates aren't selling you the files, they're helping you discover new movies!

aqme28 13y ago
"or make whole copies of books available"
- droopybuns 13y ago
  You won't miss it if they trim a few minutes of dialog from the Phantom Menace. Boom, MPAA legal team out of business!
  - GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
    I think I know exactly which minutes of dialogue I'd like to trim from TPM
    - wiredfool 13y ago
      Yeah, but think about the effect on the work's value.
  - chc 13y ago
    That is still effectively a whole copy. The law is not a poorly configured spam filter that you can get around by changing a couple of words here and there.
res0nat0r 13y ago
Nope. If your torrent only contains a single page from each chapter maybe, but wholesale copying is still against the law. You can't read entire books on Google Books.
- ics 13y ago
  I would be interested in a "Chapterman's Book Club", where you can grab a torrent of the week's ten recommended chapters from various books and discuss them. There would actually be some novelty in it being legal.
- estebank 13y ago
  What if 100 person independently loaded one page of a 100 page book? The full work is available, but no individual can be blamed with infringement under your interpretation.</devils_advocate>
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    Spot checking the first Hunger Games book on Google, it only displays the first 50 pages or so.
  - macspoofing 13y ago
    These kinds of tricks hardly ever pass muster. The law isn't that stupid.
  - ben0x539 13y ago
    Sounds like a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement to me!
  - Oletros 13y ago
    They can't See p. 9: "one of the snippets on each page is "black-listed," meaning it will not be shown; and at least one out of ten entire pages in each book is black-listed... An "attacker" who tries to obtain an entire book by using a physical copy of the book to string together words appearing in successive passages would be able to obtain at best a patchwork of snippets that would be missing at least one snippet from every page and 10% of all pages. (Pl. Resp. ¶ 41). In addition, works with text organized in short "chunks," such as dictionaries, cookbooks, and books ofhaiku, are excluded from snippet view. "
kahirsch 13y ago
Google did not "make whole copies of books available." Not a precedent.
venomsnake 13y ago
Which kinda they do ... I have discovered a lot of stuff that way. And any game that I have obtained and liked that way is already in my steam and gog libraries.
joering2 13y ago
I think its worth nothing, to "comply" with this ruling, it would have to be limited to music, and you would have to find songs that are not being otherwise offered as a "buy one", but rather come within the entire album. In other words, if the judge said that its okay to scan and make available _parts_ of the book and this serves as "new income" for authors, then similarly you could weed off one song from entire album and make it available and try to fall under the judge reasoning, shall MAFIAA comes after you. But if I were you I wouldn't try, unless you are Google/Apple/or Ebay too big to fail/jail. IANAL tho. Alternatively, envision torrent network that every person shares only part of a song. Noone, technically shares online entire song, but only lets say 25 seconds of it. This would completely fall under judge's reasoning :)
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Alternatively, envision torrent network that every person shares only part of a song. Noone, technically shares online entire song, but only lets say 25 seconds of it. This would completely fall under judge's reasoning Probably not. The judges ruling is an application of fair use law to the particular case; one of the considerations expressly applied is the criteria (specified in the fair use statute) of effect on the commercial market for the work. Sharing parts of works as part of a network of people collaborating to, in combination, share the whole work can quite easily be argued to have a very different effect on the market for the work than what was at issue in this case, making your hypothetical readily distinguishable under the criteria applied.
Zigurd 13y ago
My books are on many torrents. Very few people who can buy them torrent them. I've lost a few rupees. There are only a few hundred pop-book authors who could plausibly lose measurable income from more widespread torrenting.
ncallaway 13y ago
Fair Use is a four-part test. Chin has concluded that the book scanning project by Google meets all four parts of the fair-use test. You are taking a single-test discussed in the article ("Effect upon work's value") and assuming it's the only criteria. You can learn about the four-factors (which is judicial precedent) here: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ The four tests are: * "Purpose and character" - Your use of the work must be substantially different (transformative). Generally, it is considered that you must be adding some new expression to the work. From the Standford link above: "At issue is whether the material has been used to help create something new or merely copied verbatim into another work". Clearly any attempt at sharing files in their entirety (or near-entirety) for the purpose of distributing the original film would fall down on this test. * "Nature of the Copyrighted Work" - This is basically an acknowledgement that you can't copyright facts. There's significantly more leeway to copy from something like the phone book than there is from fiction. Most of the time file-sharing copyrighted torrents without permission and Google Books are probably on similar grounds here. * "Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Taken" - The less you take, the better off you are. Google Books is in an interesting position here in that they _take_ the entire work, but they only _make available_ very small sections of the original work. In the case of the torrents, someone is making available all (or most) of the original work. It's definitely going to fall down here. * "Effect upon work's value" - Basically, does the use in question have a significant negative effect on the market where the original work is in use. In the Google Book's case Chin noted that it didn't seem to negatively impact the market that the books were being sold in. The MPAA and RIAA have argued in court successfully so far that distributing torrents leads to direct financial harm. I find some of their arguments suspect (or at least lacking evidence), but courts have generally been receptive to this argument. Courts will determine that torrents fall down on this test as well. Finally, it should be noted that Fair Use is an "affirmative defense". That means you can't get a judge to dismiss a lawsuit by saying "Fair Use". You'll need to go to trial. And the burden will be on you to show that the use was "Fair Use". This will cost a small fortune. So, assuming arguendo, that this ruling did create a precedent that torrenting was fair use, it would still be strongly discouraged as you'd have to go to trial every time to show that it wasn't.
- droopybuns 13y ago
rayiner 13y ago
And this is why we can't have nice things. This conflation of the higher principles of fair use with people simply wanting to get popular movies and video games for free.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  It is actually a serious problem. The trouble is that some subset of the usage of P2P apps -- even for copyrighted works -- probably is fair use. Imagine some history teacher downloading Lincoln to make excerpts for classroom use in order to avoid having to personally use DeCSS on the DVD. The problem is, how is anyone supposed to distinguish those people from naked infringers over the internet? There doesn't seem to be any obvious cost effective way to do it. So you have a situation where either fair use in the new medium is destroyed because those making legitimate fair use are lumped in with infringers for whatever penalties, or copyright enforcement is hopeless because you have to litigate a fair use defense for each of a million different users.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    There is an ongoing litigation about this: http://www.dmlp.org/threats/tuteur-v-crosley-corcoran http://www.dmlp.org/threats/tuteur-v-crosley-corcoran. The novel issue is whether sending a takedown notice requires a good faith belief that the infringment isn't fair use. If it does, then robo takedown notices become an abuse of the takedown process.
  - chc 13y ago
    > The trouble is that some subset of the usage of P2P apps -- even for copyrighted works -- probably is fair use. Imagine some history teacher downloading Lincoln to make excerpts for classroom use in order to avoid having to personally use DeCSS on the DVD. It seems to me the real trouble is that, with torrents, that history teacher will also be giving unauthorized copies to others, who are most likely not also history teachers.
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      It seems to me the real trouble is that, with torrents, that history teacher will also be giving unauthorized copies to others, who are most likely not also history teachers. It seems to me that, in the future, a sane legal system should ignore this technical aspect of torrents. Merely participating in an existing swarm should not be considered distribution.
chc 13y ago
The "make whole copies of books available" thing is crucial, because that's what makes it not a substitute for the original work. I think most companies would not be particularly upset if you torrented a demo or trailer of their movie/game/whatever. But instead, most people make the entire work available, so that it acts as a replacement for purchasing the work.
blacksmith_tb 13y ago
Shouldn't that be "new income FOR authors"?

aqme28 13y ago

"or make whole copies of books available"

droopybuns 13y ago
You won't miss it if they trim a few minutes of dialog from the Phantom Menace. Boom, MPAA legal team out of business!
- GotAnyMegadeth 13y ago
  I think I know exactly which minutes of dialogue I'd like to trim from TPM
  - wiredfool 13y ago
    Yeah, but think about the effect on the work's value.
- chc 13y ago
  That is still effectively a whole copy. The law is not a poorly configured spam filter that you can get around by changing a couple of words here and there.

res0nat0r 13y ago

Nope. If your torrent only contains a single page from each chapter maybe, but wholesale copying is still against the law. You can't read entire books on Google Books.

ics 13y ago
I would be interested in a "Chapterman's Book Club", where you can grab a torrent of the week's ten recommended chapters from various books and discuss them. There would actually be some novelty in it being legal.
estebank 13y ago
What if 100 person independently loaded one page of a 100 page book? The full work is available, but no individual can be blamed with infringement under your interpretation.</devils_advocate>
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  Spot checking the first Hunger Games book on Google, it only displays the first 50 pages or so.
- macspoofing 13y ago
  These kinds of tricks hardly ever pass muster. The law isn't that stupid.
- ben0x539 13y ago
  Sounds like a conspiracy to commit copyright infringement to me!
- Oletros 13y ago
  They can't See p. 9: "one of the snippets on each page is "black-listed," meaning it will not be shown; and at least one out of ten entire pages in each book is black-listed... An "attacker" who tries to obtain an entire book by using a physical copy of the book to string together words appearing in successive passages would be able to obtain at best a patchwork of snippets that would be missing at least one snippet from every page and 10% of all pages. (Pl. Resp. ¶ 41). In addition, works with text organized in short "chunks," such as dictionaries, cookbooks, and books ofhaiku, are excluded from snippet view. "

kahirsch 13y ago

Google did not "make whole copies of books available." Not a precedent.

venomsnake 13y ago

Which kinda they do ... I have discovered a lot of stuff that way. And any game that I have obtained and liked that way is already in my steam and gog libraries.

joering2 13y ago

I think its worth nothing, to "comply" with this ruling, it would have to be limited to music, and you would have to find songs that are not being otherwise offered as a "buy one", but rather come within the entire album. In other words, if the judge said that its okay to scan and make available _parts_ of the book and this serves as "new income" for authors, then similarly you could weed off one song from entire album and make it available and try to fall under the judge reasoning, shall MAFIAA comes after you. But if I were you I wouldn't try, unless you are Google/Apple/or Ebay too big to fail/jail. IANAL tho. Alternatively, envision torrent network that every person shares only part of a song. Noone, technically shares online entire song, but only lets say 25 seconds of it. This would completely fall under judge's reasoning :)

dragonwriter 13y ago
> Alternatively, envision torrent network that every person shares only part of a song. Noone, technically shares online entire song, but only lets say 25 seconds of it. This would completely fall under judge's reasoning Probably not. The judges ruling is an application of fair use law to the particular case; one of the considerations expressly applied is the criteria (specified in the fair use statute) of effect on the commercial market for the work. Sharing parts of works as part of a network of people collaborating to, in combination, share the whole work can quite easily be argued to have a very different effect on the market for the work than what was at issue in this case, making your hypothetical readily distinguishable under the criteria applied.

Zigurd 13y ago

My books are on many torrents. Very few people who can buy them torrent them. I've lost a few rupees. There are only a few hundred pop-book authors who could plausibly lose measurable income from more widespread torrenting.

ncallaway 13y ago

Fair Use is a four-part test. Chin has concluded that the book scanning project by Google meets all four parts of the fair-use test. You are taking a single-test discussed in the article ("Effect upon work's value") and assuming it's the only criteria. You can learn about the four-factors (which is judicial precedent) here: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/ The four tests are: * "Purpose and character" - Your use of the work must be substantially different (transformative). Generally, it is considered that you must be adding some new expression to the work. From the Standford link above: "At issue is whether the material has been used to help create something new or merely copied verbatim into another work". Clearly any attempt at sharing files in their entirety (or near-entirety) for the purpose of distributing the original film would fall down on this test. * "Nature of the Copyrighted Work" - This is basically an acknowledgement that you can't copyright facts. There's significantly more leeway to copy from something like the phone book than there is from fiction. Most of the time file-sharing copyrighted torrents without permission and Google Books are probably on similar grounds here. * "Amount and Substantiality of the Portion Taken" - The less you take, the better off you are. Google Books is in an interesting position here in that they _take_ the entire work, but they only _make available_ very small sections of the original work. In the case of the torrents, someone is making available all (or most) of the original work. It's definitely going to fall down here. * "Effect upon work's value" - Basically, does the use in question have a significant negative effect on the market where the original work is in use. In the Google Book's case Chin noted that it didn't seem to negatively impact the market that the books were being sold in. The MPAA and RIAA have argued in court successfully so far that distributing torrents leads to direct financial harm. I find some of their arguments suspect (or at least lacking evidence), but courts have generally been receptive to this argument. Courts will determine that torrents fall down on this test as well. Finally, it should be noted that Fair Use is an "affirmative defense". That means you can't get a judge to dismiss a lawsuit by saying "Fair Use". You'll need to go to trial. And the burden will be on you to show that the use was "Fair Use". This will cost a small fortune. So, assuming arguendo, that this ruling did create a precedent that torrenting was fair use, it would still be strongly discouraged as you'd have to go to trial every time to show that it wasn't.

droopybuns 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

And this is why we can't have nice things. This conflation of the higher principles of fair use with people simply wanting to get popular movies and video games for free.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
It is actually a serious problem. The trouble is that some subset of the usage of P2P apps -- even for copyrighted works -- probably is fair use. Imagine some history teacher downloading Lincoln to make excerpts for classroom use in order to avoid having to personally use DeCSS on the DVD. The problem is, how is anyone supposed to distinguish those people from naked infringers over the internet? There doesn't seem to be any obvious cost effective way to do it. So you have a situation where either fair use in the new medium is destroyed because those making legitimate fair use are lumped in with infringers for whatever penalties, or copyright enforcement is hopeless because you have to litigate a fair use defense for each of a million different users.
- rayiner 13y ago
  There is an ongoing litigation about this: http://www.dmlp.org/threats/tuteur-v-crosley-corcoran http://www.dmlp.org/threats/tuteur-v-crosley-corcoran. The novel issue is whether sending a takedown notice requires a good faith belief that the infringment isn't fair use. If it does, then robo takedown notices become an abuse of the takedown process.
- chc 13y ago
  > The trouble is that some subset of the usage of P2P apps -- even for copyrighted works -- probably is fair use. Imagine some history teacher downloading Lincoln to make excerpts for classroom use in order to avoid having to personally use DeCSS on the DVD. It seems to me the real trouble is that, with torrents, that history teacher will also be giving unauthorized copies to others, who are most likely not also history teachers.
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    It seems to me the real trouble is that, with torrents, that history teacher will also be giving unauthorized copies to others, who are most likely not also history teachers. It seems to me that, in the future, a sane legal system should ignore this technical aspect of torrents. Merely participating in an existing swarm should not be considered distribution.

chc 13y ago

The "make whole copies of books available" thing is crucial, because that's what makes it not a substitute for the original work. I think most companies would not be particularly upset if you torrented a demo or trailer of their movie/game/whatever. But instead, most people make the entire work available, so that it acts as a replacement for purchasing the work.

blacksmith_tb 13y ago

Shouldn't that be "new income FOR authors"?