A Saga of Copyright
: Authors Guild, et al.v. Google.
A saga can commonly be
held to be a long tale involving many parties interacting within a
complex environment seeking to overcome both their own flaws and
outside forces. A classic example of this would be the Eddas of
Iceland. While not as long running or (as yet) as bloody, there is a
similarity with Icelandic sagas the multitude of legal pleadings of
the parties before a judge and the search for justice & fairness
in the dispute which has embroiled Google Books; which continues as
per the latest in Authors Guild, et al.v. Google.
The background to this
being Google has positioned itself as the the premier search engine
company in the global economy (see "How Google test Software"
by Wittaker as an interesting insight into how this is achieved). The
mission goal for this company can be captured in a desire to allow
the world's information to be search-able. As a large part of this
heritage of information is present outside the digital format in
paper based books, in 2004 Google began to convert the physical to
the binary by scanning in books. This however was done without the
permission of the copyright owner's permission (leaving aside books
which were in public domain or without know authors) and the US based
Author's Guild in 2005 brought a copyright infringement suit with
Google's defense being that of "fair use".
This term original from
the US case of Folsom v Marsh (1841) and facts revolved around a
book of one of the American rebel leaders, a George Washington, and
the correctness of being able to quote sections of that book. Four
main elements of allowing such quotes were enumerated as being.
1- the purpose of such
quotes and if these were of commercial nature
2- the original work
and if it were copyrighted.
3- the percentage of
the work quoted
4- how this might
effect the commercial aspect of the work
The Saga initially
looked to have a fairly benign ending with an agreement between the
parties but this was rejected on the grounds of unfairness, The excellent IPKitten site has commented that the which ever side is the victor, it will mark a
key ruling on how "fair use" is to be viewed in terms of
transformative (from physical to digital) copyrighted material.
In the European
context, how the moral rights of the author might be effected given
the less than perfect technology that underlies scanning, could also
be an issue. Either way, the Google Books like any good Saga will
likely continue to provide years more topics of interest.
