Table of Contents
Comments
Commenters3
What the impact might be of this settlement on the UK Higher and Futher Education in terms of teaching and learning?
What the impact might be of this settlement on the UK Higher and Futher Education in terms of teaching and learning?4
3
What the impact might be of this settlement on the UK Higher and Futher Education in terms of research?
3
What the impact might be of this settlement on the UK Higher and Futher Education in terms of research?5
2
Does the settlement represent a democratisation of access to knowledge or has it the potential to be Pyrrhic to UK education and research?
2
Does the settlement represent a democratisation of access to knowledge or has it the potential to be Pyrrhic to UK education and research?
If you could leave out Google’s potential monopoly on orphan works, that’ll be fine…
If it is left up to Google (and/or another commercial company) it is unfortunately inevitable that – as you put it – it would be a pyrrhic victory for us, and a lucrative market for them.
We need to support Google’s ‘partner’ institutions in the UK and help them play a bigger role in any such potential agreement, as it is greatly in their longterm interest to increase access to their holdings, especially digitally.
With just the US agreement in place, it will mostly be envy but the major impact will be on email systems, as US colleagues email copies of desired digitised works to their UK/EU colleagues to comment on and return them, leading to a situation like track-changes on a word document – dozens of version clogging up the system.
Yes, it’s a ridiculous and extreme example, but the bottom line is that many people have long since ceased worrying about country borders and ‘piracy’ of sorts will be rampant.
The scanning of text, heralded by the many as “enabling democratisation of access to information by making books available digitally to new audiences” will be denied to those relying on assistive technology. This would be a fantastic opportunity to enhance the quality of life for so many sensory and motor impaired people but Google Books are inaccessible to screen readers; when using magnifiers the quality of print varies and scanned graphics in particular strip cartoon type images soon become illegible. Under the UK DDA and DED there is the obligation on FE and HE institutions to take reasonable steps to ensure content is accessible and to make reasonable adjustments so no one is denied the provision of services; so I would like to suggest to JISC that access issues are added to this list of questions to consider.
PS could I also suggest that this site is tried with a screen reader; the summary page is fine but there’s a lot of code being read out on the Questions to Consider page
I quite agree – even to those users who have good vision, some of the older books suffer from foxing and other visual degradations.
However, the OCRd text that Google supplies (at least to the partner university) is of decent quality. We really should be making better use of this text, and involving communities such as those proof-reading texts for the gutenburg project. This OCR text should only be the starting point for a textual version of a book, not the final product.
Please could you point me to where the documentation mentions the OCRd text? Thanks.
That’s the thing – it’s not via the Google Book interface. The institutions that had their holdings scanned by Google have access to copies, which include a page-by-page txt file containing OCR text.
I am close to securing a place to put our holdings (Oxford University), and a screen-reader version of the service is very high up my list of TODOs!
So institutions will need an appropriate e-resources strategy to ensure they also prioritise the production of accessible digital data. Thanks for the information. Shame it isn’t being done at source or do you know if alternative versions are going to be made available?
Who can tell what the Great Google might do? maybe they will release the text through their interface – I can certainly ask for it.
I write as Copyright Officer at UCL and one of the authors of the LIBER submission to the EU on the Google Books Settlement at http://www.libereurope.eu/node/415
I strongly endorse the points made in the EBLIDA position paper for the European Commission hearing on 7th September. In particular, while welcoming the potential of Google’s project to make a vast range of resources generally available, I am very concerned about the implications of the monopoly position Google would enjoy. This would, potentially, leave questions of access to and long term preservation of the material to be determined by Google’s commercial judgement and dependent on the company’s continued existance. I am also concerned that any such project has international agreement so that there is fair access worldwide and that the rights of authors throughout the world are respected.
See George Kerscher’s article on this from July 2007 in the DAISY Consortium newsletter.
Thanks for the link; it would be interesting to see the article rewritten for 2009. I tried Google Books with ZoomText Reader, Guide and WebAnywhere, with graphics and off, and still couldn’t access the text. I don’t have Jaws but neither do most of the VI people I work with for cost, confidence and competency related reasons. It seems that the situation is no better now than then and that priority for the VI, especially those not privileged with educational access, is still much too low.
The likelihood of there being a similar European result is not great given the ECJ’s attitude to technology and copyright. See the recent decision Infopaq International (Intellectual property) [2009] EUECJ C-5/08 (16 July 2009) at http://www.bailii.org/eu/cases/EUECJ/2009/C508.html
JISC needs more input from legal academics on this topic, I suggest.
The issue of orphan works really needs to be settled by legislation. It would not be right to support a Google monopoly over such a large proportion of published works. If a legislative solution is not found what will happen regarding those works purposely excluded by Google.
I think we would all like to see greater/easier access to works currently housed in numerous libraries. However would we be happy with an even wider Google monopoly position? The EU is looking at various options re orphan works, including legislation. The question is will a European-wide acceptable solution be found? Previous attempts at harmonisation have had minor impact (apart from the extension to 70 years), but we do need a viable solution which will allow libraries (and other commercial/non-commercial entities) to provide access to millions of orphan works.
I agree-piracy will grow. However could there also be an impact on the decisions made by future research students regarding choice of university? Would they be attracted by US institutions providing digital access to material not readily available in the UK?
The Google Book Settlement agreement (original version) is incompatible with international and UK copyright law, and with the fundamental right of authors to authorize any reproduction of their works. Any agreement along similar lines would also violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, article 17.2: ‘Intellectual property shall be protected.’ In addition, the unauthorized display of extracts from a work, whether as ‘snippets’ or as page views, would be an infringement of the author’s moral right of integrity (guaranteed under the 1988 Copyright Act).
Only an opt-in arrangement, in which authors’ copyrights and moral rights were fully protected, could conceivably be acceptable.
And yes, I realise this would not ‘solve’ the ‘orphan works problem’. But the overwhelming majority of ‘orphan works’ are not books, in any case: they are photos, sound recordings, film recordings, mss, etc. Books come tagged with authors’ names, publishers’ names, place of publication etc. In practice, there are very very few cases where people clearing rights in books cannot trace the rights-holders. (The GBS is, inter alia, a device for transferring the administrative burden and associated costs of sorting out licensing from Google Inc. to the rights-holders, to the economic detriment of the latter.)
If academics and academic/institutional librarians were to push for a Google Book Settlement in Europe, along the same lines as the settlement which is currently being proposed in the US, it will damage relationships between academia and creative writers, independent scholars, etc.
If such a settlement were to come into being, it would do immediate and lasting harm to Europe’s literary culture: particularly in the long forms, such as the novel, history, memoir. It would also greatly damage the valuable and necessary tradition of scholarly writing by writers working outside the universities.
Some salaried academics, I know, find it hard to fully appreciate that most novels and many non-fiction works are written by people who rely at least in part, sometimes entirely, on the income they receive from writing. That is what buys them the time to write. In many cases they don’t make a great deal of money for the work they put in. That doesn’t mean the money they make isn’t crucial in their economy, and indispensable if they are to continue to write. The Google Book Settlement will undoubtedly depress authors’ incomes further. This is a situation that anyone who values our literary and intellectual culture should wish to avoid.
Besides the money, there is also the fact that for many authors it is hugely important that they own and control the work they produce. This is a point that comes out from a number of statements authors have made criticising the GBS: that it is psychologically necessary to many authors that they own their own words, their own written utterances: that they have a right to decide where, and in what form, and whether their works shall be published. The GBS agreement in its current form takes this right away from most poets and anyone else who has published in multi-authored collections (see my comment at 2.32 above). It also in many cases accords publishers rights (especially digital rights) in cases where the publishing contract reserves those rights to the author: again removing control and choice from authors.
On democratising access to knowledge:
It is my experience that very few books fall into the so-called ‘twentieth-century black hole’ of in-copyright out-of-print works are genuinely hard to obtain: most may be bought secondhand on the web, typically for modest sums, and all, or virtually all, are available on inter-library loan.
A huge number of rare nineteenth- and even some eighteen-century works are now available free on the web in the Internet Archive, Google Books and other digital collections.
What are not really accessible at present to scholars outside the universities (and indeed, depending on institution, to some scholars within the university system) are the great digital collections of earlier material: EEBO, ECCO, Burney Collection etc etc. In the matter of democratising access, JISC might want to make this problem a priority: for example, by arranging web access to these and similar collections to scholars who have a British Library Readers Card.
‘eighteen-century’ is, of course, a typo for ‘eighteenth-century’
Most of my concerns about the settlement are outlined in my paper ‘The Google Book Settlement and European Authors’ (http://www.gillianspraggs.com/gbs/google_settlement.html).
Any change to copyright law must be done with the interests of creators paramount. Otherwise researchers, librarians and educators will find that their victory is indeed Pyrrhic.
I am a writer and researcher, and currently a Visiting Fellow in the Department of English and Drama, Loughborough University.
The views expressed here are my own.
Gillian says:
“It is my experience that very few books fall into the so-called ‘twentieth-century black hole’ of in-copyright out-of-print works are genuinely hard to obtain: most may be bought secondhand on the web, typically for modest sums, and all, or virtually all, are available on inter-library loan.”
How does that help authors? There is no income from 2nd hand book sales.
Philip
I was speaking to the issue of democratising access to knowledge, not authors’ incomes, as I thought I had made clear.
It is questionable whether the Google Book Settlement would do much for authors’ incomes, though. Most authors would almost certainly do better to publish their out-of-print works themselves as e-books or print-on-demand editions: or to make arrangements with specialist e-book/POD publishers. Some, of course, already have.
It has been claimed by some that the GBS is a response to a ‘market failure’: the reality is that digital publishing is an emerging market, and the GBS would be likely to damage its development severely.