(Book) Paradise Lost; Google plan to digitalize books nixed by courts

www.theatlantic.com...

It was to be the realization of a long-held dream. “The universal library has been talked about for millennia,” Richard Ovenden, the head of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, has said. “It was possible to think in the Renaissance that you might be able to amass the whole of published knowledge in a single room or a single institution.” In the spring of 2011, it seemed we’d amassed it in a terminal small enough to fit on a desk.

“This is a watershed event and can serve as a catalyst for the reinvention of education, research, and intellectual life,” one eager observer wrote at the time.

On March 22 of that year, however, the legal agreement that would have unlocked a century’s worth of books and peppered the country with access terminals to a universal library was rejected under Rule 23(e)(2) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

so millions of books are digitalized and ready to go, but the court says we can't access them.

Western Civilization shoots itself in the foot.

to someone like me, what loves old books, it's heartbreaking.
here's hoping they can work something out, especially the older stuff.

a reply to: ElGoobero

I second that. Well said.

Copy right laws? If i wrote a book I'd like to have royalties for my family. Maybe that's the issue?

a reply to: ElGoobero

I'm slightly confused. I understood books copyright expires after some time (100 years?).

Does this ruling affect those too? Or did I miss something.

originally posted by: youcanttellthepeople
a reply to: ElGoobero

I'm slightly confused. I understood books copyright expires after some time (100 years?).

Does this ruling affect those too? Or did I miss something.

it's complicated. I think the article says half the books are non-copyright and half are, but it's too much trouble to figure which are which.

Wunk, this was not supposed to affect copyrighted material, so the royalties wouldn't change.

Books older than 30 years are out of copyright, but that may depend if there are relatives and they still want the royalties. Think of the lawsuits over the Happy Birthday song.

Google would have been better off keeping quiet about this, as with the Silicon Valley mantra "to ask permission is to seek denial". The politics are that many academic departments take pride in having exclusive access to their own rare collection of unique papers. Simply because ideas are worth hundreds of thousands in academic research projects, Until they end up losing their collection due to fire or other disaster, then they quickly get everything scanned in and made available in digital form while keeping the originals in a fire safe.

a reply to: ElGoobero

What a great article

Google stood to make a minimum of 37% of cost for every out-of-print book that was downloaded. Then it says an estimated half of all books published from 1923 to 1963 are out of copyright which would presumably be 100% of price for Google. Imagine Treasure Island costing $200 to scan? Prices (in article) would have been $1.99 to $29.99 so 100 copies and it's paid for. However books like this will be read in their thousands each year. How about Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Dickens etc. Some of these could sell in their tens of thousands at the cost to Google of storing a 10mb file.

It looks like most of world follows copyright for the length of the author's life plus 50-70 years after their death. That would leave most pre-1923 books out of copyright.

It's a noble effort that, coincidentally and by happenstance, would have made Google increasing profits for decreasing costs. Their altruism was more like planting the Google flag in the book market and dominating it.

Saying that, I've read a few books on Guttenberg and Archive.org that were digitised by Google and can see the upsides to their plans. There are books on those sites that are too obscure or high-priced to find or buy. Without their efforts, I wouldn't even have known they existed.

a reply to: Kandinsky

You beat me to it Kandinsky, Paradise Lost is on the Gutenberg site, although you could walk into any discount store and buy it for £1 in the UK.

www.gutenberg.org...

50,000 books apparently on there, although the formatting isn't too great on all IMHO.

a reply to: ElGoobero

from the source

outpacing Page’s prediction, had scanned about 25 million books. It cost them an estimated $400 million. It was a feat not just of technology but of logistics.

it cost Google $400 mill. What a shame these digitized copies won't be available

a reply to: ElGoobero

Then the courts are wrong. Making a thread on it ... And where to access for next to nothing.