BookFinder.com Journal

Authors slam reading aloud ebooks

While I like authors and am occasionally skeptical of ebook readers, the Authors Guild's slam against the Amazon Kindle 2 confuses the heck out of me.

One of the features of the upgraded Kindle is that it can read a book out loud to you, using a canned computerized voice similar to the text to speech systems available on many current computers.

Upon hearing of this, the Authors Guild told the Wall Street Journal "They don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."

Faced with pushback (including the suggestion that perhaps the Authors Guild would like to ban all reading aloud of books), the Guild retrenched, suggesting that publishers should consider forcing Amazon to add restrictions to books that could block access to the read-aloud feature.

This is absurd. Book owners can buy paperback books, and rebind them into hardcovers; companies like Brodart sell this service to libraries. It's as if the Authors Guild was trying to put Brodart out of business, claiming that rebinding paperbacks would infringe on their exclusive rights to sell hardcover rights.

There's been a lot written about this, but my favorite is Neil Gaiman's take.

"When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it."

Google settlement: an author's view

Glenn Fleishman posted an excellent overview of the Google Book Search settlement, written from the point of view of an author. He touches on public access to orphaned works and other out-of-print works.

Posted by Anirvan

Google settlement

Last week, a proposed settlement between Google and the publishing industry that was released could have far ranging implications. Here are some highlights. Note: I am not a lawyer, I could be wrong, and this could be a settlement about Martian real estate.

Overview of settlement

• Settlement is responding to a class action suit that claims Google violated copyrights of authors, publishers and other owners of U.S. copyrights in books and other writings by digitizing (scanning) them, creating an electronic database of books, and displaying short excerpts without the copyright owners’ permission.
• The settlement is on behalf of publishers and authors; those who don’t want to be part of the settlement can opt out
• Google will pay $125 million to authors and publishers
• Part of the $125 million will go towards a new nonprofit called the Book Rights Registry which will collect revenue from Google and distribute it to authors and publishers. If this is reminding you of ASCAP that may not be too far off. The settlement mentions that the BRR might be able to bargain on behalf of authors and publishers with other companies in the future.

What rights Google has acquired

• Google will be able to scan and display books on the following terms:
  • Right holders of in-print books must opt-in
  • Rights holders of out-of-print book must opt-out
• Google can display any non-content text (e.g. copyrights pages, table of contents, indexes)
• Google will be able to sell electronic copies of complete books to users with some limitation on the users.
• Google can sell subscriptions of the whole database to orginizations
• Libraries and other public institutions will get a limited number of physical terminals that can access the entire catalog
• 65% of revenue generated from selling books, advertising on the pages, and subscriptions will be given to the rights holders

What does it all mean?

It’s really hard to predict what implications a deal like this will have. For users, it seems to be a win. They’ll get access to a large corpus of books that’s easily searchable and available for sale in a digital format. Say you’re a graduate student doing research on an obscure topic. You’re not worried about getting the physical book, but reading the contents. It’ll be easy to search and buy an electronic copy from Google. On the other hand, this deal is with Google right now. Others companies can’t take advantage of these terms, giving Google an immense advantage.

For booksellers, the sky may not be falling, but I think this is of concern. Most people who buy used books want to own a physical copy, so I don’t think this will be an instant death knell to booksellers. There are, however, going to be people who will be satisfied by the electronic copy so this will eat into some sales. I also think Google will be able to get some people who wouldn’t have bought print editions to buy the very convenient electronic edition.

Sources and further reading

• Official google blog
• Settlement agreement website
• Electronic Frontier Foundation settlement reader’s guide

Posted by Charlie

Orphan works suit dismissed

Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive (a long-time BookFinder.com user) and Richard Prelinger of the Prelinger Archives challenged the legal basis for copyright protection of orphan works* in a 2004 lawsuit, Kahle v. Gonzales.

The case was recently dismissed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, upholding a lower court decision—further frustrating the possibility that we’ll ever be able to buy, use, or cite extensively from the millions of works that have fallen into the “orphan works” category.

More coverage:

• Reuters via Yahoo! News
• Christopher Sprigman, Stanford Law School
• Internet Archive
• Full court decision, in PDF format
• Reaction from Larry Lessig

* Orphan works are copyrighted materials whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate, meaning they can no longer be purchased, reprinted, cited at length, or otherwise built upon. Books can get “orphaned” for all sorts of reasons. Publishers shut down. Authors move, change their names, or pass away. Under U.S. copyright law, academics, artists, researchers, and plain-old-readers have no recourse if the copyright holder can’t be contacted.

Posted by Anirvan

Kevin Kelly on digitizing books

Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times magazine about the digitization of books by Google and others, and how that intersects with publishing models, copyright law, orphan works, and the long tail. It’s an old story by now, but he writes it well. Read the article online (single-page version).

[Now Reading: Foxy-T by Tony White]

Posted by Anirvan

Final orphan works report

Last spring, the US Copyright Office asked the public for comments about their experience with copyrighted orphan works (*), and suggestions on solutions to the problem. BookFinder.com made a submission, as did hundreds of others.

After several months. the US Copyright Office has released their final 133-page report based on their study. They suggest changing copyright law so that that users of orphaned works who do reasonably diligent searches and attribute the use of works will enjoy the following protections:

• the user will have to pay only “reasonable compensation” if the owner resurfaces and objects to the use
• non-commercial users won’t have to pay a fine if the owner resurfaces and objects to the use, as long as use of the work is stopped immediately
• if the orphaned work has been used as part of a larger work containing significant expression, then the entire larger work can’t be shut down as long as the user pays reasonable compensation

We’ll continue to track the issue, to see if the recommendations are taken up…

* Orphan works are copyrighted materials whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate, meaning they can no longer be purchased, reprinted, cited at length, or otherwise built upon. Books can get “orphaned” for all sorts of reasons. Publishers shut down. Authors move, change their names, or pass away. Under U.S. copyright law, academics, artists, researchers, and plain-old-readers have no recourse if the copyright holder can’t be contacted.

Posted by Anirvan

Orphaned works in our neighborhood

Earlier this year, BookFinder.com submitted a comment about the problem of orphaned works to the US Copyright Office. Orphan works are copyrighted materials whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate, meaning they can no longer be purchased, reprinted, cited at length, or otherwise built upon.

I was trying to find the hours of a restaurant near BookFinder.com’s office, when I stumbled onto a submission from the restaurant’s web developer (PDF), telling the story of her failed attempts to contact the illustrator of an out-of-print book. The restaurant staff had apparently wanted to use a certain image from the book as part of their website design, but they weren’t able to contact the artist or publisher to get any kind of an answer.

It’s one thing to read submissions online, but the scope of the problem really hits home when even our local pasta shop is speaking out about copyright law reform.

Posted by Anirvan

BookFinder.com on orphan works

A wide variety of organizations weighed in to the the US Copyright Office with their comments on the problem of orphan works. BookFinder.com was one of them.

We take a broad view of what it means to help our users find books, be they new, used, rare, out of print, or available in another country. We studied the books that our users were searching for, and found significant interest in orphaned titles.

Most of the end-users calling for greater access wrote in either discuss specific cases, or making broad assertions. Our submission to the US Copyright Office offers up some hard numbers, underscoring the fact that orphan works affect large numbers of real world commercial users. We don't have a specific opinion about the best way to solve the problem, but we wanted to respond to copyright maximalists attempting to paint the issue as too small or anecote-driven to warrant action.

Interested? Read submissions defining the problem from BookFinder.com, Visual Resources Association, Vai Vecchio Press, George Mason University's Copyright Office, Presscommune, and the Science Fiction Writers of America.

Read submissions with ideas on addressing the problem from Creative Commons, Recording Industry Association of America, Google, Stanford University Libraries, the Association of American Publishers, and Microsoft.

You can also browse the complete list of comments.

[Now Reading: Amnesia Moon by Jonathan Lethem]

Posted by Anirvan

Orphan work comments made public

We've been blogging about the problem of orphan works all month (1, 2).

(Again, orphan works are copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate, meaning they can no longer be purchased, reprinted, cited at length, or otherwise built upon. If BookFinder.com shut down and its employees/owners died without heirs, these blog posts would become orphaned, and there would be no legal way for someone to reprint them in an anthology.)

The US Copyright office has been asking the public for their comments about the problem, and for possible solutions.

The Copyright Office has now parsed through the responses, and has posted the 700+ public comments on its website. There's a wide array of respondents -- small publishers and researchers having problems reprint orphan works, companies in the copyright industries pushing against major reform, and a vast array of comments that don't easily fall into either category.

Take a look. There's a lot of interesting comments in the mix...

[Now Reading: Ask the Pilot by Patrick Smith]

Posted by Anirvan

Examples of orphan works

The folks over at FreeCulture.org have some of the comments to the US Copyright Office on the subject of orphan works available on their website.

Here's an example:

M. B. of VA writes: "Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, by Erwin Panofsky, is considered to be an important work on gothic architecture. The book is no longer in print, so cannot be purchased easily. The current copyright holder, if any, cannot be located. Searches were done in Books in Print and on the Internet to determine if the original publisher could be located. A University of Virginia class in medieval architecture has need of the work. If the book could be scanned and the text made searchable, the students would have the access they need, and the work would also be available for other scholarly pursuits."

Interested? You can read more public comments, learn about the issue, or submit your own stories.

[Now Reading: Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction edited by Jack Dann]

Posted by Anirvan