Google Pub Quiz

Seemingly why is it that so few people concerned that Google has created one rule for themselves, whist everyone else still are governed by copyright laws?
Here are ten questions to ponder against Google’s new rights registry.

We would welcome the answers to these questions:

1. An author has some 300 works spanning a number of decades and published by different parties (we know one). These are all still in copyright, but out of print and all the rights have reverted. Google acquires the books and makes them all available. Do Google pay the royalty to; the original publisher, the publisher who may have bought part of the list, the author, the author’s estate, the bank?

2. How will any party know what is in Google’s rights register and what is not? Who will determine any claim or arbitrate? How are works published under licence recorded?

3. If an out of print title had a jacket price of $5 in 1960, what will be the digital and POD price today? Who determines the price of a Google adopted orphan?

4. If a copy is scanned in the US but the UK rights are owned by a different party, who determines who gets the money?

5. If a books illustrations or photographs were licenced only for that rendition or edition, or were acquired under specific licence, do these now become fair game?

6. Public Domain works are free and anybody can publish. So publisher A embellishes the work with student notes and extras. What is fair use and what is copyright and who will police or arbitrate?

7. A number of public domain publishers have already put their content into GBS. Is this now fair game and free or covered by typographic rights?

8. If a publisher made a digital land grab for out of print but in copyright material and put this into GBS as a new edition, who will determine copyright breach and who will arbitrate?

9. What stops a publisher grabbing UK orphans and registering them as new works in another Google geographic region?

10. Anyone who has struggled to reconcile the cost of Google Adwords against revenues will understand that reporting and open accounting is often down to trust. Who will audit the service?

If you don’t know the answers to all these questions ask your CEO, Rights Director, Digital Director and your local publishing association or industry body as they will obviously know the answers.

The Great Book Bank Robbery?

Today is a sad day for copyright and publishing as we know it. Google has settled their long standing case against the publishers and authors and have been given a green light in many areas. The most alarming is the out of print area where we would suggest coupled with the Orphan Act the gates are now open. Here are some snippets direct from Google and we would ask you think out the implications.

We have taken abstracts from the Google pages (in italics) the full write up can be found at Google Book Search.

Out of print books
Until now, we've only been able to show a few snippets of text for most of the in-copyright books we've scanned through our Library Project. Since the vast majority of these books are out of print, to actually read them you'd have to hunt them down at a library or a used bookstore. This agreement will allow us to make many of these out-of-print books available for preview, reading and purchase in the U.S.. Helping to ensure the ongoing accessibility of out-of-print books is one of the primary reasons we began this project in the first place, and we couldn't be happier that we and our author, library and publishing partners will now be able to protect mankind's cultural history in this manner.

Accessing books
This agreement will create new options for reading entire books (which is, after all, what books are there for).

Online access
Once this agreement has been approved, you'll be able to purchase full online access to millions of books. This means you can read an entire book from any Internet-connected computer, simply by logging in to your Book Search account, and it will remain on your electronic bookshelf, so you can come back and access it whenever you want in the future.
Library and university access
We'll also be offering libraries, universities and other organizations the ability to purchase institutional subscriptions, which will give users access to the complete text of millions of titles while compensating authors and publishers for the service. Students and researchers will have access to an electronic library that combines the collections from many of the top universities across the country. Public and university libraries in the U.S. will also be able to offer terminals where readers can access

Buying or borrowing actual books
Finally, if the book you want is available in a bookstore or nearby library, we'll continue to point you to those resources, as we've always done.

International users
Because this agreement resolves a United States lawsuit, it directly affects only those users who access Book Search in the U.S.; anywhere else, the Book Search experience won't change. Going forward, we hope to work with international industry groups and individual rightsholders to expand the benefits of this agreement to users around the world.

Three types of books
This agreement helps define how our users may access different categories of books on Google Book Search.
In-copyright and in-print books
In-print books are books that publishers are still actively selling, the ones you see at most bookstores. This agreement expands the online marketplace for in-print books by letting authors and publishers turn on the "preview" and "purchase" models that make their titles more easily available through Book Search.
In-copyright but out-of-print books
Out-of-print books aren’t actively being published or sold, so the only way to procure one is to track it down in a library or used bookstore. When this agreement is approved, every out-of-print book that we digitize will become available online for preview and purchase, unless its author or publisher chooses to "turn off" that title. We believe it will be a tremendous boon to the publishing industry to enable authors and publishers to earn money from volumes they might have thought were gone forever from the marketplace.
Out-of-copyright books
This agreement doesn't affect how we display out-of-copyright books; we will continue to allow Book Search users to read, download and print these titles, just as we do today.

The Book Rights Registry
The agreement will also create an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry to represent authors, publishers and other rightsholders. In essence, the Registry will help locate rightsholders and ensure that they receive the money their works earn under this agreement. You can visit the settlement administration site, the Authors Guild or the AAP to learn more about this important initiative

Again we have long argued for a rights clearing house but not one that is tied to an act such as this. Some may say that the industry has opted for the easy route and one that means that they can effectively abdicate from the job it should have done long ago.

So out of print but in copyright books become fair game and the question is who owns what, what happens to rights reversals, how do royalties get paid and to whom and who is the seller?

So is Google a bookshop, a search engine, an advertising agent, a library resource or as some have said an omnivore?

Copyright Quick Guide

We have written much on the subject of copyright and there is much more to write. The thorniest area is that which we referred to as the ‘grey area’, which lies between public domain and in print, in copyright and with full traceable ownership. To many this area of ambiguity is best left at it is – murky. To others it stops books being brought back into print and given a second chance. Establishing the rules is relatively easy establishing ownership is a lot more difficult.

The American Library Association (ALA) have produced a copyright slider to make it easier for their members to understand the rules on all materials. The slider shows that copyrighted works published without a copyright notice and created between 1923 and 1977 are in the public domain now. However, if published with copyright notice, they will be protected to at least 2018. However, even with a copyright notice, this only applies if they renewed after 28 years. Pretty clear there then! That is without the differences between US, UK and other countries!

The slider is available online and has been created by Michael Brewer at the University of Arizona. The ALA also offers a ‘Fair Use Checklist’ that applies the four criteria of use to provide guidance to determine on ‘fair use’. Personally we found it rose as many questions as it answered, but we supposed some clarity is better than none.

Copyright is the backbone of publishing and intellectual property. If the ALA have to produce guidance sheets for what are ‘professional information managers’ it begs the question of how authors and consumers have any idea what is public, what is fair use and the rules. As we enter an era where controls are passing from professional and institutions to anybody we have to question whether the rules can be either simplified or tracing copyright can become easier? Why haven’t we got an effective copyright clearance centre? Why isn’t copyright clearly accessible on all digital materials? How do we find about rights reversals, permissions and other issues if the basics are so ambitious?

Scan first ask later maybe is an understandable route for some!

Copyright News

On Monday eBay won a US court battle with Tiffany that there were not liable for the sale of counterfeit jewellery on their site. This wasn’t a quick decision as the case had lasted 4years but it could be a significant one re the eBay service and those offered by similar sites.

Judge Richard Sullivan ruling, in Federal court in the Southern district of New York said that under current law Ebay should not be held liable, and it was up to lawmakers to decide if trademark owners were adequately protected. Earlier this year a similar case brought by LVMH against eBay had gone the other way, so the issue remains somewhat open.

Judge Sullivan said, Ebay’s efforts to prevent sales of fakes, including removing listings promptly when warned that the items were counterfeit, showed that it took adequate steps, and it was up to companies like Tiffany to police their own trademarks.

The ruling raises the question of how companies who aren’t as big as Tiffany ensure that their trademarks aren’t being violated. However, when we step back into the physical world that is exactly how it works and the onus is always on the holder to pursue the infringement, there are no parent police as such. The internet merely makes it easier to copy and easier to trace.

The second article reported that Brussels is expected to push ahead with reforms to extend copyright protection for performing artists from 50 to 95 for European singers and musicians. This move would move Europe into line with the US, and be applicable to all from rock stars to session musicians.

The Commission’s antitrust arm is also looking at “collecting societies” who collect and distribute music royalties. It is expected that societies are likely to see their domestic monopolies over broadcast material broken down. One objective would be to enable any collecting society to deal with the rights to use a piece of music across Europe.

Copyright continues, and rightly so, to be a major area of focus for all especially in the media sector. As the digital world expands, so do the opportunities and challenges of maintaining and protecting copyright within it.

Candian Common DRM Sense

According to where you live you will experience different rules on Digital Rights Management and copyright. Is this any different to the physical world and if not then why would we expect it to be?

Today we read that Canadians will be allowed under new legislation to copy legally acquired music to their iPods and computers but it will be illegal for them to break any digital locks that content owners have applied. The bill also shows common sense in exempting Internet service providers from liability for copyright violations by their subscribers, requiring them only to pass on notices of violations rather than their neighbours in the US requiring them to take down offending material.

Canadians will be allowed to ‘time shift’ and record television and radio programs for playing back at a later time, but would be prohibited from retaining these indefinitely in a personal library. This sounds unenforceable and a little contradictory and what is deemed as indefinitely.

The bill would reduce Canadians' individual liability for making illegal copies of music or movies for private use to C$500 from a maximum of C$20,000 but penalties up to C$20,000 per infringement would apply if digital locks were hacked, or posting music using the Internet or peer-to-peer technology, or for posting a copyright-protected work, such as a picture or video, onto a website such as Facebook or YouTube. It will also be illegal to provide, sell or import the tools to break digital locks.

However we view the enforceability of parts of the bill, like most things Canadian it offers a fair measure of common sense. The question of how and how long digiotal locks will prevail is interesting and whether watermarks that merely monitor but do not inhibit are regarded as locks are some of the interesting points.

A number of publishers have expressed a view to us that they believe that DRM has a limited life and the media such as ebooks will become DRM free. Our own view is that although this seems plausible in some media formats such as music it is hard to envisage in others such as film and games. The question is then where do ebooks line up?