In "Google and the World Brain", Ben Lewis' thoughtful new documentary about the search giant's effort to scan all the world's books (link to the documentary shows a trailer of the movie).
The most arresting moment takes place in a monastery high above Catalonia in Spain. The film's globetrotting crew is interviewing Father Damiá Roure, who runs the library at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, about what happened when Google came to digitize the library's collection.
The monk's mixed feelings about the book-scanning project are mirrored by many interviewees in the 89-minute documentary, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival. While the film contains interviews with people who question whether a corporation should be able to own the world's knowledge, it also offers a relatively straightforward account of the Google Books project and the legal case against it. At the end it credits Google with galvanizing public libraries into putting more of their collections online.
Google began scanning books in 2002, relatively early in its history, working with major university libraries around the globe. By 2005 the company had scanned more than 10 million books, with more than half of them still protected by copyright. In the autumn of that year, the Author's Guild filed a class action lawsuit against Google, seeking damages for its writers and new protections for digital copies of copyrighted works.
After three years of intensive negotiations, Google and the Author's Guild emerged with a 350-page settlement agreement. Among other things, Google agreed to give authors in the suit $60 per copyrighted work, in exchange for the right to start selling digital books online. And it's this point that turns out, strangely, to be the real start of the film, as what the filmmakers describe as "a ragbag army of authors, helped by the occasional librarian" come together to protest the settlement and, in 2011, successfully get it rejected by a federal judge.
We'll talk about this case when we discuss copyrights. Read more...
3 comments:
I respect Google's ambitious efforts to scan every book. I, for one, have used Google Books countless times, whether it be to purchase a book or just to "peek inside" to find a quote or passage for an assignment. The fact that every book in the world can potentially be held online prevents the chance that a book might be lost for good, and I believe that's an incredible feat.
As for the authors and their copyrights, I understand. If I were to spend countless hours and effort writing a book just to have it scanned onto the web for pirates to steal, I would be pissed too. However, this world is a changing place, and the business model of people going into stores to purchase books is dying.
It's a tough decision for authors, but I believe Google is doing them a favor. As long as these authors are still getting paid for their work, I have no problem with what Google is doing.
The issue re Google Books in the recent settlement is to ensure that Google is not the sole owner of these books, since it's unprecedented that one corporation gets to own all these books. What if they change their mind and sell them, for example. So the new settlement offers assurances that they won't do that.
Librarians and many other legal and tech experts didn't like that one company had sole ownership AND got to decide what the public could see and couldn't see.
At first it was about copyrights of orphaned books (books not in the public domain but where the authors are unknown), but it is in some always the bigger issue. Google had to settle, and the back and forth went on for years...
I agree it was a good decision to have the writers get a settlement for this. But on the other hand I applaud Google's efforts to scan every book. Their mission is to make the World's information available to everyone which is socially responsible in itself. And the writers of the "scanned" Google Books should be happy because now they are getting extra profit from around the World, and not just from wherever his/her book is sold.
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