The Google Library
By Dr Rizwana Rahim
Chicago , IL
In this digital age with lots
of things brought to our finger-tips, we venture
out less and less.
We don’t go to libraries as often as we used
to, and in not too distant a future, we may not
even have to go there at all, unless of course we
really want to be in a place that used to be less
dusty, less moldy.
Google and a few other well-known electronic databases
have been busy scanning books --- not just a few
thousand or a few hundred-thousand books, but every
single page of every single book ever published
anywhere in the world. That’ll be how many
books? It’s a mind-boggling 32 million (and
growing every minute), according to the WorldCat,
based on a survey of 25,000 libraries around the
world. And, how long will it take ? Google’s
Marissa Mayer, who is in-charge of the project,
recently said: “We think that we can do it
all inside of ten years.” Nothing else would
perhaps fit in better with the Google philosophy:
“to organize the world’s information
and make it universally accessible and useful.”
On this effort, Jeffrey Toobin (a CNN legal analyst)
has an interesting article in The New Yorker (February
2007 issue).
Starting collaborations with university libraries
in 2002, first with the University of Michigan (the
alma mater of a Google co-founder), Google promised
them complete digitalization of their entire book
collection, and offering each library a digital
copy of each book, and free of charge. Considering
tens of thousands of books from each of the many
participating university or other libraries, are
now being scanned page-by-page by specially designed
scanners at many locations, every week for the past
5+ years already, the 10-year target doesn’t
seem all that wild or impossible for Google.
Google doesn’t divulge the number of books
it has already scanned, but a sizable fraction of
it is now on-line (beta-version) at books.google.
com, where, by searching a word or phrase in
a book, you can get a glimpse of the shape of things
to come.
Besides Google, a few others are also involved in
similar ventures, for instance: Amazon.com (hundreds
of thousands of books scanned); Carnegie-Mellon’s
project Universal Library (nearly one-and-a-half
million scanned); Open Content Alliance, a consortium
funded largely by Microsoft and the Alfred P. Sloan
Foundation and several other institutions (many
thousands scanned). The main goal of every one of
them is to see that the databases, a ‘universal
digital library’, are easily accessible and
‘searchable’ to the users. How universal
is this ‘Universal Library’?
Books in languages other than English, and their
translations in English, pose a major problem. Google
has many such books in its library, but right now
they are searchable only in that language, with
only a very limited preliminary translation capability.
Google doesn’t say how much the entire project
would cost, but Microsoft did in 2005: copying 100,000
books from British Library would cost it about $2.5
million. At that rate, scanning the world collection
of 32 million books would amount to about $800 million,
which, spread over years, shouldn’t be too
prohibitive for a company like Google that has had
phenomenal success in less than 10 years of its
establishment and whose two founders (in their thirties
now) are already worth about $14 billion, each.
Then, however, there’s this other shoe to
drop. On charges of potential copyright infringement,
this Project is in legal fight with two groups in
a New York federal court : Authors Guild and some
Publishers (who, ironically are also Google’s
partners in this very Project).
The issues are quite complex, and involve constitutional
rights. The ‘Copyright Law’, in Article
1, US Constitution first passed in 1790, charges
the Congress to enact laws “securing for limited
Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right
to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
The law has been amended several times since, most
recently in 1998 when the time-period was extended
to 20 years, and allows the public (scholars, teachers,
journalists, writers, etc), under its ‘fair-use’
proviso to copy and quote (for personal and professional
use) only portions of the copyright-protected books
and other material. However, its fair application
and protection of the copyright owners’ legitimate
rights get murky in this electronic/digital age.
Only about 20% of all books are in ‘public
domain’, i.e., have passed the copyright limits,
and can thus be copied/scanned entirely, without
any restriction. Another 10% are protected under
copy-ight laws. The rest of the books are still
protected but of uncertain status or out-of-print.
And, it is this group that has presented most problems:
Google is scanning each book in its entirety, without
the publishers’ permission or compensating
them for it: This, the publishers remind IS against
the law, even if making only parts of them on its
website available to the users is allowed under
‘fair use’. Without proper compensation
for the use, the publishers also maintain that Google
unlawfully profits, at the expense of the copyright-owners
of the works involved.
Google, on the other hand, insists that its scanning
of a copyright material is in fact “transformative,”
which means that Google has made the book into a
new product. Even though they in fact are illegally
copying the entire book when they scan and digitize
it, the digitized product, they say, is no longer
a book. These fine-points are best left to the legal
system.
Fearing legal complications, some libraries, notably
Stanford, Harvard and Oxford, have restricted Google
to those books that are in ‘public domain’
books, while some other public institutions (e.g.,
the Universities of Michigan, California, Virginia,
and Texas at Austin) continue to allow Google (also
their partner in the project) to scan the copyrighted
material.
The publishers don’t quarrel with Google for
trying to help them sell books (they know how ‘browse
leads to buy’), but in their 2005 lawsuit
they insist that copying the entire book, still
under copyright protection, IS an infringement.
Authors Guild, filing a suit around the same time,
takes Google’s effort as a violation of authors’
rights.
People in the know think that some settlement will
be reached before the trial, as it happens in most
federal cases. That, of course, will be among the
parties protecting their own interests. Hard to
say, who is really concerned about the users or
how will whatever comes out of it affect the users.
True, the significance of moving books from the
enclaves of libraries to your laptop cannot be easily
dismissed.
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