Google Library Project on Arts and Letters
Today on Arts and Letters was an article about the Google Library Project , which has been a topic of class discussion. The article, called Google and Its Enemies: The much-hyped project to digitize 32 million books sounds like a good idea. Why are so many people taking shots at it? , gives an excellent break down/ summary of the major issues involved in the project. Behind this entry are a few of my favorite quotes…
On the scope of the project (and its cost):
The scope has changed in the intervening years. Initially Google planned to scan the 15 million books in six years. That projection was revised upwards to more than 20 million books, and the New Yorker recently reported that Google is now aiming to scan at least 32 million books, besting the number of titles in the largest bibliographic database, WorldCat. It hopes to finish within ten years. As one Googlehead told the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, “I think of Google Books as our moon shot.” It remains to be seen how realistic this goal is. Google will not divulge how many books it is scanning currently, or how many titles are already in its database, which went live to the public in May 2005 at books.google.com. To get a rough sense of things, the University of Michigan library has 7 million volumes and Google estimates it will have annexed them all by 2013, noting that it is scanning tens of thousands of books each week. Google will not reveal how it scans the books. As for the cost, this too is closely guarded by Google. In a similar venture, Microsoft is spending $2.5 million to scan 100,000 books; if that scale were to hold, Google might spend as much as $800 million.
On the copyright issue:
The legal problems lie with the Library Project. Copyright has its foundations in English law and the Licensing Act of 1662. The falling costs of printing had created rampant book piracy in England. Concerned that such behavior would blunt creativity and harm the book business, Charles II established a register of licensed books to protect authors and publishers. A hundred years later, the copyright was the only right the Founding Fathers gauged important enough to recognize explicitly in the Constitution itself. In the intervening years, it has evolved somewhat. Today, works published before 1923 are generally in the public domain. There are exceptions and complexities, but works published after 1978 are protected by copyright for 70 years from the author’s death. As for works published between 1923 and 1978, they were given an original copyright protection of 28 years from first publication and another 67 years of protection upon renewal of the copyright. Got that? And here lies Google’s dilemma: Out-of-copyright books account for about one-sixth of all titles. Most books—75 percent of them—are in copyright, but out of print. Only about 10 percent of all books are both copyrighted and in print. Google has decided to get around this problem of copyright protection by simply ignoring it: forging ahead and scanning books, regardless of their copyright status. If a book is in the public domain, its full text is displayed to users, but if the book is protected, then Google shows users only a “snippet” of the text surrounding the search result. It is relevant to note that “snippet” is Google’s word and is intentionally not a legal term; how much text is displayed is entirely at Google’s discretion.