HOWTO: Misunderstand American copyright law

by Ross Catrow

Google Print has stirred up quite a controversy lately. Most recently two crossfire-esque dueling politicos have joined forces to deride Google Print as the end of writer’s rights and the end of all creativity as we know it! Surely if a Democrat and a Republican can agree on something it must be true!

Actually no. Let me set some things straight.

First a brief summary of Google Print. Google wants to scan in every book ever written and make them available via the internet. If the work’s copyright allows it, they want to provide the full text. If not, they want to provide short snippets of the text. The whole shebang will be keyword searchable. Ok? Onward we go!

Ahh, the authors begin by harkening back to our founding fathers and that great all-star American document: the Constitution.

And so we find ourselves joining together to fight a $90 billion company bent on unilaterally changing copyright law to their benefit and in turn denying publishers and authors the rights granted to them by the U.S. Constitution.

And in case y’all don’t have the Constitution memorized (shame shame), Article I Section 8 Clause 8 says:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

How exactly is Google “unilaterally changing copyright law?” Are they extending the “limited Times” to the entire life of the author plus seventy years? Oh wait, no that was Disney. It seems — apparently — Google runs afoul of the Constitution in two ways: 1) Providing snippets of the copyrighted texts, and 2) Collecting ad revenue from Google Print searches. To quote:

The creators and owners of these copyrighted works will not be compensated, nor has Google defined what a “snippet” is: a paragraph? A page? A chapter? A whole book? Meanwhile Google will gain a huge new revenue stream by selling ad space on library search results.

Actually if the authors spent fives seconds reading the Google Print webpage they would have found that “for books that we have scanned from a library which are still in copyright, you will only be able to view the bibliographic information and a few short sentences of text around your search term.”

But isn’t it still wrong and reprehensible to copy even the smallest iota of a copyrighted work without the author’s permission? Nope. From Copyright.gov on the four part test to determine if something is Fair Use:

  1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
  2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
  3. amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
  4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Number three is what we are interested in. If Google scanned in the entirety of Steven D. Levitt’s Freakonomics and made it available for consumption over teh i-nets then of course that would be illegal. But providing a few short sentences — “in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole” — would be insignificant. The simple idea of fair use might blow you away; you can thank the RIAA for deleting the concept of Fair Use from America culture.

Next the article claims authors must “opt-out” of Google Print if they don’t want their works online. False. First off, it is opt-in if you want your complete works to show up. The owner of the work, which may be the publisher and not the author, must opt-in. Second, you can’t opt-out of fair use. It is my right as an American to quote what ever I want. You can see I’ve quoted several things from several places already in this very article. That is my right! But, with Google being sensible, if you join their publisher program, you can request to have works removed — if you own the rights to it of course.

And finally how can you argue against this?

And have you ever tried to get a live person on the phone at an Internet company?

It is obvious to me now that because sometimes it is difficult to talk to a live person at an “Internet company” Google is trying to twist American copyright law to their own evil desires.