Okay, now I'm confused. There have been so many blog postings extolling the virtues of Google Print, and arguing that showing a few snippets of a book is fair use, so even if Google is copying without permission (to permit the online search to begin with) this should be permissible. My colleague Jim made this argument and found himself quoted by a Copyleftist with whom he rarely agrees. And Google itself, as Jim points out, insists that "Google doesn’t show even a single page to users who find copyrighted books through this program (unless the copyright holder gives us permission to show more). At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries." I have no reason not to believe this, but as a former investigative reporter I decided to look for myself. Within moments I had used Google Print to pull up every single full page of a 141-page book. Is this fair use?

Let me walk you through my test so you can repeat it yourself. First I went to Google Print. I searched for the keyword "copyright." The second entry was "Every Writer's Guide to Copyright and Publishing Law" by Ellen M. Kozak. It showed me the first page of the book in its entirety, and by clicking on an arrow I could see the full second page and the full third page. These were not snippets, but full pages.

Then I clicked on the left on "More results from this book." It gave me 164 entries. Each entry was a full page, and all told all but about a dozen or so of the book's pages were included. I had now spent about 45 seconds on this test.

Curious how I could find those few missing pages, I put "publishing" in the top search bar and ran that search, clicking "Search book." That got several more, including some of the few pages missed by "copyright." Putting in "law" seemed to get just about every page. (Interestingly, it rejected my search of the word "and," calling it too general.)

On the side of each full page are the words "Copyrighted Material." And Google does seem to want to make it difficult to do anything with the text other than read it on the screen. I couldn't select it with my cursor, and when I sent the page to the printer the book's text didn't print. Still, I don't know much about such things, I'm sure a techie could extract the text in moments.

Regardless, if I so chose I could read this entire book on my computer screen. I'm currently reading Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku as an eBook on my phone, so reading Kozak's book on copyright and publishing on my much larger computer monitor would be quite pleasant by comparison.

What am I missing here? How is it that someone like me, not fully versed in computer searches, can pull up every single full page of a book in a matter of minutes using Google Print, when all the Free Culture Movement folks -- and Google itself -- say that can't happen? I like Google a lot. They've made my life so much easier, and I do believe they have the best of intentions. As I have told Jim, I too have not been too stressed by their implementation of Google Print, although I would have preferred they work with publishers, because I fear any precedent of opting out could be misused later by a bad actor, who would steal a published work and then say "Well, that publisher should have known what I was doing. They could have told me to stop."

But what I just found doesn't fit what I've been hearing on Google Print. Perhaps the author gave Google permission to show full pages, and include the entire book, I thought. So I tested the other nine books that came up on the search engine results page. Guess what? All nine showed full pages, and allowed me to piece together the book through further searching. If this is indeed what the project will be going forward, I have to wonder if this is indeed fair use.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 6:32 PM |

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