Google Books started copying full books in 2004 without permission and
it was ruled an "infringement" by Judge Chin who asked the parties
(Publishers and the Authors Union) to settle. While the publishers did,
the Authors guild and Google could not and the battle went back to court
where Judge Chin reversed himself and said it was "Fair Use." Authors
Guild appealed. Supreme Court stayed Judge Chin's reversal ruling!
Unprecedented!
Like you say, Tom, if there is enough money to keep delaying something
like this you can do just about anything you want; copyright be damned.
And people are doing it, churches are doing it, and writers are
suffering big time.
The Hathi-Trust has taken the files from the consortium of Universities
who let Google copy their books, and put them up in another
database...along with all the faults of the OCR, bad copyright dates,
bad edition information, and hand prints covering data; reversed paging,
et al: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books#Errors_in_content
Reference type books like my uncle's */Pioneers in Brass/* are not
selling since Google Books in 2004-5, since one can search by keyword
and find the information snippet one needs without purchasing the book.
Yes, as publisher, I tried to get them to take it down without success;
the convoluted process would not work. The 4th complete edition on
CD-ROM apparently wasn't felt needed by the 2700+ music departmental
libraries (academic and public) in this country either, since only a few
libraries have them; earlier editions are not all the same as Glenn
Bridges self-published; adding things as he had them printed. Given the
CD-ROM edition's 16bit platform, and the cost of redoing everything
again, I've given up and giving the remainders away at the ARSC 50th
Conference.
We call it "fair use creep" or "copyright creep" when anyone can use
others IP for commercial advantage.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/case-closed-supreme-court-refuses-hear-authors-guilds-challenge-google-books
Paul T. Jackson
Trescott Research
Steilacoom, WA
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trescottresearch.com <http://trescottresearch.com/>
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On 4/18/2016 4:53 PM, Tom Fine wrote:
> I've never understood this fight.
|