The Anarchist in the library Business World | Nov 03, 2005 See related pix and illustrations at: http://www.businessworldindia.com/issue1/indepth03.asp#
Siva Vaidhyanathan is not quite the anarchist he believed he was initially. Although he declares that he shares many of their values, he does not subscribe to their tactics and strategies. As for the oligarchs, this assistant professor of culture and communications at New York University says he has almost nothing in common with them. The oligarchs (corporations, governments and global institutions) are those clamping down on cultural freedom through copyrights, while the anarchists (educators, civil libertarians, artists and hackers), are striving to keep it free. It is these two factions that are shaping the digital revolution, according to Vaidhyanathan, whose latest book, The Anarchist in the Library, is an examination of the information arms race under way. Long before the authors and publishers filed their lawsuits against the Google Print Project, Siva Vaidhyanathan had begun to worry about the fallout of such an initiative. The professor has been warning that Google's plan would have sparked a copyight meltdown, a meltdown that would not have ended well for readers, libraries, or the Internet. In an interview with BW's Latha Jishnu during a visit to Delhi earlier this year, Vaidhyanathan explained why. Why is Google Print a cause for concern? Google concerns me because it serves the best interests of Google: it does not necessarily serve the best interests of school children in South Africa, or school children in California for that matter. We'd be better off if we invested in library systems at a national and global level rather than expecting Google to do the job for us. India, in fact, should be investing a lot in strengthening its public libraries. Google's credentials are good. Google is fascinating, brilliant, a great company, one of my favourites. But it is still a company and doesn't represent my interests. I am concerned that we are increasingly at the mercy of Google. So far it has been benign; very little harm comes from Google. But I fear if we rely on it too much, if we decide we don't need libraries because we have Google, we are going to enter a dark age. You mean governments and public institutions will just sit back and do nothing? That's precisely the danger, the idea that we don't have to do something because Google will. It's a great mistake. Google is going to digitize all of these texts but they are texts in the public domain. That doesn't solve certain problems that most schools in the world don't have access to any library and that many works of the 20th century are still locked under copyright and will be inaccessible. It doesn't help that library budgets are shrinking in general and they can't buy new books. "Digitisation and networking have helped to stir up all kinds of messes," says Vaidhyanathan in his latest book Are you saying we should not have such a facility at all? I would prefer that we focus on the distribution of information. Google is offering us an open archive to public domain works. I'd rather have that than not have it. But we should not make the mistake of thinking that this is the solution to our need for a global library. Why is the library so important? A library is an ideal model for information distribution. It is free but not radically free. It is open but reasonable. It is ordered, organized, imperfect but essential. We make a big mistake if we think that we can use information that's as wild as the ocean. Information is only useful if we can make sense of it, if we can order it and if we can choose what to use and what not to use. If you look at the worldwide web it's too diffused, too chaotic to be a library just now. To some extent Google is organising the Web but it is still not a library. You believe that copyright goes on for too long, specially in the US, and it sets the trend. What would you consider a reasonable time for copyright? It's a difficult decision and in the past ten years we have not been able to ask that question in a serious way. The US and Western Europe have just gone along with whatever Hollywood has asked for. Hollywood says we want copyright to last for 95 years. Hollywood says we would like copyright to extend to as many media forms as possible. Hollywood has a lot of political power. People in Washington, London and Brussels listen to them, and no one stands up to them. These are multinational companies; it's not simply an American protectionist idea. So what can be done? For the past six years this growing movement of critics of the copyright machine has been striving to identify allies, broaden the movement and establish a vocabulary that can serve as a counter balance to what Hollywood. We are in the process of forging a political movement that can stand up to Hollywood, to Microsoft, to the big publishers. It's a long shot. What's at stake is the vibrancy of culture and democracy. Have you come to any agreement on how many years copyrights should last? We have not come up with a set global agenda. We have been trying to stop the global standardisation of intellectual property, trying to stop certain specific efforts like database protection. Why is copyright so important? It is one of a variety of policies that affect both culture and democracy. It's part of a larger matrix of culture and information policies. We cannot fashion just systems if we examine it separately, if we don't understand how these issues interact with each other. While copyright is important, funding for libraries is just as important. While creativity in music is important, the price of software is just as important. Are you really on the side of the anarchists? Not exactly but I am more sympathetic to their values. The anarchists and I share many values. We don't necessarily share tactics and strategies. The oligarchs and I share almost nothing. o o o o o o o oo See the potboiler at: http://www.businessworldindia.com/issue1/indepth02.asp The text is here for your convenience: The Great Book-building Battle Google's project to digitise and index library books has run into a legal block. By Latha Jishnu It is the kind of project to make you catch your breath: to put all the books in the world on the Web and allow anyone to search the contents! Not since the advent of the Gutenberg press, perhaps, has anything stirred the business of publishing as much as the Google Print Library Project, the incredibly ambitious venture of the $3.19 billion Internet media company. Google Print is a book-search facility, astounding in its simplicity and overarching vision. According to the company, the project aims to create "a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages". This marks a fundamental shift in the way the world accesses knowledge. Not surprisingly, rivals like the $3.57 billion Yahoo! have rushed to set up competing book-search facilities. And with universal access to all knowledge as the new slogan, even non-profit organisations - and governments - are coming together with the companies to open up more libraries to a digital search. A few weeks ago, Yahoo! joined Internet Archive to launch the Open Content Alliance. It will fund and index the digitisation of an initial corpus of American literature, in collaboration with Adobe and Hewlett-Packard (software providers) and libraries in the US and the UK. MSN, too, has decided it wants to join the race. Last Tuesday, it announced that it would launch MSN Book Search with digitised content from books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources in the public domain. It plans to team up with Open Content Alliance next year. In Europe, governments and the publishing industry are setting up separate digital access systems to counter Google's 'American influence'. Although Google Print isn't the first Web archive of library collections (see 'All The World's A Library'), it has sparked a corporate rush into this sector. What Google Print has done since its launch in December 2004 is to help open up libraries to knowledge seekers in a systematic way. It has started by digitising the collections of five major libraries - the New York Public Library and the libraries of the universities of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford -and making these available online. Google Print works somewhat like Amazon's 'Search Inside!' feature that lets you look at a few pages from each book (only if the publisher has given permission). But unlike Amazon, Google gives just enough detail to confirm your search results. A Google-powered search engine scans the books for the submitted phrases and shows up the highlighted excerpts in snippets. At best, one or two pages are shown (though hackers claim they can download as many 45 pages in five minutes). Google also provides links to the booksellers offering these titles, but it is currently keeping the sites free of any advertising. It's a neat idea that appears to fulfil the ultimate digital age fantasy of the book lover. But there is a snag in this: copyright. Is Google violating the authors' copyright by scanning and indexing copyrighted works along with those in the public domain? Enraged publishers and authors believe it is. First, three writers, in tandem with the Authors Guild, sued Google saying it was a massive copyright infringement. Nick Taylor, president of the New York-based organisation which has a membership of 8,000, accused the Internet juggernaut of plain and brazen violation of copyright law. That was in September. A couple of weeks ago, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed a similar lawsuit seeking to block Google's plans to digitise books without its permission. The suit was filed on behalf of its five major publisher-members, Penguin Group (USA), the McGraw-Hill companies, Pearson Education, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley & Sons. Funded by the 300-odd member AAP, the suit has the backing of the publishing industry and was filed after a huge vote of support by the AAP board. The legal challenges, which are being sought to be turned into class action suits, were not unexpected given the level of resentment in the industry. A couple of months ago, two major publishing industry organisations, the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), asked Google to stop the project. Digitising, they asserted, would hurt publishers and authors financially. ALPSP is the trade association (340 members in more than 30 countries) of not-for-profit publishers who work in the scholarly and professional information chain. Chief executive Sally Morris says ALPSP has been working closely with Google during the development of the company's Google Print for Publishers, an allied programme whereby publishers agree to put up works for full text indexing. This helped both sides to find a practical way to protect what the ALPSP described as "the sometimes very considerable investment of publishers who have already digitised some of their publications". The 'practical measures' enabled publishers to specify a source from which the content could be purchased and also control the extent to which the content may be displayed. However, Google Print for Libraries, she maintains, was launched without consulting the industry. AAUP echoes this view. News of this project came as "a complete surprise", according to a letter written by Peter Givler of the association. AAUP claims Google Print has brought "mounting alarm and concern at a plan that appears to involve systematic infringement of copyright on a massive scale". Following the fierce protests, Google has paused its scanning till 1 November to give publishers the option to opt out. This move has failed to mollify publishers, who insist that copyright itself is the opt-out and that the search engine must seek individual permission. Google, for its part, is sticking to its guns that what it does is consistent with the 'fair use' provision of the Copyright Act in the US. In a passionate defence of its project, Google CEO Eric Schmidt says its policy is entirely in keeping with its main Web search engine. "In order to guide users to the information they're looking for, we copy and index all the websites we find. If we didn't, a useful search engine would be impossible, and the same dynamic applies to the Google Print Library Project." Schmidt's statement, which appears on Google's official blog, is the standard company response to queries from journalists. Google's contention is that less than 20 per cent of books are in print, and that only around 20 per cent of the titles, according to the Online Computer Library Center, are in the public domain. "This leaves a startling 60 per cent of all books that publishers are unlikely to be able to add to our program and readers are unlikely to find. Only by physically scanning and indexing every word of the extraordinary collections of our partner libraries at Michigan, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library and Harvard can we make all these lost titles discoverable with the level of comprehensiveness that will make Google Print a world-changing resource," says Schmidt. That is logical enough, but an argument that will not curry favour with its critics. Even Siva Vaidhyanathan, an academic who has been in the forefront of the battle against the copyright warriors (those who seek a stranglehold over IP through extended copyright), believes Google is not justified in digitising without permission. "Google did not have the right to make wholesale copies of millions of copyrighted books without permission from the copyright holders," says Vaidhyanathan. He also believes that Google's plan "fails every possible fair use test ever tried". His main contention: corporations do not have the same leeway as libraries. "Libraries work for us. Corporations work for themselves." (See 'Google Is Not A Library') But others like Lawrence Liang of the Bangalore-based Alternate Law Forum give Google a clean chit. Google Print passes every test of the fair use criteria, says Liang who specialises in copyright issues. The fair use criteria is based on the purpose and character of use, including whether it is of commercial nature or for non-profit educational purposes; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and, the effect of the use upon the potential market for the copyrighted work. Schmidt, in fact, believes the primary beneficiaries will be publishers and authors. "Backlist titles comprise the vast majority of books in print and a large portion of many publishers' profits, but just a fraction of their marketing budgets. Google Print will allow those titles to live forever, just one search away from being found and purchased." To clinch its argument, Google says its search facility has helped Cardinal Ratzinger, who became pope earlier this year, increase sales of his little-known book, In the Beginning, 10-fold! If Google is not making a penny on referrals, as Schmidt declares, or earning any ad revenue from ads on Google Print pages what is the gripe about? The simplest answer is fear of something new, say copyright analysts. The fact is copyright law is at a major crossroads thanks to technological advances that were not envisioned when the laws were framed. In a sense, print books are dealing with a situation similar to what Napster did to the music industry, although, very clearly, Google Print is not the Napster of publishing. As the Web opens new frontiers, the challenges to IP laws are bound to increase and turn increasingly complex, says Liang. Again, lawyers and stakeholders have to learn to balance the rights of the copyright owners with the need to allow public access to their artistic works without reducing their value. For the generation that grew up with Google (if something cannot be Googled, it does not exist), the fuss over Google Print seems unnecessary. Preethi Singh, a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, puts the lid on the debate: "I can photocopy more pages of copyrighted books in my library than I can find on Google Print." The medium makes the difference. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/NJYolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> «¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥«¤»§«¤»¥««¤»¥«¤»§«¤» This is ZESTEconomics. Post economics-related articles and event info to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTEconomics by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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