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September 22, 2005

Authors Guild Sues Google Over Searchable Digital Library

The Authors Guild is suing Google over their Digital Library project, a massive undertaking that will scan and OCR texts from libraries. Google will then be able to provide a giant, searchable online library. Google will not show pages to users, only snippets so that users can then go to conventional sources to actually obtain the texts. In addition, Google will be providing University libraries with a digital archive of all of their texts, allowing them to provide works on e-reserve, etc.

Original BoingBoing story with updates, recent BoingBoing post with new developments and arguments from Jason Schulz and Cory Doctorow, NPR Story, Slashdot story, Jason Schulz of the EFF's original post about this.

The Authors Guild argues that they aren't being properly compensated. Jason Schulz points out the following analogy they use to make their point:

To endorse Google's library initiative is to say "it's OK to break into my house because you're going to clean my kitchen," said Sally Morris, chief executive of the U.K.-based Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers. "Just because you do something that's not harmful or (is) beneficial doesn't make it legal."

He refers to it as "another inept physical property analogy." He's absolutely right about that. This whole thing points to the inadequacy of law to address change in technology. Law school, if anything, is showing me how slow the law is to address any sort of external or internal change. Current notions of property and licensing are no longer applicable to new situations. It's why the DMCA is so flawed, why record companies can sue for statutory damages of millions of dollars for sharing a few songs, and why everyone is now a criminal because of it.

We can't keep applying old doctrines to new technologies. Digital copies do not necessarily deprive the original owners of anything, and making something searchable is not just a fair use, but an actual improvement of the Authors Guild's products.

I wonder how long it will take for the venerable law to catch up. And furthermore, I wonder whether the old institution of common law (cases that interpret the laws) can ever evolve rapidly enough to keep up with the current pace of paradigm-changing technology.

I don't think it can. I think it will be ten years or so before statutory law can address new ideas about digital music, which is already a technology that is ten years old. Then it will be another ten years before common law can make any sense of the statutory law. By the time we can adequately address it, the tech world will have long since moved on (indeed, it already is). What do we do when the entire legal tradition of statutory interpretation by common law is no longer viable?

Posted at September 22, 2005 5:00 PM | Comments (2)