One Final Note On Google Print

Holly Lisle's problems seem to have come to a satisfactory end: Google finally agreed to take her books offline.

But I am finding that I need to explain my position on Google Print over and over again to people emailing me. I posted a while back elaborating on one of the main moral argument against it, but there are good legal reasons as well for standing against Google Print.

My reasons, in short, are these:

1. The Online Content
Google stores the entire books in its database, and allows people to see any 20% of it at a time before it supposedly stops you (apparently, Holly's experience was different... she was able to see over 100 pages of one of her books - about 35%). This is way beyond the "fair use" clause. Enormous revenue is being generated from the Print project (why else would Google do it?), and this revenue comes directly from the content, for which the creators of that content are not compensated. The only answer they seem to have is that "its beneficial to writers and publishers", but shouldn't the decision then be left to the writers and publishers?

2. The Permissions Policy
Google scans entire libraries of books - with the permission of the library. It scans other books with the permission of the publishers. (Supposedly. Holly says that at least two of her publishers had no idea Google was putting their books online. But never mind even that.) The point is: neither of these two entities is the copyright owner of the books; only the author is. So why is Google "asking permission" from the wrong people, people who have nothing to do with the book after it is published? Ignorance of the law is no defence - and of course Google isn't really ignorant. Just big and greedy and well-protected by corporate insulation.

3. The Games They Play
What stinks is that when Holly Lisle wrote to tell Google to take her books off their search, she was told that no, her books were there with the permission of the publishers. Leave aside that this wasn't even true about two of the publishing houses. When the copyright owner tells Google to take the books out, Google should take the frickin books out. No questions asked. But to Google, "opt out" seems to mean "tell us you want to opt out, and we’ll decide whether or not we can get someone bigger than you to tell us we don’t have to." Why play ring-around-the-rosy? Only because they know that individual authors don't stand a chance against the Google corporate machine.

The only way that Google Print can legally work is when they purchase reprint rights for all the works that they are putting online. (Why reprint rights? Why not just buy a copy of the book? Because they are using the book such that it can be read by millions of people simultaneously. That's the definition of 'publication'. To republish Holly's books, they should purchase reprint rights.)

A niggly detail, though: Amit says he can't see results when he searches for Holly Lisle's books, while I can. Can people tell me if they can find her books on Google Print? This is really weird.