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| Home > Roxana Robinson |
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| Roxana Robinson |
10/31/05
I do object to having my published/copyrighted works made available to the public via the Google Print Library Project.
I have no objection to my books being available, free, in libraries worldwide. Libraries are nonprofit organizations whose purpose is to make cultural material available to the public. Moreover, and most importantly, libraries buy books. They are responsible for a significant percentage of book sales in this country. And they keep buying books. They record interest in a volume, so that if the public asks repeatedly for a particular book, the library buys another copy. Libraries deal in the real, practical response to the author's work. They support the efforts of authors and publishers, both economically and physically: they buy copies of the book, and they provide those copies to the public. That kind of economic support is crucial to both writers and to publishers.
But having a book made available for free in an electronic form, without any licensing agreements, is a much less appealing prospect. If a published work is available for free in electronic form, in a process that eliminates the need for the physical object and circumvents licensing fees, the more the author's investment is vitiated—this is what royalties were designed to do: reward the author for writing a book that the public wanted to read. Moreover, it undercuts the publisher's investment. How will publishers survive, if books are transmitted instantly through electronic means, drastically minimizing the need for the book itself? And without the publishing industry to provide a filter for all the material that all would-be writers in the world want to publish, how is any reader to determine what to read, from textbooks to political thrillers? And how are professional writers to survive in this scenario? Anybody's writing available to anyone for free? It's just like the Internet—unmediated and limitless, and while most of us enjoy this resource, we don't confuse it with the world of published literary works.
Google, though it is a wonderfully well-liked and sophisticated Internet mechanism, is not a nonprofit organization, nor does it support the efforts of writers and publishers in any meaningful way. Google is not buying any books. It is acquiring an enormous financial resource—the contents of the great libraries of America—for nothing. It plans to make money on each usage of the writer's work, without either sharing this money with the author, through royalties, or by buying further copies of the book in response to increased volume.
Google is making use of copyrighted material for its own profit, without acknowledging the author's legal and moral control of that material. The purpose of copyright in the first place was to prevent unauthorized use, for profit, of material that was the intellectual property of the writer. If Google continues to make agreements with libraries that bypass the rights of writers, they could make a work available to the entire library system from the purchase of a single book. This would undercut the present mechanism of economic support designed for the people who need it and who morally deserve it.
Google is a brilliant and successful company that is breaking new ground in Internet technology. However, that doesn't give it the right to circumvent established protections of the rights of authors. If Google wants to use copyrighted books as part of its own commercial operations, then let it apply for licensing agreements that will cover these operations, offering just compensation to the owners of the work, just as it would be required to do if it were printing the work using more primitive methods.
Regardless of the technology involved, the issue remains the same: authors own the rights to their work. Other entities, who wish to make money from that work, should acknowledge this proprietary right of the authors.
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