Pirates
May 18
If you live in Sydney and are at all interested in authorial copyright in the digital age, I would urge you to come to the (free) CAL/ Meanjin Lecture, 'Should Intellectual Property be Owned?', to be given by Lynne Spender this Saturday May 23 2009, 4–5pm at the Sydney Philharmonia Choir Studio, Pier 4/5, Hickson Road, Walsh Bay, as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Following is a brief extract from Spender's article, 'The Question of Literary Property' for Meanjin's June edition (which you can read in full here:Volume 68 Number 2, 2009). Spender will expand upon this essay in her lecture and consider the implication of Google’s creation of a searchable database of the world’s books before speaking on the ethics of reproducing writers’ work. What happens to education, and more broadly society, when ideas are viewed as private property, only accessible through permission or payment? Spender asks whether we need a cultural shift in the way we view knowledge and information sharing. She also give some historical context to the debate and reminds us that once it was the publishers and printers who were the pirates, rather than the victims of piracy.
. . . Google responded to the Authors Guild class action by claiming that their Library Project fell squarely within these fair use provisions. They made it clear that for works that were still in copyright, their project would of necessity involve digitisation of the whole book, but it would only make available a card-catalogue-style entry. This snippet-view entry would contain basic information about the book and no more than two or three sentences of text surrounding the search term to help users decide if they had found what they were looking for. The entry would link to bookshops where the book could be purchased.
Like Google, I thought this constituted a very fair use. And I thought it was fair dealing. In Australia, the fair-dealing exceptions in our copyright law say that works can be reproduced for a range of specific purposes, one of which is ‘research and study’. Now as well as being optimistic, perhaps I am also overly imbued with the Australian notion of ‘a fair go’, but I did not see that the Google project was unfair dealing or that it harmed authors. Surely searching a database to find a book qualifies as research; reading the associated ‘snippets’ surely qualifies as study? Nor could I see how this might interfere with the commercial interests of the copyright owners, except to advance them by providing links to bookshops where the book might be purchased.
So what is the real issue behind the passionate objections of authors, here and in the United States, to a well-resourced digital corporation undertaking the digitisation of the world’s books? Is it that they really object to Google, who have paid millions of dollars to digitise the works, deriving income from the project? . . .
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Comments
18 May 09 at 13:03
The Google project as described here would certainly come under most people's definitions of fair use. The title of the lecture is perhaps more controversial than its subject matter. When the large corporations (Sony and the like) realise it is impossible to police their intellectual property rights they will begin a campaign to undermine the concept of intellectual property all together, thereby creating a free-for-all from which they will be the only beneficiaries. Create a situation in which there is no intellectual property and there will be no professional artists.
...18 May 09 at 16:00
"The Google project as described here would certainly come under most people's definitions of fair use." Except of course Google were making a lot of money out of those snippets from advertising and subscriptions which is why they ended up settling the case by paying $125,000,000 dollars. (ie, losing.)
...18 May 09 at 16:06
Doesn't it feel as if we're already moving beyond the bounds of intellectual property in the new digital world we're creating? Perhaps it will mean the end of 'professional' artists as we now know them but artists will still continue to create, to make art and tell stories. They were creating long before the institution of intellectual property, which is only 500 years old and coincided with the invention of moveable type. That was the last big communications revolution. Now we're in the throes of another, which is opening up undreamt of new worlds for art (from blogging, iPod apps, homemade music and video clips) and commerce (rejoice in the free sharing of software). And aren't most artists uneasy about capitalist consumerism anyway? Antony Hegarty speaks about his discomfort with being roped into consumer culture in yesterday's Guardian: "Being an artist downtown meant that you weren't paid and no one was listening. Now I do get paid and there are people listening - bless them, they bought my apartment for me - but it's not the same." So perhaps this a big opportunity for us to find new creative models for artists and their incomes. In the meantime, the old cliche still applies - don't give up your day job.
...18 May 09 at 16:40
I know Lynne and Meanjin won't mind me buying one copy of the magazine, scanning the article and posting it all over the internet. Might as well scan the whole magazine while I'm at it and post that too. After all, there's no such thing as intellectual property, right?
...18 May 09 at 16:54
i feel that i've done Lynne a disservice as most commentors seem to be assuming her whole argument from the brief extract I've put up here. She does not say there is no such thing as intellectual copyright. But as for putting the article up on the internet, we plan to do that so yes, the article will be available for free. Not just Lynne's, others also - with the authors' permission. I don't think that means we're saying there is not such thing as intellectual copyright at all. If you scanned the article with due accreditation to Meanjin and Lynne that would be okay. That is, she would need to be acknowledged as the author and we would need to be acknowledged as the original publisher. One of the things we are trying to do is make the physical Meanjin enticing enough that people might also want the print edition of course.
...21 May 09 at 22:29
I recently discovered that I can read Meanjin online. Very exciting. And what was the first thing I did after that? Subscribed to the print edition. So your enticement seems to have worked. I enjoy reading things online, but hard copy is more satisfying. Maybe my attitude will change when I get my first e-book reader, if the price comes down and they solve the problems of digital rights.
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