Question: does reprinting and republication in a new format give the publisher rights to control the use of a public domain work?
Answer: not under current copyright law!
But Google would like it to. In their Google Book Search, they’ve included text placing restrictions on use of the books which they’re making available. It’s not necessarily legal: but what is written can frequently be accepted as law by any user without knowledge of the laws surrounding copyright.
Philipp Lenssen is challenging this position. Good luck, Philip!
It seems that copyright infringement is a chronic complaint against search engines - and, to be honest, particularly against Google. At least from a news perspective, Google is the only search engine ever suspected of infringing copyright despite the minor detail that their engine does behave more or less the same way as any other.
Regardless, the recent successful Belgian lawsuit has brought a number of interesting issues to mind.
The burden of copyright prevention is in no way a requirement to maintain copyright. No content producer is required to make use of tools to erect barriers against copyright infringement. In this case, where the basis of the lawsuit is primarily based on the presence of cached pages in Google’s index, the question which pops to my mind is:
What relevance should preventative measure play in copyright law?
The DMCA (which, granted, is in no way relevant to the Belgian courts) specifies that it is a contravention of copyright law to circumvent measures taken to protect copyright. This could mean that Google would be in violation of the DMCA if websites were to make use of features such as robots.txt, noarchive, or nocache and Google failed to acknowledge and respect those rules.
However, the bill says nothing which provides any protection for an automated service which has made provision to allow publishers to protect their materials when those publishers do not make use of the copy protection provisions.
It is trivial for content publishers to prevent Google for misusing their material. However, according to law, the onus lies fully on Google to avoid copyright infringement.
Bill Slawski, who very helpfully transcribed portions of the judgement, comments concerning the Court’s addressal of these issues:
Regardless of how the Court may have felt about those options, I think that they should have been addressed in some manner. The failure to do so makes it appear that they either weren’t provided information about those by their expert, or didn’t understand them, or may not have addressed those issues on purpose.
It would have been very much appreciated had the court ruling actually made any mention of the methods available to the newspapers to prevent this issue.
Google has also made their own public statement concerning the case which specifically mentions the ability publishers have to prevent the indexing of their content. One suspects that they would really like publishers to know that there are other means of accomplishing their goals than a lawsuit.
I wonder how much of the problem has to do with business model and communication. The goals of a business are very diverse: and the diverse business units may not always be working towards the same ideals. These Belgian newspapers sites may be a good example.
I can easily imagine that the web development team was gung ho about making certain their websites were well-indexed and represented in Google.be. The copyright protection team, on the other hand, noticed one day that their content was showing up on somebody else’s website! Not being technologically savvy, the legal team talked with upper management and a group of papers pressed a lawsuit. The teams, each protecting and supporting their company in their own ways, may have acted literally in opposition.
This is an entirely hypothetical scenario, of course - I don’t have any kind of inside track to know what actually went on in the development of this lawsuit. Nonetheless, I can’t help but be curious just how these publishing companies perceive the value of their website presences.
Publishers Aim to Kill Their Business (Title slightly rewritten from the original.)
Actually, it’s a bit more complex than this. Reading between the lines, I believe that what’s going on is that these publishers want to allow search engines to crawl and index their content, but NOT allow search engines to make use of snippets of that content or aggregate the information.
Kind of a situation of wanting to have their cake and eat it too, as I see it.
In addition, the article states:
In one example of how ACAP would work, a newspaper publisher could grant search engines permission to index its site, but specify that only select ones display articles for a limited time after paying a royalty.
Although this is a poorly written sentence, it appears to say that this program would allow publishers to control what search engines were allowed to access their content when, in addition to requiring royalties be paid by those search engines.
Andy Beal describes this as publishers building a new robots.txt file, but I think there’s really a bit more to it. The publishers still see that search engines are a great way to get users to their information. They don’t want their content removed, they simply want more control over how it’s used.
The article also says:
What is required is a standardized way of describing the permissions which apply to a Web site or Web page so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer.
A robots.txt file does meet this description. However, a robots.txt file is purely a binary decision maker: either you can come in, or you can’t. This project, I suspect, is designed to build a more complex permissions system, allowing robots to visit at some times but not others, to view articles provided certain criteria are met, etc. None of this couldn’t be done by combining a robots.txt file with some sort of server-side decision making, but why not centralize the logic?
This isn’t to say that I think it’s a good idea. I’m pretty confident that there are much simpler ways to accomplish their goals - starting with effective monetization of their own sites. But it has to be acknowledged that the publishing industry has been undergoing a groundswell of change over the last decade. Access to information has changed radically during this time, and more traditional publishing companies are simply trying to keep their business models alive.