Google Print lawsuit

The more I read, the more I find the Google Print controversy interesting (Authors' Guild statement; Google statement).

I've been going back and forth on this issue. I don't think either side's argument is a priori tantamount, which just highlights how woefully inadequate our system of intellectual property is to cope with the information age.

As you no doubt know, copyright is a legal protection granted the author of a work to determine who is allowed to make copies of that work. Note that this is different from having control over any given copy of a particular work. Playboy has no right to tell you that you can't nuzzle the centerfold picture affectionately and whisper how the two of you will run away together if you purchased that copy of the magazine. You will, however, end up having a bunch of angry Bunnies show up at your door with baseball bats if you attempt to make a copy of said picture, particularly if you attempt to sell that copy. Or Hugh Heffner will kick your ass with his walker. Point being, something bad will happen.

Now, that said, certain kinds of copying are allowed regardless of how big of a dick the copyright holder wants to be about it. Reproducing excerpts of a text document, for example, is allowed. This is an example of "fair use," and you see it all over the place: news casts, book reviews, etc.

The crux of this dispute, then, is whether Google Print is covered by fair use. Google will tell you that all you can ever read are excerpts, and these are protected by fair use. I suspect the argument the Authors' Guild will be making, however, is that in order to construct the index Google uses to generate the excerpts, they had to make what amount to illegal digital copies of library books.

Conduct the following thought experiment though: Imagine a man named Google, a social outcast with OCD, goes to a bunch of libraries and individually checks out all the books one at a time. Using each book he has checked out, he constructs a massive index of their contents. By the time he's done, after roughly 80 bazillion years, you have the equivalent of Google Print without any illegal copies having been made.

You see the problem though. That scenario was utterly impossible before the information age. There was simply too much information to process "manually." Computers can easily process that much information, however. The problem is that you have to codify the books so that the computers can process them. Do you count that codification as a violation of copyright? Does just having the bytes-equivalent form of a book in a computer's memory a priori count as a copy? What if, in the process of processing the books, you had to copy those bytes to 1000 different machines (not as implausible as it sounds)? Have you violated copyright 1000 times?

The lesson here, as if you haven't heard me say it before, is that IP law needs an overhaul. Trying to retrofit archaic notions of what constitutes an invention or a copy is utterly hopeless. Without an entirely new system that acknowledges a world where "copies" are irrelevent (having been supplanted by an extremely volatile system of links between pieces of information) and where "inventions" are highly ephemeral creatures that can be easily both created and destroyed, we're going to have a myriad of court cases asking judges to try to cram complex modern situations into an archaic framework that is fundamentally incompatible with them.

Of course, in a system where you can buy such legislation, any kind of overhaul would end up being geared towards the profit margins of large IP holders and not anywhere near a socially beneficial ideal.

But hey, I can still bitch about it.