Culture on the net
Internet it changed everything, though not ha done much for the culture. Because of its chaotic, anarchic, libertarian, individualistic nature and because of its model cheap heavily employee laid down by the dealer, websites not is to rely ontechnology ideal for develop la culture. This state of affairs will undoubtedly change when there is nothing but the network, but for the moment there culture in the space digital not receives thecaution which it deserves. Also an obstacle are the rather Dionysian tastes of the Internet-consuming public. A project cultural not always can to incorporate the concept of "Gamification” which appears to be there key of time of success of a content digital and of construction of a following on the network.
On the Internet there are But two resources which make a huge contribution to the culture and knowledge. The first is the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and the second is Google Books. Two projects very different, promoted by two very different, if not polar, realities with divergent motivations and objectives. Both, however, are available di anyone has an Internet connection without having to pay a cent to access it. A bit like what happens in the great public museums of London and New York where there is no official entrance ticket.
Wikipedia represents it original spirit of the network as Napoleon, according to Hegel, was the spirit of history on horseback. Google Books is a project more complicated to frame: in it the commercial component, which plays a role very important, is inextricably mixed with its, shall we say, social value. It's a mix a bit' sneaky, as it is with all Google initiatives. No service by Google is paid for the consumer, yet the Mountain View company, now called Alphabet, has one capitalization lower solo ad Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC),. Google's messianism can't hide the fact that its initiatives are business. Money, and there is a lot of it, enters through a back door and al consumer not seems import a lot where they come from pure di continue a use its services for free. These are services that have considerable value for the consumer and also for the community. Google Translate, Google Maps e Google Books are three projects only for which Google deserves un post important in the Story of human development.
The Google Books program
Larry Page ha they tell to the "New York Times" theEpiphany of Google Books. Her passion for books it dated back to the past years a Stanford (where he was also involved in cataloguing) and theidea that on books there was one knowledge is Google not never could gather was starting to give him the torment. Why not incorporate them all in Google and make them searchable within the Search Engine like any web page? Why not build one large database of universal knowledge, A kind of universal library, so from concretize the futuristic insights contained in the Memex di Vannevard Bush, one of the greatest visionaries of the tech industry? From ex-montessorians Larry Pageand his partner Sergey Brin who unreservedly shared a passion for books, have been accustomed, since childhood, to think big and to implement one's thoughts. And so in theOctober 2004 at the Frankfurt fair is party il program with a good portfolio of agreements with libraries and publishers.
In ten years have been acquired 25 million books, seven million less than those targeted at the launch of the program. In fact, the idea was to have, in 2015, 32 million which is the number of registered books in WorldCat. All the passwords contained in the books scanned by Google have been indexed in a and now I am reachable from the engine of Research of Google like the information contained on the web. This mixing of information and knowledge is the aspect that has been strongly criticized for an intellectual and editor like Roberto Calasso.
Regardless of its flaws, Google books is a manna for researchers and scholars and, together, one misfortune for the publishers and authors that it they fight da 10 years convinced that the program violin il Copyright e you deliver to a private company a de facto monopoly on knowledge: a status which, instead, should be the prerogative of a public institution. The mantra of Google that “browse leads to buy” not seems to have convinced not at all the traditional actors of the book industry. For them, the Copyright defense is more important than sales.
Indeed Google Books does not violate il Copyright nor is it a threat to society: the scanning of books and the display, without authorization, of a brief context (20% of the content) connected to the research carried out are consider oneself "fair use”, a concept that does not exist in the European legal order but is contemplated in the copyright law of the United States of America. So the 16 October 2015 three: Judges of court of appeals of the second circuit of New York, have confirmed definitively the judgment in favor of Google issued by Judge Denny Chin on 14 December 2013; a judgment against which the Guild of Authors (representing 8000 authors) which now only has the Supreme Court left to appeal and it looks like it will happen. According to the New York Court of Appeals the Google Books program “provides a public service without violating intellectual property law".
The authors in a closed fray on copyright
We have already extensively commented on the 2013 sentence. What interests us now is to follow theevolution of the attitude of the Gilda of the authors and that of publishers during this decade-long and confusing affair. In the 2005 la Guild of Authors andPublishers Association they had done cause a Google because scanning books without the permission of the right holders was one infringement of copyright law. Note that some of the publishers had joined the Google program.
In 2009 le parts yes they were agree, out of court, for one compensation di 125 million dollars. Google would have paid 45 million dollars to the right holders, 15 million to the publishers for legal fees, 20 million to the Guild to pay the lawyers and finally destined 30 million for create un register of entitled persons so as to introduce a sort of collective copyright that would be used for to distribute to the authors the 63% of the eventual revenues arising da sales and subscriptions made through Google Books. Each fully scanned book was valued at $60, and between $5 and $15 a partially scanned book. Paul Aitken, the director of the Guild of Authors, called this deal "the best ever made in the book industry."
But theagreement, strongly criticized from a large number of authors and unanimously from European press, it was rejected in 2011 from judge Danny Chin because it guaranteed Google in the long run”a significant advantage over its competitors” granting him the “right to exploit entire books without the right owner's permission.” The meaning of the sentence is that theagreement he conceded a Google un de facto monopoly on the world's library heritage.
After this reset, the Gilda ha continued of cause (the publishers settled separately with Google), upping the ante enormously: at Google it was asked un compensation di dollars 750 for each book scanned, so as to bring the total reimbursement to 3 billion dollars. A claim at the limit ofunreasonableness, also in light of the validity of Google's defense focused on the concept of fair use. Compared to what was agreed in 2009, this claim recorded a dramatic change di scenario in a very short space of time. He marked the passage of the world of writers and to the publishers da a reasonable one availability a experience new forms of distribution of the content and of collaboration with the reality born on Internet to chiusura almost total in the direction of a castle around a interpretation seriously restrictive of the copyright.
Una vision very distant from that of the same Pierre Leval, one of the New York Court of Appeals judges who ruled on the case. Way back in 1990, Leval had outlined, in an article titled Toward a Fair Use Standard published by the “Harvard Law Review”, his vision on copyright and the concept of fair use: “The copyright is not neither inevitable, nor divine, nor a natural law which gives authors absolute ownership of their creations. It's conceived for stimulate the activity and the progress of the arts and to encourage intellectual enrichment of the public".
What had happened between 2009 and 2011 in the publishing industry? At the threat di Google Yes it was addition Amazon which with ebooks, growing by three figures, was unhinging the whole assetto ofindustry of the book by moving the center of gravity of the industry from the trinomial publishers/authors/bookstores to the trinomial Amazon/Google/Apple, even if the publishers entrusted the latter with a stabilizing role. This Apple's role ha attracted the wrath of Department of Justice who saw you as a violation of antitrust rules, thus giving avvio to a new one judicial saga which is now in the hands of the Supreme Court. This is why the consequences of Google Books, far beyond its merits and demerits, have been quite devastating on the entire book ecosystem and its orderly evolution towards digital.
The consequences of Google Books on authors
Despite having won in court, Google Books è cost very expensive to Alphabet also in terms of image. The long one legal battle on copyright with the Publishers' Association and the Authors' Guild not ha benefited to Californian society pointed out dai medium trendy, especially in Europe, as adisruptive initiative of one of the foundations of modern society: the Copyright, a principle that gives a living to millions of people.
The most devastating consequence, however, was another. The program Google Books, started e carried forward da Google so often unilateral and with the logic of the accomplished fact, contributed to to poison le relations with the subjects that are the raw material of publishing, the Authorthe. These subjects, with ahuge media influence and certainly higher than that of companies born on the Internet, after a initial sympathy for the phenomenon of network, they began to perceive it as a mortal enemy of their business and have begun to fight any initiative that does not come from or is not controlled by them or the publishers. Slowly, theaversion to Google e Amazon has transformed in a fight against la tech in itself. It is no coincidence that the large patrol of technoskeptics includes many writers led by Jonathan Franzen.
Libraries vs. publishers/authors
La collision course of Google towards the book and writing industry has narrowly missed the point of impact fatal when Google, following the double dogma of nerds "do first and then ask permission" and "move fast and break everything", we concentrated on libraries for get i books that publishers and the authors they did not want that he got. And in libraries he has found an unexpected and vital ally. University libraries d Harvard, of Oxford, of Stanford, California, Michigan, Columbia, of Cornell, of Princeton, New York Public Library and in Italy (since 2012) the National Library of Florence And that of Roma they have indeed open le doors a Google in which they saw the possibility di digitize theirs library heritage so as to have at no cost such an important service and otherwise difficult to achieve.
In fact, almost all of the books digitized by Google come from librarieswhich, in most cases, not they did distinction between works in public domain e works under copyright: they put everything on a pallet or on a trolley addressed to Google labs where the books were worked with a proprietary technology finalized a not cause any danno al artefact. Only Harvard, Stanford and Oxford have prohibited Google from acquiring copyrighted books.
This atteggiamento of most librariesabsolutely divergent with respect to the policies of publishers and to the authors, show as is complex, faceted and differentiated thebook ecosystem in which many operate subjects with finality and visions different. It is a fact that to acquire, index and create the algorithms of research is outside laid down by the flow of the libraries and a cost they can't afford. But it is one thing have absolutely need for ferry their experience in future. In fact, it is calculated that completing the acquisition of books in the WorldCat could have a cost of 800 million dollars. Then there is the , the decisive part of the process, which is a investment economic and human resources unsustainable for the libraries. In this regard, Paul LeClerc, president and CEO of the New York Public Library for 10 years, said: “Everyone asks me when the library will be online. I reply that we would like to…, but we can't because no one intends to give us the money we need… Then Google came along and in Google I saw the fastest, most effective way to bring our collection online for free”. Here we have a nicetogether di Strength conflicting: authors, publishers, booksellers, libraries and media technology groups. Who will draw a synthesis, the market, the legislator, the consumer? Nobody knows.
Google Books is nice but limited
View the disturbance caused by the meteorite of Google Books, I'm in today many a to wonder not it was worth really the penalty. In fact to date the value of the program è object di discussion among Internet users, academics and among Googlers themselves.
The "The New Yorkerposted a article (What Ever Happened to Google Books?) by Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, who summarizes well le critical issues of Google Books. L'idea originally from universal library it is in fact failed since the most of the books remains inaccessible in its content: the brief Estratti displayed help relatively and often the title not neither is it available for the 'purchase either in paper or electronic form. It so happens that thehuge result to have found a interesting context, does not find sequel e remains something interrupted like a section of road that ends in nothing, allowing a glimpse of a suggestive landscape. No è fault di Google if it is so! Our company is its secure of this? Not deserved this project ambitious and truly revolutionary a better management, A 'higher allocation of economic and diplomatic resources to carry it forward with greater certainty of the result? L'idealism and did the admirable original messianism really benefit the project? And finally the main question: was Google really the right subject for this vital project for human development?
THEbitterness stems from the observation that, despite being thwarted in multiple ways, a company like Google failed a do di meglio of what he did. Leave even more baffled the impression that it is failure a will gives part of Google to find a agreement resolution on the plan economic with parts for get il consent a to exhibit more books in their wholeness. It's as if the project were fallen in a kind of limbo, as if it were merely an experiment, one of many that Google sets up without completing them.
To the criticism of the "New Yorker", perhaps even unfair, have been added i results of asurvey on Google Books conducted by a team of Vermont University. This investigation has exposed the shortcomings of the collection. The Vermont University researchers meant use il corpus of Google Books for to understand, through theanalysis of ngrams, the evolution of language, society and culture. Finally the corpus of Google Books has established its limits and its heterogeneity so much to make it a inadequate tool to get reliable statistics. There are gaps of metadataization and, since each work counts as one, it happens that a work like Moby Dick worth as much as a novel by an unknown author. What's more there is one imbalance to scientific texts which are predominant and therefore tend to alter the results of statistical surveys.
Google Books will have its faults and flaws, but without it we would all be poorer and if it is the way it is, the stars are not to blame. Copyright is to blame.
