What are you thinking, Herb Mitgang? August 7, 2008

The knee-jerk reaction some writers and other artists have to any unauthorized use of their copyrighted works often baes me. Artists often react viscerally to any unauthorized use of their creations even when doing so fails to serve, as far as I can tell, any legitimate personal interest they might have. It's as if they simply think: it's my property, and no one can touch it unless I tell them they can! The Association of American University Presses provides a useful summary of the Google Book Search Program:

​Many university and scholarly presses have participated enthusiastically in the Publisher program, which allows their print publications to be indexed and displayed to an appropriate extent through Google's beta online index of print materials while protecting their own, their authors' and third parties' rights. The Library program has proven controversial, as Google plans to scan, digitize, and copy not only public domain works from ve world-class research libraries, but also the in-copyright collections of at least some of those libraries. The libraries are the Bodleian at Oxford University, Harvard University Library, the University of Michigan Library, the New York Public Library, and Stanford University Library. 

​It is important to understand that Google is not merely copying the libraries' collections in order to make them available electronically to the world. Instead, Google Book Search allows its users to search the entire database of what Google has thus far scanned. For works by authors who have granted Google permission, a user of the Book Search can scan read the entire text. But for those who have not expressly provided that permission, a search through Book Search will turn up only books containing the searched terms along with snippets of approximately 3 lines around the searched terms. In short, Google Book Search is a boon to researchers, allowing them to locate books relevant to their research in libraries they could not possibly ever have visited. They then can obtain the books, either through inter-library loans or through online purchases. Without Google Book Search, in other words, myriads of profoundly useful books scattered around the world would remain utterly invisible to the vast majority of people with interest in them.

Which brings me to Herbert Mitgang. Mitgang is one of the named plaintis in the Authors Guild lawsuit seeking to shut down the Google Library Project. Mitgang was born in 1920, and since the 1950s he has been a prolic writer in numerous genres, from journalism to ction to biography. Among his books are three on Abraham Lincoln. Mitgang, however, is hardly a household name. His books on Lincoln are still in print, but, despite my acquaintaince with several amateur Lincoln-obsessed readers, none of them have read any of Mit- gang's Lincoln books. Mitgang is 87 years old. It seems quite likely therefore that, within a decade or so, the only feasible way Lincoln researchers will be able to obtain his books will be from the collections being scanned by the Google Library project. In short, I cannot begin to imagine why Mitgang wants to shut down the Google Library Project. Without it, his books will likely fade into oblivion. On the other hand, if the Google Library Project is a success, there is every possibility that future Lincoln researchers might come across and use Mitgang's Lincoln books. I wish I could get in a room and ask him: Why are you doing this? Do you really want your life's work to disappear entirely from the sight of future researchers? 

Disney’s expertise in nurturing, co-opting and, most of all, not cracking down on the many ways fans have embraced “Frozen” online is a template for how to thrive in a digital, copy-promiscuous, consumer-empowered environment. Disney, long one of the fiercest and most powerful defenders of strict intellectual property control, has learned how to let copyright go.

Well, at least a little bit.

[W]as twenty years [since] the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, its most recent consideration of fair use.  The Court made clear, in a unanimous opinion, that a commercial parody was fair use under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act.  A lower court had held that the rap act 2 Live Crew’s “Pretty Woman,” a lewd skewering of Roy Orbison’s saccharine love ballad “Oh, Pretty Woman,” was presumptively unfair because it was a commercial parody.  When the group and frontman Luther Campbell appealed, the Supreme Court reversed, holding that the “more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of other factors, like commercialism, that may weigh against a finding of fair use.”  (Some interesting C-SPAN coverage of the case before the Court’s decision, hinting at class overtones of the dispute is available here.)