Google issues apology to Chinese writers

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By Laura Godfrey
January 12, 2010
6:44 PM

Filed under: Quillblog, China Writers' Association, Copyright, digitization, Google Books

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After a long copyright debate, Google has offered an apology to Chinese authors, admitting that they treated them unfairly. The country’s authors were in an uproar when they discovered that Google had digitized their works without first asking permission.

The Internet giant has agreed to provide a list of scanned books to the China Written Works Copyright Society and will work with the China Writers’ Association to come to an agreement on this issue. The New York Times reports:

“We definitely agree that we haven’t done a sufficient job in communicating with Chinese writers,” Erik Hartmann, who runs the Asia-Pacific division of Google Books, wrote in a letter to the China Writers’ Association. […]

Zhang Hongbo, the secretary general of the China Written Works Copyright Society, which manages Chinese copyrights, hailed the letter and the apology. “It is a result that all Chinese copyright holders have been waiting for,” he said. “We look forward to Google’s deeper understanding of this issue.”

According to the Times, last month Shanghai author Mian Mian was the first Chinese writer to take legal action against Google. This is how the company responded:

“In China like everywhere else, if a book is in copyright we don’t show more than a few snippets of text without the explicit permission of the rights holder,” Courtney Hohne, a Google spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail message. “In addition, we have a longstanding policy of honoring authors’ wishes, and authors or publishers who wish to exclude their book may do so at any time.”

So far, it seems Google has been following the belief that it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. In the meantime, the company has said it plans to reach an agreement with the China Writer’s Association by early summer.

http://johnrcarlisle.wordpress.com/ John R. Carlisle

I will be shocked if Google really follows through with pulling out China Operations because of the compromised emails. I think Google is just trying to win points with the US Gov in an effort to gain traction in other areas they have having problems in , such as the copy righted materials being scanned and broadcast to the world. I asked a few people here at the John R. Carlisle Institute if they thought Google would really pull out of China and no one thought they would really do it. Time will tell and we will see, probably sooner than later.

John R. Carlisle
Jonathan Ball

All of the uproar over Google Books misses the point that it is fundamentally no different than a library, and cannot be expected to cut into publisher profits any more than a library does. Moreover, there is a larger social benefit to making these books accessible, which outweighs the possible negative economic impact of the project — just as in the situation of a library. Unless Google starts developing software that would allow one to “harvest” Google Books for material to fill an e-reading device, there is nothing to worry about — the site can only have a positive impact for reading and research.
Paul

Jonathan Ball says: “All of the uproar over Google Books misses the point that it is fundamentally no different than a library”

The defence of Google’s activities is missing the point that they’re doing this for profit – they’re copying books without permission so that they can sell them and profit from them without the approval of the copyright holders. Google (except for its copying of old, public domain books) is not creating a library, they’re creating a monopolized book publisher and retailer.
michel

Jonathan Ball also misses the point that is precisely the subject of the article: permission. That’s what copyright is about, the _right_ to _copy_. Frankly, I don’t understand why, on the one hand, Google is apologizing to Chinese authors when they’ve not apologized to any other writers, at the same time they’re threatening to pull out of China. Something’s going on.
anon

Wow, “… a larger social benefit to making these books accessible, which outweighs the possible negative economic impact of the project…”

I love how the internet is all Marxist now…
Jonathan Ball

Marxist — ha! Paul and Michel, those are excellent points.

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